back in september* I competed in my second triathlon. I did a second triathlon only because the first one, which happened the day after my thirty-first birthday, was so frustratingly unpleasant that I felt like I needed to have a better experience to counteract it. after my first triathlon my impression of the sport was that you spent twenty minutes letting giant men try to drown you in mucky garbage-water before trying to run a race. there’s nothing like having your lungs full of long island bay water to take the fun out of a 5k.

[I did the first triathlon because this conversation happened:

my friend: "I want to do a tough mudder! do a tough mudder with me!"
my then-boyfriend: "I'll do a tough mudder if you do a triathlon."

so of course I also had to do both. the tough mudder was way easier.]

going into my second triathlon, I set three goals for myself — one goal for each leg of the race — that I thought would help me feel like I had experienced a good tri. I was not entirely convinced it was going to be fun, but I was hoping for at least a sense of satisfaction.

goal number one: swim freestyle. 

in the first triathlon, I ended up doing the backstroke for the majority of the course, fighting a strong current and a crowd of oncoming limbs. it was truly unpleasant, not to mention s-l-o-w. it was really important to me to experience a good swim, and I chose the right triathlon for it: warm lake water; a smallish group of competitors (there were 62 people in my wave); five minutes between starts; and only 400 meters.

I started out swimming in somewhat the wrong direction, and felt myself flailing a little as I course-corrected. my breathing went out of sync with my strokes and I found myself thinking, maybe I should just do the breaststroke. I frog-kicked for a few seconds to catch my breath… and then I started to swim. really swim! I know this is no big thing to real triathletes, but I was so happy just to be moving through the water, one stroke after another, watching the buoys slide past when I lifted my head up to breathe, watching the bubbles left behind by the racers in front of me as they kicked their feet.

the water was clear and deep, and I could see down to the thickets of naiads and elodea growing up from the lakebed. near the end of the course, as I swam in to shore, the plants reached high enough to tickle my thighs. when I found myself pushing them aside so that the leaves wouldn’t hit my face, I stood up and sprinted out of the water. the race emcee yelled into the mic: “ooh, she’s going to scare people on the run!”

goal number two: bike smart. 

I had never biked seventeen miles before, at least not without breaks built in by traffic lights. I didn’t know what to expect from a course advertised as “challenging,” with “rolling hills,” except that it would probably make my legs tired. I mostly wanted to enjoy the bike (which was the only part of the first triathlon I liked at all), use my gears wisely, and not burn my quads out so much that I couldn’t run fast.

starting the bike ride, I was behind pretty much all the men and probably about 70% of the women. immediately after turning out of the park entrance, the course took us into a long downhill stretch, and I was going faster than I’ve probably ever gone on a bicycle before. it was exhilarating, and terrifying, especially when I found myself in the midst of a pack of athletes jockeying for a position out front. for a few minutes I was freaking out and deferring to all the other riders when they got close to me, but then something clicked in my brain and I realized it was just like city biking during rush hour — you have to find the space and squeeze your body into it, and then your presence will maintain the integrity of the space. most of the time, anyway. weirdly, imagining the surrounding bikes as cars and buses made it a lot easier for me to get aggressive and stand my ground within the pack.

a few miles out of the start, the pack thinned. the ride was so beautiful, I had to let myself take my eyes off the road a few times. the sun was hanging along the top of the treeline, its light glittering across the surface of the reservoir and casting long, elegant shadows down the roadways. at one point we rode by one of those roadside speed indicators, and I watched it flash at each bicycle that went past: 26, 25, 28, 27. I thought to myself: if I could ride 27 miles per hour in the city, I would get to work in fourteen minutes.

the bikes were traveling in little clumps, with long empty spaces between them. I started focusing on one little clump at a time, slowly pushing myself closer, drawing the distance between us shorter as if I were tightening a winch. I didn’t pay any attention to riders coming up behind me. I didn’t stand up and pump to keep up with them when they powered into the uphills. I just kept shifting to maintain a steady pedaling cadence, kept inching closer to the group ahead of me, and kept catching up. in a way it felt like climbing up a rope: hand over hand, one pull after another. when I realized I was getting close to the end of the bike course and had passed dozens of other racers, all I could think was I’m doing it right! so it turns out I really like bike racing.

the last mile of the course was a grueling, relentless uphill that forced me onto my smallest chainring and into single-digit speeds. I kept downshifting, pedaling as smoothly as I could to keep my momentum. a lot of the men around me were struggling to keep their pedals turning, standing up on them to force them down with gravity as much as with the power of their muscles. I inched past a few of them and caught up with another woman, who called out a hello to me.

“hi!” I gasped. “this is intense!”

“I know! hardest bike course I’ve seen this season.”

“this is my second tri,” I said. “I don’t really know what I’m doing!”

“you’re doing great! just keep doing that!”

“okay! thanks!”

I was glad that the other racer agreed with my brain. I was pretty thrilled to be doing it right.

goal number three: run fast. 

running is the thing I’m good at, at least as far as triathlon legs go. before my first triathlon, I set a goal for myself of a 25 minute 5k. that first race had a short course, and I finished in about 23 and half minutes, but my drowned-lung pace was 8:09, too slow to finish a true 5k in less than 25. after that experience, and not knowing what my quads would feel like after 17 miles of rolling hills, I told myself I would be happy to be done in under 30. secretly I was still gunning for the 25 minute mark.

I busted out a forty second transition (the benefit of not needing a shoe change! I don’t have clips) and started doing the closest approximation to sprinting that my tired legs would allow. I felt like a noodle or an octopus or something, like my limbs were made of rubber instead of muscle and bone, but I was completely overjoyed just to be running. maybe I had exerted myself so much already that all it took was a few steps to get that runner’s high going — all I know is I was gasping for breath, lurching through my steps like a toddler who had just learned how to run, and grinning my face off.  when I ran past the race emcee at the halfway point, he announced into the microphone, “ooh, she’s going fast!”

I did not feel like I was going fast. I felt like I was running through jello. but when the emcee took the mic away from his face, nodded towards the woman a dozen meters in front of me, and said, “go catch her!” I leaned into my stride and did my best. and I caught her.

here are the run results:

I was pretty damn happy to be the second-fastest woman on the run course, and even more happy to have finished the 5k at a sub-7 pace. I can — or at least I have in the past — run a 20 minute 5k** but the difference between just-running and triathlon-running is enormous, and I really did not know what to expect from myself after nearly an hour of hard cycling.

the finish line of the race was on the beach, so for the last hundred meters or so we were running through sand, which had the comedic effect of making everyone look extra sluggish. I sprinted as best I could, feeling like a funny little troll on a treadmill, under the inflated arch and straight up the sidewalk into my husband’s waiting arms. after a few minutes of inarticulate panting, I happily yelped, “that was so much fun!”

so it turns out I like triathlons after all. ***

* good grief. apparently my writing is slower than my swimming.

***I think I actually did a pretty good job racing, too. here are my complete results for posterity and the maybe two other people who care:

it was so lovely to read all your comments on my last post! as much as I am no longer (-slash-was-never-really-) interested in building an audience, it was surprisingly gratifying to see notes from old internet friends. and of course my mom.

[not so lovely: spam comments. good grief.]

today is the last day of summer vacation. I have had a remarkably happy and enjoyable few months, not just because I got married (and had a wedding, which I now realize the purpose of is to get everyone you love to hang out with you) but also because I did every bit as much carefree running, ocean swimming, bike riding, peach-eating, and  dog-snuggling as my heart desired. somewhat unlike a summer spent traveling or working on big projects, this one has left me with an unprecedented feeling of satisfaction. as much as I would like to continue making spontaneous beach trips on weekday mornings, the mere fact that I have been able to do that for the last nine weeks clearly means that I have nothing to complain about. and while the water is still warm — almost eighty degrees this week — the air is starting to bite a little on the way out.

so, back to school we go.

it’s an odd back to school for us this september, because our whole entire school has been rehomed. same principal, same teachers; new building, new neighborhood. our new neighborhood is part of east new york, which sits in the northeastern corner of brooklyn. for those of you who are not familiar with it, the collective reaction at our staff meeting when we found out about the move was something like this:

principal: the DOE wants to put us in a brand new building…

everyone: ooh!

principal: …in east new york.

everyone: [horrified jaw-drop]

for a long time, the new neighborhood seemed like the end of the world: distant, dangerous, crime-ridden.  a significant number of staff members purchased cars or made plans to start driving to work, a change that made me dizzyingly ill and still does if I think about it too much. (the walk from the subway is barely more than a mile, far by new york city standards, but completely doable. there are also buses that come much closer.) those of us who remained committed to the bike ride — from my house, it is about twice as far to the new building as it was to the old one — swapped horror stories about the dearth of bike lanes, dodging trucks on the four-lane linden boulevard, riding along torn-up pavement beneath the clattering menace of elevated train tracks.

the reality of the ride has been a little different:

this is what the first half of my ride looks like, three miles straight down the eastern parkway bike path, and this time of the year, straight into the sun. my old route hugged the brooklyn waterfront, along a beautiful but relatively desolate path where I mostly just saw other bike commuters. eastern parkway, though still a bit sleepy before eight in the morning, is a major pedestrian thoroughfare. I imagine it will be frustrating at times to be constantly watching out for people dashing in and out of the subway or walking in the wrong lane, but so far I rather like the touch of humanity that crown heights has given my commute.

at the end of the greenway, I plunge downhill into the streets of brownsville, where the oaks and maples give way to crape myrtles and weeping willows. it’s a neighborhood I haven’t spent much time in, but I love riding along its wide streets, past churches and housing projects and playgrounds and bodegas. in the morning it’s quiet and I can say hello to every driver who waves me through an intersection and every pedestrian who crosses in front of me while I balance on my blue pedals.

it’s embarrassing to admit, but I didn’t know much about east new york beyond my trips out to the UPS facility and its reputation as the homicide capital of brooklyn. it’s true that my ride to work takes me past a few garages and warehouses, and also true that the crime statistics aren’t the prettiest. but… that’s not really what it’s like. what I see on my bike ride: neat little row houses, many with pretty gardens in front; children playing hide-and-seek in garage doorways, or a mysterious hopscotch-like game that seems to be permanently spray-painted on to the street; pitbulls dragging their owners down the block; and even the occasional someone else on a bicycle. there is an odd sense of otherworldly detachment, once you get past the trainyards and across the boulevard, as if it could be any day or any decade. but it’s a sweet detachment, filled with godliness and friendliness. I am wished a blessed day every time I go to work.

there are train tracks to ride under, but they are flanked by an ever-present basketball game (in the middle of the street) and a plaza with scattered, brightly colored chairs where senior citizens eat their deli breakfast sandwiches. the clatter of noise comes more from the hollers of the kids shooting hoops and people greeting each other as they leave the station than it does from the train itself.

as commuting goes, I have to say, I really don’t hate it at all.

when I started online journaling, I was in tenth grade, literally and almost exactly half my lifetime ago. at the time, while I wasn’t foolish enough to try and hide my internet presence from my family or my school-friends, I certainly didn’t want them to follow me around online. nor did I particularly want my AOL friends to know me as a real-life human, which is why for several years there were probably more people calling me Kaz than rabi on a daily basis. it was never an alter-ego, exactly; rabi and kazzie were the same person, but the intersection of each girl’s friends would be such a tiny sliver on a venn diagram that I’m not even sure it would be visible. (at least not if the circles were scaled by population size.)

anyway, my little AOL journal became my little college weblog became my not-so-little blog. and then blogs became BLOGS, I became an adult, and my distaste for the word blog turned into a more general dislike for, well, blogging. I will spare you (and myself) the usual lamenting about how Things Have Changed on the Internet, because of-freaking-course they have, and yeah I miss my old community but I sure don’t miss listening to modem-dialing sounds or wondering if blogger was going to disappear completely and take my archive of posts with it. (I was a sophomore in college when pyra nearly self-destructed along with the rest of the dotcom bubble.) to me, reading sad posts about how things were better back when I started blogging feels the same as hearing people complain about how their favorite bands were better before they got a major label deal. listen to music you like: your old favorites might have gone a little too mainstream for your tastes, but there’s no shortage of awesome new independent bands out there. blog the way you want to blog: yeah, the corporate-sponsorship-monetization wave has been pretty disgusting, but the whole point of self-publishing is that you decide what you want to put out there.

the point of which is this: I want to put something here.

what, exactly? I think I want this website to evolve in the opposite direction that many do. I don’t want to build an audience or count pageviews. I don’t want to be a part of any particular movement or genre. what I do want is:

• something that my family can read and know what I’m up to. while I once cringed at the thought of my mother reading my journal, now she’s my favorite fan. (can you tell I’m in my thirties?)
• a record of my often-happy little brooklyn life, and the eventual growth of my own family.*
• a place to write, if I want to write.

and… that’s all, really. storytelling is probably too ambitious for me anymore, and I’m too public with my name to write anything about my job. I still subscribe to the philosophy that everything I put here is something I should be comfortable sharing with my boss, my students, my students’ parents, my dissertation committee**, my hockey teammates, strangers on the subway, and anyone else on the planet. so possibly it’ll be a little bland, or boring, or unremarkable. I’m okay with that. I just want it to be something again.

and if you want to read it, all the better. but if you don’t, that’s okay with me.

* since I am newly married, and since I didn’t announce my impending marriage to pretty much anyone until about a month ahead of time, there has been speculation swirling within my family and my workplace about how pregnant I am. or maybe the speculation comes more from the fact that I haven’t made my desire to be a parent any kind of secret. while the stubborn side of me has come out in response and I actually at one point said, “now I want to never have a baby, just to prove them wrong!”… the truth is I am happily looking forward to building a family, one way or another. at this point though I’m still actively preventing that so if you are wanting cute baby photos there is an indeterminately long wait ahead of you.

** HA. I don’t even have a dissertation committee right now, that’s what a terrible PhD student I am. but my stubborn self is determined to get that sorted out one of these days.