Race Day

3:45 a.m. Zero hour. The alarm pulled me out of a fitful doze. I stared up at the ceiling, steely resolve tempered by a burning desire to crawl back into the womb.

Splashed my face with water, meditated, and forced down breakfast (my last?). Lynne and I drove the 250 yards from the motel to Shadowcliffs, the site of the event.

Shadowcliffs. A gloomy, Tolkienesque name. Particularly for a lake in downtown Pleasanton, California.

We registered, laid out our stuff at the transition area, and waited for the sun to rise. I wrapped my arms around myself, shivering in my swimming trunks. Tall figures with muscled jaws, long femurs and outsized shoulders stalked around. Sleek, lycra-flanked blondes stamped the ground, chomping at the bit, whinnying. Where were the fat slobs I had envisioned, cannon fodder for my triumphant entry into the sport? Christ. What had I gotten myself into?

I went to the bathroom. The first, gray light showed the buoys marking the swimming course, just over the horizon and far, far, far away from one another. Surely that was longer than the advertised 1/4 mile! Clearly it would be longer than I'd ever swum in one stretch.

Christ.

I went to the bathroom again.

They gathered us first-timers together. Everyone else looked like a product of some East German eugenics program -- well, at least everyone but me had enough bodily substance to stay afloat out there. We listened to this petite blonde with a voice like paint stripper, a veteran of dozens of Iron Man tri's whose motivational speech had but one point: the swim was going to be a bitch.

Thanks. Really needed to hear that.

The first wave took off, Iron Man pros using the Tri For Fun as a warmup, a stretching exercise. I had never seen humans move so fast in the water. They jetted around the bouys, 10-foot rooster tails following in their wakes. They were in and out of the water in under four minutes.

Then the horn sounded for the under-35 men. I watched the roiling mass move away from the beach. My group, the over-35s, inched forward. For the first time, I really understood what it must have been like when the ramp of your LST dropped down off Omaha Beach. Of course, we were on the beach, but still -- all that was missing was Germans raking the buoys with machine-gun fire.

"Honey, this is so exciting!!" Standing behind me, Lynne grinned and jumped up and down. I went to the bathroom. Again.

Back at the beach with two minutes to go, I drifted to the back of the group, as directed for those who felt their swimming was "a little sketchy". Which would be, in my case, a charitable way of putting it.

The horn went off. The herd of adult males entered the water. And as I stood there, watching these guys find a place in the water and start swimming, a sense of calm settled over me. The kind of eerie calm you feel when you have completely, utterly lost your bearings.

"Oh," I said to myself. "I'm going to take a dip. What fun."

Then another thought started to form: "And...I see I'm about to enter a swimming race. How very interesting! You know, actually, I believe I shall instead go back up the beach and visit the bathroom."

But I was pressed forward by the crowd, the water swirling around my thighs, my chest -- and then everything went black, an inky gloom of duck spoor. I broke the surface in the center of a thrashing, frenzied scrum. Elbows, feet, knees flying, punching, grabbing for anything. I tried to move forward and freestyled up on a guy's back once, twice, three times. I stopped, took a breath, pointed myself in another direction. A long strand of water hiacynth wrapped itself around my torso. A Samoan swam over me.

After a few minutes of this, I looked up and saw the first buoy to my left. Rounding it took an eternity. It was beginning to dawn on me, as I slid further and further away from the course and into the center of the lake, that I could not find my stroke. I had no stroke. Instead of extending my body in a long, elegant line, I was pulling myself into a fetal ball. Every breath sucked in pints of lake water, ripe with protozoa, amoebas and zooplankton. One of the dozen or so lifeguards, watching us carefully from surfboards, called out to me: "you okay?"

I didn't answer.

Now was not the time to cave into that nagging doubt that comes whenever I slide into a pool, the feeling that I don't belong there. I clearly don't know what I'm doing. I mean, don't get me wrong, I can execute a basic crawl stroke, and have even been studying this Total Immersion DVD, but still, more than 40 yards and I always expect some lifeguard to see my form, do a double-take, jump in and haul me out.

I didn't want to talk to any damn lifeguards, didn't want to think about my bad form, didn't want to dwell on my insecurities. So even as I gagged on litre after litre of giardia-laden pond filth, even as I said to myself, "ah, so this is what drowning is," I was determined to get through this damn thing.

And the hell if they were going to pull me onto one of those surfboards and cut my swim short.

The back leg of the course was endless. And my crawl simply wasn't there. I defaulted to a kind of spastic breast stroke. A side stroke. Floating on my back. But I kept...moving...forward.

I drew some comfort from not being the last guy in my wave. Five or six other poor souls also plodded along on their fronts, their sides, their backs. I'm sure at this point the under-35 females were gaining on us, maybe even passing us, maybe getting on the bikes already. I don't remember. In fact, the whole thing's a blur now, a jumble of frantic images, splashes, a wet lens, shark's mouth gaping, a severed leg, water full of blood, camera at a crazy angle.

I pressed on. Where were those warm, slimy plants? Out here it was cold, with chalky sunbeams slanting down into the fathomless depths of the Marianas trench.

On the home leg, breast-stroking furiously, I followed our motivational speaker's instructions to keep swimming until there was sand right under me, until I couldn't swim anymore. And when I dove ten feet straight down, what do you know, there was the sand! I walked under water for 20 yards and up onto the beach to my bike.

Fumbling with my helmet, shoes, gloves, hands shaking. Jacked up with adrenalin. Pulse racing, my mind a whirl. I had faced death -- and worse, humiliation -- and I had prevailed. I was back in my element. I didn't even know I had an element before this, but now I was on my bike, air all around me, terra firma beneath, and I was flying! I passed everyone I saw (more than half of whom were on mountain bikes, but still). Pulling up to a young woman I'd been following, I checked my speed from her computer -- 21 mph -- took it up to 22, 23, left her standing still, and in a flash I was back in the park, pulling on my running shoes.

I took off at a fairly easy pace, but damn if I wasn't passing all the runners, too! The futility of the swim transformed into the swaggering confidence of a well-trained athlete! Ha! Me, Doug! Fleet of foot, high of anaerobic threshold! Kicking ass, taking names! Lynne and I grinned wildly and high-fived as we went by each other on the course. The nauseatingly fit couple!

A few people passed me, OK, but only six, and only two of those were GIRLS, and one of them was an Auschwitzy, emaciated, ultra-marathoner type, so that doesn't count because she could probably have run until next week anyway. Then I overtook a big guy who'd passed me on the last hill, jousted with him for a moment in the last quarter-mile and LEFT HIM IN THE DUST with a HUGE BURST OF SPEED at the finish line!!!!

I shot under the sign, arms up in victory -- where was the olive wreath? where was the American flag to run around with?? -- and then remembered the clock! My time! I trotted around to the front of the finish line again and looked up: 1:29:13. So...let's see...third starting wave, subtract 10 minutes, and then the time it took to come back around to the clock...uh...1:18:55. Or so. Yes, the real triathletes had finished the race and left the park 25 minutes ago, but hey, that was not a bad time!

Elation. Bliss! Ready to do it again!! The horrors of the swim expunged from the memory!! Standing by the finish line, waiting for Lynne (starting smack in the center of the over-35 women's wave, she was even more freaked out at people swimming over her and kicking her, and didn't complete the swim any faster than I so I was able to beat her time by 35 seconds -- a major victory for the male ego), everybody was cheering for those crossing after them, a tremendous collective euphoria and accomplishment and relief -- except, perhaps, for one girl bent over next to me, vomiting prodigiously. I patted her on the back and said, "good race, huh?" She grinned up at me and said, "yeah!"

I knew just how she felt.

So anyway, I found that I am in halfway decent shape for a rank amateur cyclist and runner. I told Lynne flatly two weeks ago that I really would have no interest in thinking about another triathlon once this was over but, I have to admit, the whole experience has me thinking. So if -- IF -- I do another one of these things -- I have GOT to get the swimming thing down. Knuckle down, face the music, throw myself back into lakes, rivers, lagoons, estuaries, the bay -- gulp -- the ocean.

Christ!

I've got to go to the bathroom.

The Plants. My God, the Plants.

So my girlfriend railroaded me into entering a triathlon.

For almost two months I've been training myself into exhaustion for something that slovenly, out-of-shape people who haven't practiced a single hour will show up for with old mountain bikes and tennis shoes.

Went out yesterday to Pleasanton to take a bike ride and then actually swim in the lake where this thing is going to be next week. Very important for the aforementioned girlfriend, who, while a strong swimmer, has open water issues.

We swam out beyond the frenzied, screaming chop of the recreational area. The adult swimming lane spanned the horizon in a single, bleak line. I grabbed a pylon and stared at the twin ropes stretching ahead of me and disappearing over the curve of the horizon. It was simply a question of exactly where my heart would give out -- at just what point my faltering stroke stopped and my lungs filled with water until I slipped with a tiny ripple into the depths below.

I drew in a breath -- my last? -- lowered my head, stroked my arm forward -- and came face to face with SLIMY PLANTS. Right at stroke level. I mean to say that when you bring your extended arm down and in, you graze the tops of the SLIMY PLANTS. So if you have goggles, and if you swim with your head submerged and your face to the bottom, with correct Total Immersion form, you spend the whole time staring at MANY, MANY, MANY SLIMY PLANTS.

Lynne shrieked and shot out of the water. She has SERIOUS ISSUES with SLIMY PLANTS. After working for a year to perfect her crawl, she announced that she will be doing the breaststroke the whole way, keeping her body out of the water from the knees up.

As for me, the fear I face is not the fear I thought I would face. It's really not even the plants and the overall murk. Consider this: 1500 people have signed up for this race. 1,500 people, all of them running at the gun, surging from the beach, plunging in and swimming all at once, a kicking, stroking, elbowing, zig-zagging mass of humanity, stirring up the muck and the slime and the dead fish and the plants.

Many will urinate in terror.

Or worse.

And I haven't even mentioned the way the loose plant strands wrap around your legs and shoulders.

Another Dialogue:

Doug: All your dishes -- which you never used -- have chicken fat all over them.

Doug: And small encrusted spinach leaves which only reduce slightly in diameter no matter how furiously you scrub at them.

Mark: And stuff, you don't even know what it is, that you have to scrape off with a sturdy knife.

Mark: And broiler racks that have never been cleaned, ever.

Mark: That grease that becomes molecularly bonded with your skin.

Doug: Until you scream FUCK! FFUCK!!! FFFUUUCCCCKKKKK!!!! and slam a fying pan through your television screen.

Doug: And then your hair bursts into flames.

Mark: Dad has been gliding though the house recently, his feet a foot above the ground. Gerri too.

Mark: They pass each other in the hallway.

Mark: Dad in his bathrobe, Gerri in Flemish armour, circa 1385.

Doug: Is it a jousting contest?

Mark: Pikas scurrying up and down the outside of the house.

Doug: A mariachi band that keeps appearing at the bedroom door at 3:30 AM, playing La Cucaracha.

Mark: Their bed slams them into the wall every night at 4:12 AM.

Doug: Yes! Then Dad shoos the mariachis away, Gerri tries in vain to find them the next morning, and the next night, they are back.

Doug: And again with the bed.

Mark: OK here it is: it's August, it's 95 degrees, and it's pouring rain in their bedroom.

Mark: How much would you pay for footage??

Doug: Only if it were sudden and quite unexpected.

Doug: And arms were waved.

Mark: I want to see their bedroom sopping wet. Everything is absolutely soaked.

Mark: The cars won't start.

Mark: The power goes off.

Mark: There is a beeping sound.

Doug: Cue the German shepherds.

Doug: Bounding through the house, clawing the floors, barking.

Mark: I think we should fit some sort of spring-launching device under their bed.

Doug: Knocking knick knacks off shelves.

Doug: And that's when the dolls attack.

Doug: Victorian dolls versus German shepherds.

Mark: And smelly bums.

Doug: Gerri cannot break up the fight.

Mark: Dad and Gerri wake up with a foul homeless man in their bed.

Doug: Dad says, "Oh, Christ," and walks off the property in his bathrobe.

Mark: That's when the entire house disappears into a giant sinkhole.

Doug: I like it.

Mark: The only thing left is Dad, hair wisps at attention, bathrobe, FFFFFFFFUCK!!

Doug: "Son of a BITCH!"

Doug: ChrrrrrIST!!

Mark: He's not devastated, just really, really, really irritated.

Doug: That is how the journal gets started.

Mark: Vanilla enriched soymilk with Quik is pretty good.

Doug: And we didn't even talk about the wolverines Gerri encounters in the laundry room.

Doug: Quik?

Doug: Oh. My. God.

Doug: How about Strawberry Quik.

Mark: The Taste of Duluth.

Mark: Are you ever going to go back there?

Doug: Don't plan on it.

Lawnmowers

The sound of a gas lawnmower evokes heat, humidity, the absence of any particular responsibility. Staying in bed until noon. Timelessness. A floating, ambient quality: no one knows where you are, and you can drift without end.

A manual lawnmower's grating slash, however, means that you are likely to get in trouble with a stern elder.

It's worrisome.

A Dialogue:

Doug: You know how there's a small drop of water somewhere but suddenly your whole goddamn hand and half the counter top is wet? You know that?

Mark: One microgram of honey = smeared absolutely everywhere, including in your bed, on your computer keyboard, on stereo knobs, on refrigerator handle, on car door handle, on steering wheel.

Mark: And in your hair and down your pants.

Mark: You wake up with honey in your nostrils.

Mark: You can ruin someone's life with a small pot of honey.

Doug: Another one, by the way, is mustard.

Doug: Mustard has greater spreading and smearing power than any other substance on earth.

Mark: I don't know, honey has profound self-multiplying principles.

Doug: Hmm...maybe the scalar increase of honey is greater.

Doug: I think it's 1g > 58g > 34567 g > 3469732 kilos

Doug: Talk about the self-multiplying principles.

Mark: One gram multiplies itself into 2 grams, then into 8 grams, then into 32 grams, then 156 grams, etc.

Doug: We need to get this published in a scientific journal. Mark: GOD DAMN IT -- The Journal of Extreme Irritation

Doug: Dad is Editor Emeritus.

Mark: The Journal of Irritation is published in Chicago.

Mark: I wonder who would subscribe?

Doug: Dad would subscribe to the Journal of Extreme Irritation, read the thing, and get extremely frustrated, try to rip the pages out, not be able to, and hurl the thing out the window, screaming in rage.

Doug: It would be a journal with the power to exponentially increase annoyance to the point of homocidal fury.

Mark: I see it as some sort of soothing tonic for easily irritated people.

Mark: Catharsis through reading other people's extremely annoying experiences.

Doug: Yes, but these people would be so easily irritated that they would get annoyed for no reason and end up smashing their head through plate glass.

Doug: Screaming all the while.

Mark: Would you like to see a 1.5 hr. film of people hurling themselves off different cliffs?

Doug: I would rather see a 3-hour film of rotund individuals running full speed into walls.

Toupée III

OK, there's more on this. To see someone in a toupée today, in the 21st century, gives you the shock you might experience stumbling into the year 1934. A time when men with ill-fitting suits and brown fedoras would say "Hey, what's the big idea?" or "Aw, wise guy, huh?" There's something about a toupée that predates America's coming of age (via Vietnam and Watergate), a time when butch-waxed, hungry men with shirtsleeves, lean jaws, raw fists and pep held onto a vision of American opportunity even as their future dried up, even as they grew gristly and hard-bitten and old, even as the dust bowl and locusts swirled about them. Men who felt that if they could just throw some hair back under the fedora something might turn up.

Toupée II

So there's this guy who works in our building, a fellow in his 30's, who wears the most absurd toupée in the universe...this is what got me thinking about the toupée issue. It's just like, I wonder what the is dude THINKING!!!! Be BALD, man! Nothing wrong with that! Or wear a hat if you must! But he looks like, I mean, beyond surreal. Something out of a Fellini film. Like someone masquerading as a person.

Or maybe it's just making fun of people who have hair. Maybe it's an ironic statement about hair, made all the more twisted by the fact that actually, underneath the rug, he does have a full head of hair, and it's a sort of irony on irony, like people who shave off their eyebrows and paint them back on. There is something of a burlesque about it, something like kabuki or noh theatre. Perhaps, yes, it's the cranial equivalent of a mask. You know, how other-worldly and spooky masks really are, as if suddenly you're in the realm of magic, of pure allegory, removed from the measured, analog reality of everyday life and thrown into some classical Greek drama staged and acted with the stark severity of an ancient and completely alien ethos.

Toupée I

Men who wear bad toupees -- OK, what toupee isn't, when you get down to it, but some just scream "sleeping rodent on the head" -- well, I'm going to asset that there's something wrong with those individuals. Something defective in the brain physiology.

You can't really disagree with me.