Believe

Do you believe in symbols?  I do.  Recently, a friend’s mom passed away.  The mom liked to collect owls.  As Mother’s Day was approaching, my friend’s sister was feeling particularly melancholy.  She stepped outside on her porch – and saw an owl sitting in a tree.  Now, are you going to tell me that you still don’t believe in symbols?

I like symbols.  Simply put, they make me feel better.  I used to wear three rings on my hands, and each was a symbol.  The gold one on my left ring finger is pretty traditional and was given to me by my husband on our wedding day.  Yes, it tells all the men and women who check me out that I’m spoken for (and yes, I’m straight, and yes, I still find both flattering), but it also reminds me that I married my best friend and that the body I carry around is really only a part of me.  The rest resides in the guy who wears a matching ring (yes, I made us get matching ones.  We’d just seen “Titanic”, and I thought if we ever drowned together on a ship we could get paired up by our rings.  You call it “crazy”, I call it “logical”). 

On my right hand, I used to wear two silver rings.  Both were cheap little things, purchased at Target or something like that.  One symbolizes a pregnancy I miscarried 9 years ago.  When it happened, I had trouble saying good-bye to a baby that I never got to say hello to.  So, Wil bought me the ring and told me I could wear it whenever I needed to think about the baby.  I put it on, and never took it off.  The second ring was one I bought for myself.  It was a thin silver ring, just plain with four lines on it.  I bought it when I started down my health and fitness journey.  To me, each of the four lines represented a member of my family: Wil, Olivia, Ben and myself.  I liked the ring because it reminded me that I was putting in all this hard work for the four of us.

Like I said, both the rings on my right hand were cheap.  The one with the four lines was so cheap that when I had to spend hours in the pool doing deep water runs for two months, the chlorine ate it and it broke clean in half. 

As most of you know, I’ve been back to my regularly scheduled programming of workouts for almost a month now.  I’m back to waking up at 4AM, running, spinning, swimming, doing resistance bands and taking cardio sculpt classes at the gym.  Every day is a back to back double workout in an effort to get back to the level of fitness I had before my Achilles Heel turned into – well, my Achilles Heel and brought my fitness train to a screeching halt.  And what I’ve learned is that a 2 month injury takes more than 1 month of recovery to get back to where I was.

The problem is that race season is upon me.  Every weekend I either have a race or a ridiculously difficult training workout for an upcoming race.  This weekend I had – both.  Saturday I had to run a 10K in Central Park, and on Sunday I was doing a “brick” workout which consisted of a 26 mile training bike ride followed by a 20 minute run.

The 10K was hard.  Except for the 10K I “ran” in early April as my first run back after my injury (and “ran” was in quotes, because my pace was so slow and the run so painful that I think I’m using a lot of creative license by saying I “ran” it), I haven’t run more than 4.5 miles at a stretch.  I did great for the first four miles of the race, and then my legs seemed to think I was kidding as I continued to put one foot in front of the other.  I struggled, groaned, wanted to just stop.  But I knew that my family believed in me and expected me to come home after I FINISHED the race, not after I dropped out of it.  So, I trudged along and finished with an exceptionally mediocre pace.  But, I did it.

At literally the crack of dawn (and I think it’s called “crack” of dawn because a person must literally be on crack to want to get up that early just to torture themselves), I got up, packed up my bike gear and headed to Harriman State Park.  On June 2^nd my friend Jeff and I will be competing in an Olympic distance triathlon (1 mile swim, 25 mile bike, 10K run).  The triathlon is two hours away in Connecticut, and allegedly has a killer of a bike course (for example, at one point we spend 3 miles riding on a place called “Hard Hill Road”, sigh).  We didn’t want to drive that far just to kill ourselves, so we decided that the two mile bitch of a hill with the personal injury evoking hairpin turn in it would serve as a reasonable proxy.

Since Jeff is a much stronger biker than me and didn’t spend 6 weeks with his foot in a boot cast, we decided that I’d arrive 15 minutes ahead of him to get a good head start.  Of course, Jeff was early and I was late, cutting my 15 minute lead down to 7.  As I pushed off, I knew that about 10 miles into the ride I’d meet up with the hill that dropped 1200 feet in elevation in 2 miles, then had the evil turn at the bottom, leaving the rider to have to climb right back up that same 2 miles.  And the only thought in my head was, “I can’t”.  I was too out of shape, I had barely ridden at all this season.  The 10K and lousy performance from the day before was still fresh in my legs and my head.   That hill was just as hard going down as it was going up (unless you enjoy watching your life flash in front of your eyes while you start to lose control of your bike as it dive bombs down a mountain at 30mph to a turn that if you miss you quickly end up on the Palisades Parkway where you can watch that movie of your life end in a fiery heap as you collide with minivan).  So, in my mind, I had two big challenges, and I didn’t think I could do either of them.  Jeff seemed to think the same of me, because as he passed me 7 minutes into the ride, he said, “You know, Al, you could just get to the top of the big hill and turn around.  You don’t have to do it.”

I was kind of surprised when Jeff said that.  Having known me back when I was fat and seeing all I’ve accomplished, he is one of my biggest supporters.  But, I thought, maybe he saw what I felt.  I just couldn’t do this stuff anymore.  I told Jeff I’d likely cut the hill out, and then he was out of ear shot and we were each doing our own ride.

The problem with the Harriman bike ride is that that Goliath of a hill is only part of the challenge of the course.  The entire thing is hilly.  There is almost never a flat part; you are almost constantly plugging up a steepish hill, or flying down one and hoping that a deer doesn’t hop in front of you (which actually does happen a lot there.  I think the deer like to play the old “frogger” game with the bikers there).  The plus side to a ride like that is that every  hill I conquered reminded me that I do train hard, and I’m not quite as out of shape as I think.  At one point I remembered that 4 years ago I didn’t even own a bike because I figured the seat post couldn’t hold my excessive weight, and now I was getting up hills that really should come with built in escalators.

Even before I got to the big hill, I knew my decision.  I HAD to do it.  If I didn’t, I would just regret it and would end up here next week having to try again, so might as well get the end of my life over with now while I was already here.  Besides, last year I did an Olympic distance triathlon at Harriman where we had to go down and up that hill TWICE, and I believed in myself enough then to conquer that right after a 1 mile swim, and just before a 10K run.  If I could do that a year ago, I could take care of this hill today.

When I got to the top, I momentarily panicked.  “Turn Around!”, my head was screaming.  Fortunately, my ears weren’t listening and down I went.  Now, I have to admit that I went slow.  I had my hand on my brake so hard that I wondered if I’d topple over at some point due to lack of momentum.  But, I was doing it.  At one point, I saw Jeff climbing back up, and even he said, “Turn around!”  Since when could he read my mind?  But all I yelled back was, “I have to!” and kept on going.

As I neared the bottom, I quickly thought about my family and then turned into that damned hairpin turn.  I shifted gears to the easiest they make on an adult road bike, and started my ascent back up.  The ride up was tough, almost impossible.  But, I kept telling myself that I had to, that I’d done it before, that I needed to show myself that I could.  And – I did.  My quads and hamstrings seemed to be creating their own swear words to express their pain, but I did it.

Just as I was finishing the course, Jeff was driving towards me in his car.  Not that he was way ahead of me, but he’d racked his bike, gone for his 20 minute run, then decided to drive the course to look for my body he was sure he’d find somewhere on the side of the road (or in the fiery heap at the bottom of the big hill).  I told him I was fine, so he went home and I pulled into the parking lot.  I went for my own 20 minute run to complete my brick workout, then drove home to enjoy Mother’s Day with my family.

And, Mother’s Day was great.  Olivia and Ben handed me their handcrafted Mother’s Day gifts, beaming with pride.  I beamed back, and my heart swelled up when I saw all the work they’d put into their presents for me.  Then my husband handed me a small box.  I opened it – and saw a small silver ring.  He knew my old one had broken in the pool.  He knew it was an important symbol for me, so he replaced it with one that he thought would hold as much meaning for me.  And, it did.  It was just a simple silver ring, but it had one word engraved on it: “Believe”.  And he’s right; I do.