The Spinster Chronicles

A Little Earth, Wind and Fire on the West Coast

2010-08-27T05:04:00.000-07:00

Katy Perry may be on to something. She sings that California girls are unforgettable. That's debatable, but I'll never forget California itself. I didn’t melt anyone’s Popsicle while I was there (we spent a considerable amount of time hanging in San Francisco’s Castro region though, so Krispin may have…) but I did melt away some stress. Who knew vacation was so awesome?

Our ten-day trek from the city by the bay up through wine country, all the way to the Avenue of the Giants (re: redwoods galore) was the first vacation I’ve ever taken alone with a significant other. That’s right, at the age of 31 I’m finally jet-setting about with my lover. I have to say that my Spinster vacations have been pretty good, I wasn’t sure the “couple” thing could compare to Aruba with my favorite cousin, or Barbados with one of my best friends in college. Drinking beer across Germany with my family and living with six girls “Real World” style across London and Spain are also chart-toppers, but California was different.

It rekindled my belief that maybe I could be in a “real” relationship. One that hasn’t only withstood the rigors of getting together on the heels of a broken engagement (mine) and divorce (his), but the trials and tribulations of a crappy hotel room, a tab of unnecessary parking tickets and a slew of unexpected misfortunes that probably come with any vacation (slowest waiter on earth in a restaurant with food we weren’t looking forward to, an uncooperative neighbor in the apartment we rented, and a phone call that threatened to uproot our lives as we know them). Though bumps in the road, they weren’t anything that we (armed with a Mustang convertible and maps to more than 1,000 wineries) couldn’t navigate through together.

I lost track of all the moments we toasted to, and all the future versions of “us” we discussed. Somewhere between the perfect Chards of the Carneros region and world-class Cabs of Napa, we let the little things go and the big things in. I was more relaxed and laid back than I can ever remember being with Ironman behind me and my work life temporarily on hold. My biggest concern most days was wondering what dress I would wear (I brought 15 of them), and whether or not I would get a salad at dinner before my entrée.

The disciplined athlete in me also took a breather. We rented bikes one day, but cadence, heart rate, RPE and energy supplements were the last things on my mind. I focused instead on the rows of vineyards rolled out before me that in central New York would have been cornfields. I took in the golden hills that were peppered with green and the occasional (unbelievable) home. Rather than hammer over the flat road and power up the hills, I took my time and stopped occasionally to take a picture.

I even smoked a few cigarettes. Oh yes, yes I did. (A throwback to my year and half abroad where smoking came as naturally as Power Gels do now).

I guess you could say I let my hair down, but that’s not exactly accurate. My hair spent most of its time in a wild tangle above me while cruising California’s Route 1 with the top down, our red car winding its way along the Pacific coast en route to Point Reyes, then over to the first winery stop on the trip (a little place that is otherwise insignificant in the shadow of Sonoma and Napa). The winery was run by a couple of loons who could barely be bothered to give us a tasting, as we were standing next to a very important couple who couldn’t jam enough “wine speak” into their discourse over the (I thought) shitty wines. Random vintages from the 1980s were open before them when we walked in the door. Between the woman’s declarations that “ten more minutes would make this zinfandel phenomenal” and the man’s roller-pin-like maneuvers with the his glass upon the bar (he put it on its side—while there was wine in it—and proceeded to act like he was making a pie crust right there) we were ready to leave before we even got to the reds in our tasting (and they only had one white on the list!).

Eventually we parted ways with the woman in her satin pajama bottoms and her know-it all husband clad in a cloak of sorts. With us we took a bottle of the Chardonnay, which served as a lovely pairing with the Jacuzzi at our cottage in Sonoma.

It was Dr. Doolittle meets Martha Stewart in this adorable property surrounded by colorful flower gardens, fabulous patios, and a cozy little structure that was decorated with a gallery of festive prints from wine events in the area, terracotta pots, votive candles and all the things you could ever imagine needing while away from home (including a VHS tape of City Slickers, which we totally watched). The CD player was already loaded with music, and a little "Let's Groove Tonight" wove through the evening breeze.

Outside we discovered a cast of roommates to include two goats, a fearless cat (he spent his mornings leaping from the fence, to the top of an umbrella shading a table on the patio, to the pavers near the garden), and an adorable dog named Snickers who rolled into calm submissive at the mere whisper of your big toe approaching her space.

We spent the next three days visiting wineries—I would write more about that, but the tastings were so generous, I can’t recall those days very well! Suffice it to say, my Visa card recalls them just fine and yesterday a pallet of wine arrived to the office for us. Woot! We were treated to a reserve tasting at Chateau St. Jean, which may have been one of the most remarkable afternoons of my life.

Next stop was the redwoods, where we stayed in a bed and breakfast that I’m sure has been used as a set in some horror movie. It was run by a man who made Shooter McGaven hand motions while describing his egg-frying capabilities, and gussied up his main lobby with a portrait of Jesus, ceramic elks, the unity candle from his wedding, and various other disturbing objects (a stuffed sheep missing an eye, a tapestry of a pillow fight, and many, many dolls). At the top of the stairs from the main lobby, was the door to our room. A floral wall-papered, lace-trimmed vision, with wicker furniture, a flat-screened TV, and a bible by the bed.

I feel compelled to also mention that across the hall from our room, was a closet filled with more dolls all posed in various positions—and in place of the door, was a glass pane. To view the dolls. Moving on…

We left the redwoods later that day and headed back to San Francisco where we spent three more days before coming home. One of my best friends from high school, Jamie, moved to San Francisco earlier that week, so we had the awesome opportunity to have a little reunion while also discovering the city together for the first time. Ironically, the apartment we rented was on the same street and just a few blocks down from where he lived. After an incredible night out to dinner at Foreign Cinema (where Jamie’s charm wooed the waitress into bringing a boatload of complimentary delicacies to our table), we went back to his place and had a night cap. The door to his bedroom could have been the door to a time machine. He surprised me with a home video we made ten years ago.

While I was in Italy, I was part of a band and wrote a song. It was recorded and became popular there, and my friend Jamie decided he wanted to try his hat at making music videos (we were always big musical theater dorks in high school). I had forgotten all about the hilarious work of art that ensued the night we “shot” the video. The production was a family affair, with my younger brothers accompanying the music by playing guitar in the background and helping Jamie direct each scene. My mom makes an appearance to remind Alex (the youngest brother) that bed time was soon, and Ginger (my beloved dog that we had to put down in 2005) is in several shots, trying to escape my cuddling stronghold as per the usual. Seeing her again was perhaps the most moving thing about the video. I only have pictures to remember her by, and seeing her mannerisms again brought tears to my eyes. I could almost reach out to the screen to pet her.

It was getting late and we began walking back toward our apartment. With each step (as with many in San Francisco) I imagined what it would be like to live in that city. Perhaps it was because I was being courted by views of the Golden Gate bridge, Alcatraz and the amazing hills all urban and pastel, or perhaps because seeing a video of myself on 19th Street just steps from Dolores Park from ten years ago made me feel like it was already home.

I went to sleep that night knowing that the next morning we would be packing to return home to Syracuse, where our real lives awaited—jobs, families, responsibilities, credit card bills, and workouts…oh workouts, how I missed thee (I was on a solid cheeseburger for lunch/steak for dinner streak and it wasn’t pretty).

Our suitcases were robust with trinkets of our time away. New clothes, post cards, prints, and a wonderful letter and gift from my boyfriend were all tucked between a collection of dresses that were well worn all along the west coast of California—the golden state.

But what I will remember always, are the feelings I had while we were there. The fortification of my heart in a serious relationship. The time spent rekindling an old friendship. The fresh hope for the future and the delicious elixir of the past. It all left me feeling at ease with my life. The one I’ve lived, the one I’m living…and the moments that are yet to come.

Three cases of wine have been delivered to my office, and I'm well prepared to toast the future. I can’t wait to see what it holds.

Swim, Bike and Run is Done. Bring on the Swig, Dance and Fun!

2010-07-29T08:57:00.001-07:00

Shakira says there's a she-wolf in the closet, and she might be right. But I know for fact there has been a spinster in the closet for the past 24 weeks. Now that Ironman has come and gone, I'm ready to dust off the high heels (that were too painful to wear after regular runs over 10 miles), loosen up the schedule (that has been dictated by seven-hour bike rides), and pop open the vino (well, that part has been happening all the same, but soon I head to Napa Valley for a much-needed vacation and I don't have to worry about hungover workouts anymore!).

But before I get back on track with my sizzling spinster summer, let me tell you how all of my good-girl training has paid off since January.

I arrived in Lake Placid on Friday morning to soak up the vibe in the air that can only occur when you pack 2000+ athletes into a small mountain village who are all on the brink of going after a major goal. Some are there for the first time and just want to finish the race. Others, like me, are there to chase a special time that we’ve put in our minds as the proof that our efforts will be successful. Whether you’re there as an athlete, spectator or volunteer, the common denominator is respect for the race. The lake, roads and mountain tops that make up the course take on a life of their own and together become a fourth character in the scene that is “Ironman.” Lake Placid becomes a shadow box of courageous moments where people push themselves to their limits while being encouraged by the helping hands of volunteers and the clapping hands of spectators.

The morning comes early on race day as everyone gets up to prepare for the journey ahead. At 4:30AM, I moseyed out to the balcony from my hotel room and sat silently with a coffee as I stared over the black mountain tops that were silhouetted against a slightly less black sky whose sun was still on snooze. To my right, another man was doing the same…swigging Coke from a liter-sized bottle and sitting quietly with his thoughts. Like old friends who need only the bare minimum of words and phrases to communicate their feelings, he looked to me and said, “So?” I smiled and said, “It’s going to be a good day.” We both exhaled and continued staring forward as a gaggle of women still wearing heels and mini skirts from the night before ambled past us laughing as they took turns impersonating the event emcee, Mike Reilly, and his famous greeting to those who make it to the finish line…”Meghan, YOU are an Ironman!” one of them screamed, as the others doubled over in laughter whilst removing their shoes.

A few hours later I was in Mirror Lake, zipped into my wetsuit and clapping for the pros who had just begun their race. Ten minutes later we would do the same—plenty of time to pee in my wetsuit and collect my thoughts. I recognized Ryan Sutter (of Trista and Ryan “Bachelorette” fame) standing next to me. I smiled and waved when he caught me staring and continued to pee. It was a pre-race ritual after all, and I wasn’t about to let a D-list celebrity change up my game plan.

Moments later the race began, and I began my 2.4 mile “fight” through the water, swimming in and out of the thousands of limbs that were stroking and kicking their way down the long, narrow lake along the buoy line. I took a few blows to the face from nearby swimmers, and felt confident that should one of those heavy strokes push me beneath the water, the scuba divers that were nestled beneath us would swiftly usher me back to air. When I finally exited the water to run to the bike transition, I swore I tasted blood in my mouth so I checked to make sure all my teeth were in tact. They were, and I continued trotting along the carpeted path to the Olympic Oval to grab my helmet, shoes and bike.

Through the first 10 miles on the bike it was pouring rain. I immediately thought of the race in 2008 and how the rain pelted my skin for 15 straight hours before finally letting up around 10:00PM. At the time, my pink Tifosi glasses were so waterlogged I had to remove them so I could see, and I placed them into the back of my tri top only to discover later that they had slipped out somewhere. Only one day old, and already they were gone. This year it was the same. My replacement pink Tifosi glasses were streaked with rain, but I was determined that the sun would be back so I let them perch on my nose and made the bold decision to bomb down the hills despite how slick the road was from the water. Smart? Probably not. Fun? Absolutely.

There was something about taking control of my race in that moment that made the rain a little less threatening. I came back to Lake Placid Ironman to do the race I knew I was capable of, not to feel beaten down by the elements and let the weather dictate how things were going to be. I was armed with the powerful fact that I had already done an entire Ironman in the pouring rain, so I could do it again if I had to. And if the sun came out with a vengeance? Well most of my long rides and runs were completed during the hottest parts of 90-degree days when the humidity had me just as drenched as the 2008 monsoon.

My gamble paid off. I made great time down the initial descents on the bike course and headed into dry roads and sunshine after 10 miles. The sun was out just long enough to flirt with the idea of a rainbow on the edge of the passing rain, but it never came to fruition. The rest of my ride was smooth, strong and consistent. After the first 56 miles I took the Pepsi from my special needs bag and perched atop of my aerobars with one hand, while the other held the can to my lips. I was chugging cola like a crazy pirate swigging whiskey at the bow of his ship, drunk on the idea of finding coveted treasures. To me, the prospect of another strong loop on the bike into a solid marathon to the finish line was more valuable than all the rubies, diamonds and sapphires in the world. I was on track to beat my projected finishing time, and my progress on the course was motivating me to push just a little harder than I ever had in my training.

Back to the big downhill on the second loop, I stood up and soared over the road at 48 MPH. Several cola burps left me feeling ten pounds lighter and the wind in my hair left me feeling as sassy as a rebel on a motorcycle, and as carefree as a dog with his head hanging out of the car window.

I finished the bike with no issues (the anxiety of a possible flat tire or broken chain was haunting me the entire way) and got ready to set out on the run. By this time in 2008, I was so cold from biking in the rain that the idea of heading out to run a marathon in a tiny Lycra suit seemed on par with being admitted to a torture chamber. This time, I felt incredibly fresh and was looking forward to doing the last piece of the race—still on track to meet my goal of 14:30 hours.

In the transition tent, the scene was frantic and fast, the way I imagine it must be behind the scenes at a Lady Gaga concert when she’s jetting through one of her many costume changes. Only instead of sequins, cellophane and sparkler bras flying around, it was salt tabs, sunscreen and sneakers. The volunteers in the transition area descend upon each athlete like a team of stylists and make-up artists.

While one woman fastened my heart rate monitor onto my chest, another was tying my shoe. A third was basting each arm in SPF 50 and I was out of that tent and running the first mile of my marathon faster than Jimmy Johnson makes a Nascar pit stop. Apparently I ran right past Michael Phelps in the first mile who was there to cheer on his sister in the race. But not even the presence of an Olympian could have distracted me from the task at hand—run this marathon faster than the projected 12-minute miles you planned on, and you’ll crush your anticipated finishing time.

The run was without much drama. I kept a steady pace the entire way, only walking here and there as needed to sip from a cup without spilling its contents, and just briefly up the final hill of the course when Mr. Calf Muscle decided to come back and make good on his previous threat. My rationale was that running up the hill wouldn’t buy me much more time than briskly walking (which hurt far less) and trying to push it with four miles to go in the race could have resulted in a serious muscle spasm that would have me hobbling to the finish line like Mama Fratelli from the Goonies (and I wasn’t about to let Mama get to that finish line treasure before a focused, capable ME did!).

When I had just a mile to go and I realized I was going to beat my projected time by about an hour, I started to feel verklempt. My chest was hurting in part because I was pushing so hard, but mostly because I was stifling back so much raw emotion from within as I felt every fiber of my being striving for a finishing time under 13 hours and 40 minutes. Over the last 10K, I kept recalculating what I could realistically achieve with a body that was starting to deteriorate on the course. I knew I would beat 14 hours, but then I had my sights on 13:45 hours. And when it was barely safe to think it, I upped the ante to 13:40.

I headed into the Olympic Oval for the final 200 meters of the race, completely overcome by my senses. My legs were heavy with exhaustion but light with enthusiasm. My breath was shallow, but measured and strong. My arms ached, but they were reaching for the stars. I tasted salt, sweat, tears. I saw lights, and crazy arms wild with excitement for each person who came into the oval on their way to the finish line. Millions of mouths formed a sea of tiny black circles all screaming and cheering. The sound might have been deafening on another day, but in that moment it was like a song from the siren and I was happy to steer my ship directly toward it, crashing with utter joy at the finish line where my friend Jen slipped an Ironman finisher’s medal over my head.

My legs buckled beneath me, but I rested on Jen’s arm and broke down into an aggregate of sobs, slurs and one-word sentences.

It was truly special to have Jen at the finish line. I met her years ago when she moved to Syracuse from Canada and started coming to my spin class for something to do. Eventually I talked her into a triathlon, and like so many others, she was hooked and continued to pursue bigger goals. Just months ago she landed a job at a new triathlon publication (Lava) as the online editor. They flew her from San Diego to Lake Placid so she could cover the event, and there she was—taking a moment out of her time covering the professional triathlon scene to festoon little ol’ me with a race chotchkie. It made an already perfect race even better.

My parents were there to cheer me on, along with my boyfriend and a couple of my really close friends from Syracuse. Along the course there were many people from my local triathlon club volunteering and racing. It made Ironman feel like a family reunion. It’s like when you hear about your cousins from your aunt, and see pictures of them, but don’t really get to hang out with them except for once a year during the holidays. I know that the people close to me are aware of my training and my love for triathlon, but to have them in such close proximity after achieving this milestone in my life was truly special to me. Pictures and words can’t capture what I felt on that finish line. Though it was my second Ironman race, this is the one that I will always think of when I hear people say that I’m an Ironman. 2008 had its unique challenges and I know that it was a great accomplishment to make it through the race that year, but this year I feel utterly transformed as a person. I feel doors opening within me leading to potential I wasn’t sure I had. I feel the seeds of goals being planted in my soul and have goose bumps when I think of the experiences yet to come. I’m excited about new challenges and the prospect of going for something that may still be just beyond my reach.

Throughout the Ironman race this year, I kept thinking to myself how much I loved this sport and the people that I’ve come to know through it. Whether you’re just getting started in triathlon or you’ve been at it for a long time, make sure to stop and appreciate what it means to test your limits, and the way it makes you feel. Life is full of opportunities to realize how much we’re capable of and how strong we can be. It doesn’t take an Ironman to find your potential, ask more of yourself and dare to set ambitious goals—but it’s a nice stop along the way.

Heart Rates and High Heels

2010-06-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

I’ll save you the anticipation of a juicy read and let you know that this is NOT a post about sex—but it is a post about stimulation.

A couple weeks ago was the first triathlon of the season for me, a race I’ve done for the past five years to get myself ready for my main race in July. I have taken first place in my age group every year I’ve competed in this race (excluding one year where I took second place), and despite the fact that I use it as a training exercise, I always have some nerves about how things will go now that I’ve inadvertently become a defending champion for my age group.

Mini scenarios of failure hang in my mind like a string of Chinese lanterns replaced with tiny dioramas depicting all of the ways a bad race will affect the rest of the summer.

What would the people from my spin classes say of my prize-less performance? After touting months of intervals and tempo rides, what would I have to show for it if not a medal? And what would the people I ride with say? How could I be so strong in training and so lackluster on race day? How will I feel about myself if I fall short of my goals? Could it activate some kind of butterfly effect so that no race will ever go well for me again?

It is with this stream of consciousness that I stand waist-deep in a lake waiting for the start of this race each year.

This time though, I had the added complication of another important event taking place the day before. After nearly three years working at my current job, I was invited to be part of a pitch team who presented to a major brand in the food and beverage industry. I was involved in developing insights on the brand and its competitors, but I wasn’t expecting that it would lead to an invitation to present to the prospective client. I was thrilled that it did—I’ve been waiting for an opportunity like this.

The day before the race, I sat with my colleagues as we waited to begin our presentation. I was prepared and ready, and teeming with energy to go through my section. But also, I was nervous.

I felt I had something to prove—to show that I was capable of the task at hand, and that I had something to offer as a presenter. For years I’ve been “pitching” my ideas of fitness and wellness to the people who attend my cycling classes. I remember the nerves that first came with wearing a microphone and trying to talk to a room full of people staring at me whilst I was packaged in Lycra attempting to flawlessly execute a workout and motivate people through it at the same time.

Those same nerves came over me even as I sat quietly in business casual, with high heels firmly planted beneath perfectly symmetrical knees, and glossy lips in a smile.

The presentation went great, and my co-workers congratulated me for a job well done. I was relieved to get through it without sabotaging any chances of the client wanting to work with us, and better yet, felt great that I may get to do it again in the future. It was a new door opening for me, and it felt good to step through its threshold. It was a finish line of sorts, and I’d just been part of a team that could see some “podium time” if things continued to go well with the prospect.

Fast forward to the next morning, and there I was with the same insane heart rate and shaky hands—this time with naked toes (some missing nails) and no make-up.

Business casual had left the building.

I was sure I would be tired at the race after spending the entire week preparing and traveling for the business pitch, but something about a starting line pulls me out of “meh” mode every time.

The race began and I was whisked away into the frenzy that is a triathlon swim, reaching and pulling through slippery people for 800 meters until exiting the water in an adrenaline-fueled jog back to the transition area. In a little over an hour, I made it to the finish line with similar feelings to those that I felt at the end of the meeting from the day before.

A sense of satisfaction came over me as I realized that I was able to get through the course easily with decent results (I won my age group, but the time was not the best I’ve ever done on the course).

Being nervous isn’t always a bad thing before you do something important. To me, a little jitter in the hands and a few rounds of “What if?” in your head are all ways of showing your goals some respect. It’s not that I feared doing poorly in the presentation or totally bombing at my race—it’s knowing that I had put in the time to be successful, and that I needed to stay focused in a way that ensures I can deliver on that investment. For me, that manifests itself through shaky hands and turbo heartbeat. I’m so used to it, I would be worried if I didn’t feel that way before something important.

As I stood on the podium with the four other age-group winners in the female 30-35 category, I briefly flashed back to the feeling of standing next to our presentation boards during the meeting.

Though the situations appear to be completely different from the outside, on the inside they registered the same on my system.

To me, approaching the business meeting was no different than approaching the race. In both cases I was prepared, confident and slightly scared of what could happen if I lost my focus. In both situations, shaky hands subsided and gave way to comfortable movement in the presentation, and thoughtful strokes in the swim.

I thought to myself how neat it is that I can be both people—a strong presenter and business woman, and a serious athlete with lofty goals. It made me realize how strong the parallels really are between life and training, and how listening to our hearts is crucial no matter what kind of success we’re going for.

Perhaps if this career milestone didn’t occur so closely to one of my races, I wouldn’t see how obvious it is that when your heart is in something, your body will fire on all cylinders to go after it. We connect all of our senses and systems to this investment of "self" into an end goal.

It makes no difference if it's in the board room or on the beach.

I've heard many people describe the same kind of feelings about marriage and parenting. As an adult, I have fully realized this kind of connection through triathlon. It is something I nurture, enjoy, respect and fear. I love it and I hate it. I have seen the worst of myself in it, but the best of myself, too.

When that pre-race feeling came over me before the presentation, I knew that my high heels were no different than my Sidi cycling shoes.

Now I just have to figure out how to ride 112 miles in a pencil skirt so I can really kick ass at Ironman next month.

The Can-Do Shower

2010-06-09T09:30:00.001-07:00

To the outside world, it would have appeared I was at my own baby shower. No—I’m not referring to the shower I threw for my sister-in-law in absentia, where I had to fill in as the mom-to-be and open presents in front of friends and family (she lives in Germany with my brother who is in the Air Force). I’m referring to the happy hour I went to a few weeks ago, where dozens of people came to share a drink with one another after the final class in an 18-week Advanced Cycling Program that I created and coached at Gold’s Gym.

For the first time in my adult life, I stood in a room and felt a celebration happening around me, FOR me, whilst wearing a pink shirt with the words, “Push, push, push!” on the back, and the initials C.S.B. on the front. No—this wasn’t in reference to a baby girl whose name would start with “C,” this was in reference to me...the “Crazy Spin Bitch” and her drill-sergeant mantra to continue moving the pedals at pace.

All while engaging in “can-do attitude” – something of a motto for our class.

My boyfriend secretly hijacked the class email list to coordinate a celebration of the program in its final week. As a result, my 90- and 120-minute spin classes were filled with remarkably coordinated athletes sporting pink shirts (my favorite color) with messages on them for me to read.

After the final class on Friday, everyone was invited to come to the happy hour at Chili’s to get a few drinks and celebrate the end of the program. People arrived with cards and gifts in hand, congratulating me for a job well done and sharing stories with me about how much the class meant to them.

People thanked me for the opportunity to get stronger in their fitness.

For the experience of being coached again after 30 years, when they believed that time in their life was over after high school.

I was compared to a life coach. A counselor. A friend. A force.

People handed me bottles of wine as if it were a housewarming party; festive gift bags as if it were a bridal shower; and bouquets of flowers as if I were on Broadway. Homemade hats and T-Shirts in various shades of pink peppered the classes like a bachelorette party, each of them with sayings I regularly used in class.

One woman pulled me aside at the party to tell me something that she’d been hanging on to for weeks. She never wanted to let me know the ways the class affected her while I was teaching it, for fear that my knowing would alter the way I coached.

“I was a very unwilling participant in your class," she said. “My friend dragged me there because I needed something to take my mind off of things.”

Unbeknown to me, she was recently widowed and my class had become part of an “intervention” of sorts where her friend did the hard (and important) work of reminding her that life was still out there waiting for her to live it.

“You said something in those first few weeks in class that changed me. It allowed me to finally grieve. To move on.” She continued. “While we were in the middle of one of the hard songs, you asked us to feel the work that we were doing…all the sweat that was on our skin, the way it felt as it dripped down our bodies. The way it tasted on our lips, the way the pain felt as we were pushing the pedals, and how our muscles started to hurt just as we started to think that we didn't want to do this anymore. You told us that to work this way would suck. And to let the suck in. Do you remember that?” She asked.

And I did, or at least I was familiar with the concept and the way that I coach. So much of what I enjoy about training and racing are the endless parallels you can draw between a hard workout and a hard time in your life. They both require perseverance, a positive “can-do” attitude and the will to push through and see another day.

In training, it’s race day. The celebration of all your struggles coming together for a single, glorious moment as you cross the finish line and are rewarded with your accomplishment. In life, it’s the realization that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and you will find it if you are persistent enough to do so. Either way, the push gets you through the hard times and you realize that the struggle was worth it.

For this woman, Advanced Cycling Class allowed her to tap into that resource—the part of her that could push through and make it to the next day. And the one after that. And the days become weeks, and in her case—the weeks become part of a plan to complete a triathlon.

I was much more than a cycling instructor to her, and she was much more than a person who wrote a check to come to my class for 18 weeks.

Fitness is a funny thing. Yes, it’s good for you and keeps you physically healthy. But it’s also the only way most people are ever introspective. When you’re working out, it’s all about you. It’s a time to be selfish, to delve into all the things that make you tick. When you see results you are pleased. When you feel fatigue you are unhappy. Training calls upon a spectrum of emotions that allows us to be fully aware of ourselves for better or for worse. And this is why fitness becomes just as important for our minds, as it is for our bodies.

The happy hour lasted for a while, with many rounds of margaritas bolstering our post-exercise glow. I was honored that my classes thought so highly of me that they would thank me so graciously with their gifts and kind words, but I’m sure they’ll never realize that the real gift to me was the experience of watching them all change and grow through the program.

Many of the classes I taught included actual Ironman workouts that I had to do as part of my own training. There were times when I was sure that if I wasn’t responsible for motivating them through hill repeats, tempo rides and intervals that I wouldn’t have pushed through them so hard myself. The irony is that I created a program to train people in endurance riding, and they actually made me into a better athlete.

Last year I wrote a blog on “Showers for the Women of 2009,” titled so because I feel our society doesn’t celebrate women enough for the accomplishments they can achieve outside of marriage and motherhood.

Sure, the commitment of marriage and the birth of a new life are worthy of their fanfare—but I watched 65 people make a commitment to themselves to be in my class for 18 weeks. New athletes were born before my eyes. People who started the class to lose weight were finishing the program with registrations for their first races ever. Sparks were ignited, and the sport of triathlon is now being courted by a crop of new athletes who can’t wait to tackle goals they’d never even thought of until now.

I may not have a birth certificate to prove there is new life in the city of Syracuse, but if you come to any of the area races in town this summer, you can see it for yourself on the shores of the Finger Lakes and the roads of Central New York.

One day, maybe I will marry and have children. Those will be proud moments for me and I may find myself at my own wedding and baby showers being congratulated for these sacred milestones.

But it will be hard to find an event in my life that will compare to the first-ever Advanced Cycling Program, and being part of something that helped so many people grow and change in positive ways.

My thanks to all of those people who helped to celebrate the class, and their can-do attitudes.

The Flip Side of Injury

2010-05-12T12:33:00.001-07:00

I used to shun the idea of the flip turn while doing my swim workouts.

For one, I am not a swimmer. I came to triathlon from running. All triathletes start from somewhere, and we tend to be rather possessive of our respective “background” sports. In a way, it gives us the opportunity to put a disclaimer on our weaknesses, while highlighting our inherent strengths in the multi-sport world.

Over the years I’ve taught myself to be a decent swimmer and have taken the time to register for weekend clinics so I can be at the mercy of swimming as an actual sport, rather than 1/3 of my training schedule.

(Another thing about triathletes, we’ll sign up for anything that’s meant to make us better—especially in the water where most of us struggle).

Swimming as an actual sport is a completely different experience than training for a triathlon.

I won’t pretend to know all about “actual swimming,” since I’ve only heard stories of athletes layering old bathing suits and pantyhose on to create drag in the water while they swim, leaving behind arms that sting with lactic acid in a way that makes you see God. My repertoire of strokes is nowhere near where it needs to be for me to have any business completing an Individual Medley (a series of laps where you use all four of the main swimming strokes). In fact, I consider the “dog paddle” to be among my official swimming strokes. And my backstroke is admittedly modified so that I a) don’t get water in my nose, and b) enjoy a lower abdominal workout while pulsing through the water.

Be that as it may, I have taken the time to get somewhat competent in the pool, mostly because my ego was stroked in a motivating way throughout my career as a triathlete. All it takes is for someone to inquire about my past as a swimmer in high school or college, and I start to fantasize about the raw potential that may be dormant inside of me.

In actuality, my past consists of my cousin and I creating our own synchronized swimming routines to the song “Fever” by Madonna, and seeing how long we could hold our breath under water while swimming from one end of the pool to the other. Still, something about the way I swim makes people believe that I'm good in the water.

I chalk it up to my, “lane-claiming-eye contact.”

At my gym there is limited time to swim laps since it is frequently worked in around such activities as “Hokey Pokey in the water” for toddlers, and the dreaded “family swim” which basically means there are no lane lines and people just frolic about in an unorganized way.

When a lane opens up, you can immediately suss out the athletes in the room. Goggles and swim caps appear from beneath bored thighs that have been pressed into plastic chairs for a half an hour as the clock ticks away at a maddeningly slow pace (accompanied by a background of splashing, screaming and “that’s what it’s all about!” sung in 10 different pitches). You need to be swift if you want to lock down the lap-swim lane when it opens up.

I usually lunge toward the water, immediately dip my toes in and sit on the edge of the pool. Then I proceed to jam my hair into the swim cap, while putting my best “eye of the tiger” face on. This must make people think I know what I’m doing in the pool—but really my expression is more about being disgruntled at having to swim, rather than forecasting any success I may have while covering 3200 yards.

Once in the water, I can hold a steady pace and am able to swim at more than one speed. I’ve mastered bionic breathing and have a pretty good stroke and kick, but Michael Phelps I am not.

I’ve been training for triathlons for five years now, and have never done a flip turn. My rationale for this is that in the open water during a race, there will be no wall to push off from. Therefore, why should I bother incorporating this skill into my swimming when all I need to do is get good at the forward progression of my body in the water?

But the other night I noticed a sharp pain in my elbow. It was in the arm that I use to push off the wall when I swim. That week I swam several interval sets, and started to realize that jamming my hand into the wall to turn around during a fast 50-meter sprint (16 times in a row) may have been the reason for the pain.

With nothing else to do in the water but think, my mind started to reel with possible pitfalls that could result from this “tennis elbow of the pool” issue. Within minutes I convinced myself that a “can’t get this wet” cast would have to be placed on me, or worse, the arm may have to be amputated altogether!

(Another thing about triathletes: If there is even the inkling of a threat to our ability to complete training as prescribed, we are “all in” for any solution that will enable us to continue working out like crazed cardio junkies).

Immediately I recalled my attempts to learn the flip-turn months ago. Water in the nose, flailing about, premature rotation that put me too far away from the wall to get any push, and (the best) hitting the wall for the push-off, but aiming myself to the floor of the pool so that I essentially used all of my force to launch my face toward a cement surface.

Flip-turns, for me, were a blizzard of bubbles and confusion.

All of this, better than amputation.

And so, I adopted the “sink or swim” mentality (pardon the terrible pun) and decided to just go for the flip-turn. I didn't want to end up with an arm that was too sore to swim at all.

Something incredible happened after that. All of my workouts improved. Not just in the pool, but on the bike and during my runs. The flip turns started to feel natural to me, and made it easier to keep moving along at a faster pace. This gave me a new confidence in my swim workouts, which in turn encouraged me to feel that confidence in each stride of my runs, and each “push” on my rides. It was as if some new facet of me as an athlete was unearthed that day, and I received a gift that enabled me to activate that “personal record” feeling I usually only experience in races when I realize I’ve bested my performance from previous years.

How could a flip-turn have such an impact on my training?

I think I’ve figured it out.

This year I’ve been really focused on trying to feel the same way I did in years past with my training, because part of me is really nervous that I’m not as prepared for this season as I should be. My mile splits in running have been a little bit slower than usual; and most of my cycling has taken place inside on a spin bike since I was coaching a couple of advanced cycling programs at the gym. In the pool I felt okay, but swimming isn’t going to make a dramatic different in my race times, so I didn’t care as much about any progress there.

The flip turn gave me the opportunity to be “new” at this sport again. Incorporating it into my swims made me think about those workouts differently. I started to look forward to swimming more than biking and running, which meant I became less obsessed with how my times were in those workouts. I had become so distracted by my doubts and fears, that I was holding myself back in those workouts.

Nailing flip turns reactivated my goals and renewed my belief that I am capable of anything. In this case, I was forced into a new skill out of necessity; but it has reminded me that the body is always up for improvements so long as you allow your mind to be on board, too.

Don’t wait for an injury or setback to come along and force you to do things differently. Challenge yourself to try something new even if it doesn’t seem necessary or useful for anything. You might be surprised by the domino effect that comes with one small change.

My Life in Madonna Maxi Singles

2010-04-17T12:20:00.000-07:00

I recently got my hands on a fantastic collection of music: every maxi single that Madonna ever released. Last week, I watched the songs download into my itunes with the same fascination children employ while watching pieces of candy tumble into their trick-or-treat bags. And just as children see no problem with having 17 peanut butter cups in their stash, I have no problem with 14 versions of “Like a Prayer.”

While I was listening to the songs, I began to realize my mind was wandering back to very specific times in my life. In fact, with 470 songs at my fingertips—I was creating a chronology of my life based solely on Madonna Maxi Singles.

It all started with “Jimmy Jimmy” (1986).

This was the first Madonna song that I took the time to learn the lyrics for. If only there was such as thing as Google back then. You really had to feel a connection with the song to figure out what your favorite artists were saying in those days.

The process first required a good recording of the song to work with. That part could take weeks—what with the tape running out when you push record, having to wait for hours before the radio station recycled its song rotation so your jam would come back around, and then making sure the volume level was good enough to properly capture the audio in a way that would enable you to understand the words without mashing your ear up to the side of the boom box.

(On more than one occasion I would exit my bedroom with a corrugated cheek, thanks to my lavender boom box and its awesome striped plastic speakers).

At the age of seven, it was worth changing the topography of my face in exchange for Madonna’s pearls of wisdom.

“Why, oh why, oh why, do fools fall in love with fools like you?”

Brilliant, really. Brilliant because the boy that I was crushing on at the time was named Jimmy.

Three years later, I hit the double digits and it was only appropriate that my anthem became, “Express Yourself” (1989). While my classmates were rocking Skidz, Hypercolor T-Shirts, UMBRO shorts and every other trend at the time, my mom preferred to encourage me to be “unique.”

This was a fun way for her to keep me from complaining about the clothes I wanted her to buy for me, and instead get enthusiastic about the ones she sewed for me herself. Her plan worked as I realized it was way more fun to peruse patterns and colors in the fabric store; rather than the ubiquitous pre-packaged looks that plastered the mall.

I quickly wore out my recording of “Express Yourself, rewinding and playing the song for hours while prancing in front of the mirror perfecting choreography to the lines, “What you need is a big strong hand to lift you to your higher ground.”

I never progressed much past the actual (but dramatic) raising of my arm with my hand outstretched, while making what is now commonly referred to as a “duck face.”

By the age of 13, the infamous "Erotica" album was released. Around this time, I started writing really bad poetry in my journals to capture the endless heartache that ensues from middle school romance. Not that I had any romance in my life at the time, I just yearned for it. I pined for someone to rotate me in those awful slow dances at homecoming, always hoping that the object of my affection would come and whisk me away to one of the long tracks like, “Stairway to Heaven.”

It never happened, but that didn’t stop me from writing horrible love notes to boys that couldn’t care less about my feelings. The anticipation of receiving back a folded square of paper from one of them used to fill me with excitement—until I realized they had zero interest in me.

So it was fitting that on a long bus ride to Toronto to see “Phantom of the Opera” with my mom and grandmother, that I loaded my walkman with fresh batteries and silently debriefed my heart to Madonna’s “Words” (1992).

High school came and went, and I ended up in college still carrying a flame for a boy I had a crush on since the sixth grade. This was greatly encouraged by his behavior through the last part of senior year. We’ll call it, “friends with benefits-esque.”

I stupidly believed that "a' la carte" make-out sessions, dinner dates, four-hour phone conversations, and handwritten letters had something to do with actual feelings for another person, but that was an error on my behalf. I found this out when I traveled to this guy’s college to profess my love to him.

As “friends with benefits-esque” burst forth like a butterfly taking flight after months of incubation, I said THE words: I love you.

It didn’t go well.

“The Power of Goodbye” (1998) from Madonna’s “Ray of Light” album went on to become a source of therapy for me through all of college. I said a lot of good-byes.

“You were my lesson I had to learn, I was your fortress you had to burn.”

In true “fortress fashion,” I went on to withstand many battles of the heart through college. Dating jerks almost seemed like some kind of “half-credit” course I’d signed up for. Despite the warnings from friends about the questionable intentions of many of the men I dated, I carried on with my optimism.

“Don’t tell me to stop, tell the rain not to drop, tell the wind not to blow, ‘cause you said so.” Oh, how it resonated in my soul. “Don’t Tell Me” (2002).

After college, I was living in New York City with one of my best friends and was done with feeling sorry for myself. I decided that if I was going to feel pain, I’d rather have it mean something.

So I started training for marathons.

The alarm clock went off at 5:00AM, and I was out the door on a cold 8th Avenue by 5:30AM headed to Central Park where I’d feel myself come to life one layer at a time. My chunky white ipod only played about 80 songs because I never learned how to get music onto it without losing all of my songs.

“Die Another Day” (2003) came on frequently, and always in the beginning of the run where I was still half-debating about whether or not I should sneak back inside and bag the run for some extra sleep. But the song always encouraged me otherwise.

“I’m gonna break the cycle. I’m gonna shake up the system. I guess I’ll die another day.”

After three years, I moved back to Syracuse. Just to remind myself how much fun it was to date a complete jerk, I found myself one at the local gym. And I dated him on and off for about two years (that's another blog for another time).

Madonna’s new album, “Confessions on a Dancefloor” came out in 2005 and it couldn’t have been better timing. The tracks played continuously from one to the next, and provided nearly an hour of non-stop dance music that kept me from running my car into oncoming traffic on a daily basis.

At the time, I had a 45-minute commute to work, which is way too much time for an introspective loon such as myself to be alone with her thoughts. I broke it off with the loser boyfriend for the last time, and stuck to it in large part because the Confessions album was way too good to turn it down long enough to respond to any of his “please come back to me” phone calls.

“Sorry” (2005) was the order of the day. Every day.

“I don’t wanna hear, I don’t wanna know. Please don’t say you’re sorry. I’ve heard it all before, and I can take care of myself.”

Continuing the trend of “pain through fitness rather than heartbreak,” I continued to run marathons until I found a new passion: triathlon. By the time Madonna’s 11th studio album, “Hard Candy,” was released in 2008, I was well into the sport with several age-group wins and a thirst for victory.

When I heard the single, “4 Minutes” (2008) I was immediately into it. The song became a favorite pre-race track, and was dutifully blasted in my car on the way to every competitive engagement for that entire summer. While Madonna sang about having only four minutes to save the world, I thought about four minutes to save my race. Every second counts in triathlon, a sport that's ultimately comprised of six individual times. It's easy to look at race results and see where you fell short.

“Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.”

It’s 2010 and Madonna, described by a friend of mine as his “life icon,” still continues to make music that feels like a script to my soul.

My twenties are behind me, and so are the hesitations, doubts and fears. I’ve finally found the balance in life and am enjoying the stability that comes from a strong, solid relationship; a stable, rewarding career; and hobbies that are fueled by my passions—writing and fitness.

So it’s only fitting that I finish this blog on a good note…

“I’m gonna party, it’s a celebration. ‘Cause anybody just won’t do. Let’s get this started, no more hesitation, ‘cause everybody wants to party with you.”

“Celebration” (2009).

The Scheduled Life of the Spinsta

2010-03-10T10:46:00.000-08:00

That’s right, I’m so busy I have to abbreviate words in my blog headline just so I can squeeze in the time to write said (super delayed) blog post.

In what seems like a tsunami of good fortune, I have been riding waves of self-actualization from the first seconds of 2010. The year began with a promotion where I saw my title change to include the word “Senior” for the first time ever. Then came the kick-off of a new advanced cycling program that I’m creating and coaching at Gold’s Gym—18 weeks of original workouts built for 90- and 120-minute classes designed to bring new athletes into the world of endurance training.

Somewhere in the middle of my full-time job as an advertising executive and my part-time job as a fitness instructor, I found time to be a freelance health and fitness writer with a weekly column and video series on triathlon.

Topping that all off, is the beginning of my fifth week of Ironman training—spilling into my life like an all-terrain gravy that seeps into every corner of your plate.

It’s a good thing I’m a “like it when my foods touch” kind of girl.

Believe it or not, I still have some free time and I’ve been using it to become the kind of girlfriend I’ve always wanted to be. Focusing on the future instead of the past, taking my boyfriend with me to spend time with my closest friends, and making new recipes that require me to find and use kitchen utensils that are more familiar with the back corner of my cupboard than they are with actual ingredients (measuring cups, mashers, prep bowls). Wine tastings. Family time. Foreign films. Scrabble. Naps. It’s all here in my scheduled life.

Despite my being super scheduled, I have been happier than ever this year. My anger has been limited to short bouts of road rage, and I’ve been feeling like my alter ego, “Betty Bitter Pants,” has left the building. I’m finally able to watch a wedding show on television without swearing aloud (though I’ll still change the channel after a couple of minutes—because how much can be said about cake toppers?).

I can even tolerate a little bit of PDA now that I’m realizing there’s more to life than finding love. The thing about a broken engagement—you find love, you have love, and then you lose love.

Then there comes a point when you realize that you survived that. That love isn't what you needed at all. What you needed, was to know that you could live without it. That life is still full and wonderful even if you are single.

Before I was engaged, I felt like my life was incomplete without that kind of commitment. How could I truly be a successful woman if I were going into my thirties unwed, with no prospects? It was like moving into a great house that had no kitchen.

Think of the housewarming party.

The guests mingle with joy in the grand foyer; sip cocktails as they peruse each room, their shoes click-clacking upon polished hardwood floors as they compliment the view of a great lawn through crystal clear windows. But then they leave, whispering to one another…

“Everything is wonderful, but she has no kitchen. How does she eat? How can one have a home without a kitchen?”

“The poor thing. All of that house, and no kitchen.”

“Maybe she’ll get a hot pot and make some Ramen noodles. At least it’s a hot meal…”

I ask myself how my 2010 would be different if I had been married by the age of 30 as I had hoped. When I was engaged, I was starting to feel pretty settled, as the struggle from my twenties had subsided and I no longer engaged in the drama of needing to find a man.

What happened when I broke my engagement, is that I ended up engaging in the drama of trying to find myself.

I became very busy.

I looked for ways to grow my responsibilities at work and turn my role into something more than it ever was in the past—this resulted in my being promoted to a position that didn’t even exist two years ago in the agency where I work. And a column in the local paper that has never ran before. And a brand new program at the gym that was never offered before.

Filling empty spaces with something new brought a sense of satisfaction to me, as I started to feel my own empty spaces fill with purpose. It was a sink or swim feeling in many ways. I knew I was stuck inside of a dark tunnel that in theory should have a light at the end of it, but I had to rely on my own inner-torch to illuminate the path forward.

I could have sat in the darkness with my face buried in my knees, but I've learned that anger and complaining rarely illuminate.

People complain about being scheduled. They want time to do things that make them happy—time for themselves. People talk about making time to pursue hobbies, travel, or tackle big projects that never seem to get off the ground. When you’re single, people assume you have all the time in the world. Without kids and a marriage to manage, everything is easier and more flexible. People don't understand how single people can possibly complain about needing more time. When you’re single, the world is your oyster!

I believe the world can be anyone’s oyster, if you want it bad enough.

Lately I’ve seen many people put into a position that has caused them to struggle financially, professionally or emotionally. Whether it’s a break-up, a lay-off, or the sudden unexpected loss of something or someone important in life. I’ve seen some game changers in the past two years.

It’s critically important to manage your time wisely during these situations—as there is no easier way to waste the time in your life, than to sit in the dark tunnel and complain about how terrible things are.

Take it from me. If there were a formula like the one smokers use to determine how many minutes of your life are gone with each cigarette, I’d be missing a chunk of time that was spent wasted on complaining and being angry. A similar calculation for me could have been one day off your life every time you date a guy that treats you like crap; one week off for every time you go back to one of those guys; and a day off for every time you’ve been laid off, fired, or otherwise unappreciated in a career environment. By this logic, I’ve probably lost a month—one of the ones with 31 days in it!

To the outside world, my life may seem bleak, maniacal and nutty. I’m always busy, and when I’m not busy I’m either sleeping, hung-over, or getting ready to be busy again. People always ask me, “How do you find the time to do everything?”

Lately it has occurred to me that maybe I need to loosen things up a bit and find more time to do the things I like. Then I realized that the reason why my calendar is always full, is because I’m already doing that. I make time for the things I like, and I book it.

Calendars aren’t just to keep track of meetings, appointments and reminders. Make a date with yourself to do something YOU want to do.

And if someone asks if you’re available that day, tell them you’re busy.

(Note to self, for added enjoyment of this post, listen to Lady Gaga’s song, “Telephone” and every time you read the word “busy” up above, pause and sing aloud: “I’m kinda busy. Kah-kinda busy.” The song is stuck in my head and it seems fitting at the moment).

*Image from Corbis

Old Resolutions for the New Year

2009-12-29T13:30:00.000-08:00

When I was young, I used to dream of becoming a fitness aerobics instructor. I’m not sure why this was so appealing to me, but it was the only “when I grow up” scenario that seemed to be reoccurring amid the occasional daydreams of being a rock star, an actress, a princess, or a bus driver. (Our bus driver was always either singing Debbie Gibson at the top of her lungs, or stopping the bus to yell at us as she draped herself over the front seats, pointing a manicured fingernail toward the back of the bus where some high schooler tried to hold in a smirk until she was done. I think this made the bus into a rolling stage of sorts, and therefore appealing).

One of my first Barbie dolls came with her own stationary bike, and she was dressed in a teal leotard and pink belt. Jane Fonda and Kathy Smith regularly made appearances in my living room where my mom loyally did her workouts each morning. From a young age, the seeds were being planted to eventually find myself somehow tied to the fitness world.

If these seeds were planted during my elementary school years, middle school seemed to be the time when they would have surely been pulled out of the ground and deemed as duds. I wasn’t a svelte teenager, not even cute. I was overweight with pasty pale skin (often patchy, thanks to eczema), and routinely failed the mile-test in gym class. I was the stereotypical nerd who crushed on the popular boy, and believed I was being flirted with whenever slighted. The middle school years culminated with my being cut from the softball try-outs, a blow to my self-esteem for sure. At the time, A League of Their Own was a hit movie and the idea of being part of something that allowed one to merge fame and fitness in the same venue was mind-blowing to me. The coach suggested I try out for the track team, since the only thing about softball that I was able to grasp was how to run around the bases.

That summer I started to do a walking program that Kathy Smith came out with as a supplement to one of her VHS tapes. I walked miles upon miles around my town and started high school in the fall as a new person. I craved an outlet for my energy, and since I didn’t have any skills in sports on the field, I turned my attention to performance on the stage. I was a Gleek before there was ever a show to promote such a status, taking part in every music program my school had to offer. Chorus, band, girl’s chorus, swing choir, jazz band and the annual musical productions and NYSMA competitions were all part of my curriculum.

When spring came around, I decided to take the softball coach’s advice and I went for the track team. That first year was nothing great, but I started to find the same discipline in fitness that I’d cultivated in music and kicked things up a notch by running on the cross-country team the following fall. As a sprinter, I was never very good at running longer distances, but training with the team got me into the best shape of my life at the time. The next three years of track I enjoyed being part of a record-holding relay team in the 1600, and someone who regularly placed in the 100- and 200-meter dashes.

Throughout college and after graduation I continued to run to keep in shape, and to challenge myself against my own records. I sought alternative “stages” through my first few jobs, trying on hats in the advertising and publishing industries, which eventually made me realize I have a passion for writing. Over the years running and writing have started to become intertwined like a pair of best friends that are never apart. A steady pace over twenty miles of running would seamlessly flow into a steady stream of consciousness on paper, or vice versa. My mind seems to be connected to my feet and when one starts to go into gear, so does the other.

This became very apparent to me when I became a fitness instructor four years ago. I was a regular cardio junkie at the gym, taking step aerobics and weight-lifting classes, and doing spin classes to cross-train on days when I wasn’t running. The spinning instructor suggested I get certified in a new type of cycling fitness class called Group RIDE that Gold’s Gym was going to offer. I passed my certification test and started teaching my own class two times a week.

Becoming a fitness instructor has allowed me to wear almost every hat I’ve ever tried on (or pretended to try on). The 11-year-old girl who used to wear her swimming suit over tights and jump around the bedroom to “Like a Prayer” with a sweatband on beamed with pride as I took my place in front of the class for the first time. The up-and-coming track star that was buried beneath the softball-team-reject jumps with joy now that I can wear a microphone and share what I’ve learned about discipline and perseverance with the masses. And the writer in me glows with enthusiasm now that I’m a Contributing Columnist with the local paper offering weekly tips and advice in my very own column about triathlon training.

We dream about being many things when we are young. Armed with toys and imaginations and all the time in the world, we’re free to see a future that can’t hold us back. As we get older, the realities of life set in. Budgets, rules, limits. Self-esteem, insomnia, peer pressure. We learn the art of “the excuse,” and rationalizing why things must be the way they are. We forget that somewhere deep down, there was a dream. A seed that lies within the soul waiting to find light...waiting for us to till the land and tell the dream it’s okay to come out.

The new year is on the horizon, marking the end of another decade. All around the world people are thinking of resolutions, planting seeds to harvest in the new year. Making promises that they probably won’t keep much past March.

This year, consider going for one of those old seeds. One of the vintage dreams. Look inside your soul for something you used to save and cherish like a fine bottle of wine and open it. Twenty years ago I was playing with the Barbie and her stationary bike. Now I’m the blonde on the bike (sadly, sometimes in teal and pink). Ten years ago I was writing in my journal about wanting to be a writer. Now I’m a contributing columnist with a well-read spinster blog.

I’m realizing dreams I never thought I’d see come true, and things are unfolding and interlacing in ways that I never would have imagined. I’m encouraged by this especially after so many rough years both personally and professionally. I’ve been patient and persistent, yes. But most importantly – I never forgot the promises I made to the girl wearing her bathing suit over her tights. And I’m just getting started.

Pick-Up Lines – The New Pick-Me-Up?

2009-11-06T14:50:00.000-08:00

Last night I went out to meet an old friend for drinks who, like so many friends these days, shared with me the story of his recent engagement. It’s the fifth piece of “super couple” news I’ve received in the past month. I chuckle to myself when I learn of these things, as it seems the movie of my life would have to include a crawl at the bottom of the screen to announce who is getting married, buying a house or having babies around me. In reality, it seems the other way around. The big screen is reserved for these all-important milestones while the other nooks and crannies of life carry on in the background.

After a couple glasses of wine, my friend excused himself to the restroom before we were going to leave. In what might have been one of the most awkward pick-up moments ever, a man approached me and asked if he could take my picture on Santa’s lap. (Santa, so you know, was visiting this particular bar to deliver another keg of Great Lakes Ale as part of the Beer Week event going on in town). Accompanied by some horrible country-pop holiday music playing in the background, I agreed to take the photo.

A flock of men gathered to take my picture with Santa on their smartphones, and my Chardonnay-laden giggle reminded me that the scene was getting ridiculous. I extracted myself from his red velour pants, feeling a mild static shock as I stood up. (In my mind, I “modeled through it” just the way Tyra would have told me to if I were on a shoot for America’s Next Top Model. Yes, I watch the show.)

My friend returned from the restroom just in time to see the flock of men disperse as Santa gave me a “high five.” Simultaneously, the man who approached me was now flanked by another, who began to talk about triathlon and how he wanted to change his fitness lifestyle. For me, this was a guaranteed conversation starter.

“Are you okay?” My friend asked. Based on what he’d just seen, it was a valid question.

I was aware that these guys (both 20 years older than me) had me in their crosshairs and were trying to pick me up – but I happen to have a pretty passionate sales pitch when it comes to getting people involved in triathlon, and I wasn’t about to let this opportunity slide. A little bit of wine mixed with a little bit of soul, and conversations like this become an amusement park of inquiry and persuasion.

My friend left, and there I stood with a pair of 50-year old cousins who bought me another glass of wine and stared at me curiously as our conversation took flight through a random assortment of topics. We went from triathlon to career goals, to stories about their ugly divorces (trending!) and children (one of their daughters was getting married – please refer to the crawl at the bottom of the screen).

At times they attempted to resume a flirtatious banter, but for the most part they seemed to be taking me seriously as someone who could help to change their lives (in the gym, not the bedroom). I felt like the pilot show for a sitcom – testing their interaction with me to see what they were all about. Losers just looking to score, or legitimately nice guys? I believe the latter is true.

I told them about my broken engagement and how I was in a new relationship that was going well; about Ironman; and my inability to follow recipes. They told me about being self-employed; their college days of competitive swimming; and characteristics about future in-laws that annoyed them. I was compared to sisters, “Wouldn’t Renee just LOVE her?” and privy to pre-supposed confessions such as, “If I come to your class, I’m probably going to fall in love with you.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, that’s probably true.”

Some women take offense to being hit on – I’m not one of those women. If it happens to be annoying, I walk away. If it’s engaging (not necessarily in a carnal way) I’m game for an exchange of dialogue.

Blame it on my penchant for reality television and dating shows. It’s challenging to present yourself to someone for the first time, while spontaneously coming up with what you perceive to be an effective blend of words, movement and wit to keep that person interested. Many people suck at it. I’ve walked away from them plenty of times.

For the record, the cousins were well-dressed, polite, and worth the engagement.

Some of my readers know that I work in advertising and “ghost write” some social media pieces for a promotional campaign we’re doing for Remington. As such, I’ve been spending considerable time talking about pick-up lines and coming up with tips for men to impress women. Since the promotion goes so well with this post, I’d like to share the following link to a list of, “The Top 10 Looks That Will Get You Nowhere With Women.” Then make sure you try out the game (click on PLAY THE GAME in the top right corner). You might be surprised how much fun the pick-up can be if you just go with it.

Ironic sidenote: After all of my babble about triathlon, I should mention that I still can’t score with Trainer Patrice in the game!

Enjoy: http://bit.ly/28Pc9l

Happy Independiversary

2009-11-03T05:37:00.000-08:00

One year ago, I was supposed to be married. I’m not sure if 10/24 is trapped in my heart because of what was going to happen that day, or if it’s from the time spent creating Save-the-Date cards and seeing those numbers in every font available on my computer. I was proud of my design. Proud, too, of the life I was embarking on. I was leaving the dating scene and stepping up to the prospect of “happily ever after.”

I tried to let the weekend come and go without indulging in any feelings about the milestone it could have been, but it’s hard to force emotional currents one way or the other. It felt like I was trying to pull the meaning off of 10/24 the same way I might have tried to peel a sticker from an apple.

If it’s not ready to come off and you continue to try, you’re likely to pull some skin away with it, too.

It’s not just the date itself that has been keeping me awake at night. About a month ago my ex-fiance called to tell me the tragic news that someone we had spent time with as a couple had unexpectedly passed away. Given that we’ve both moved on to new relationships, our correspondence has been limited to pleasantries and the occasional conversation about how things are going. Sharing the news of an untimely death was easily one of the most emotional exchanges we’d encountered together in more than a year. My immediate reaction was to be there for him, the way I would be there for any friend in that situation, but it was reminiscent of something more. Something that we used to be – partners in life’s hardest situations.

At some point, though, we couldn’t make it through one of those situations. We came upon an obstacle that was too large to ignore, and at the time we were unable to do anything about it except argue. And then fight. And then resent. It was no way to spend an engagement, and I couldn’t move forward with a wedding that was suddenly surrounded by so much doubt and pain.

Our wedding was postponed right around the time that I turned 30, and after several months of couples therapy, we decided to break things off. I will never forget the weekend I moved out. I have never cried so hard as I did packing my things to move on from the life I was so desperate to live, back into the life of the unknown. With the wedding canceled and a parade of empty boxes swallowing up my life as I knew it, the pressure “to make things work” was off and me and my ex were actually able to talk and laugh again. The combination was jarring. How could we feel so impossible week after week, but then find a sense of calm in one another on the day before I was moving out? One of life’s mysteries, I suppose.

What I’ve learned from all of this, is that even though we never married the way we’d planned, we’ve remained close within our hearts. I am connected to him in ways that are not immediately (or ever?) undone, and though I made the right decision to end the relationship, I shouldn’t expect to encounter would-be anniversary dates and emotional conversations about someone’s untimely passing without feeling some sense of that connection manifesting itself. What it means is that I almost married a good guy, but I didn’t go through with what might have been a great mistake. At times I wish that ours had been an abusive relationship, one with crystal clear reasons for why it was wrong and shouldn’t continue. What I had was a relationship that I didn’t feel passionately about. There were boundaries as to what could be comfortably expressed and shared – and my gut feeling told me that I couldn’t live that way.

The independent woman in me knew that it would be hard to walk away from a relationship that made me mostly happy, but it had be done. It’s not easy to do the right thing, and if you are independent, you know what’s right for you and are faced with hard decisions that test that self-commitment all the time. Being “independent” isn’t just about being able to do things on your own without relying on someone else. It’s about being strong in who you are, defending what you’re about and what you need to be happy. Marriage isn’t about “finding my other half,” because I don’t feel that I’m missing any portion of who I am, nor do I feel that I need to find someone to be the yin to my yang. I see marriage as the ultimate sharing of one’s soul – it’s not about anything that’s missing and needs to be found. Or about something that’s empty that needs to be filled. It’s about something that amplifies an energy that’s already there. For many reasons, my relationship with my ex fiancé did not work. One of them was because I felt my energy was stifled in some ways and I began to feel trapped in a life that wasn’t mine.

I made the decision to break things off and face the emotional tide that comes with ending one’s fairytale wedding. Hundreds of Save-the-Date cards were recycled. Teary cancellations with vendors took me off the radar as a bride-to-be, and the walls in our home became bare as my possessions piled up into moving boxes.

I stood in those rooms staring at the walls like a ghost from a past life. Some part of me would be lost in that house forever. Time passed and gradually things got easier, but never so easy as to forget what it felt like to face that fork in the road.

Go one way and be true to “society," go another and be true to myself.

I won’t say that it’s been an easy road – because more than a year after breaking my engagement, I’m writing this blog. But I will say that it feels good to know that I can weather the storm on my own and that despite the sadness I felt on my would-be anniversary day, I know that my heart is still in tact and I’m still moving forward. Even if there are times when I pause to look back.

Let Me Put a Spin on YOUR Subject

2009-10-07T08:55:00.000-07:00

I'm always surprised to learn who reads this blog and why they enjoy it. With topics ranging from tampons and baby showers to triathlon and gay bars, it would appear that there is a post for everyone on this site.

I've been asked to provide a way for people to send in topics they'd like to see discussed in upcoming posts.

Whether you're a mom, a bride-to-be, a single woman in college or a curious male, I want to hear from you. The Spinster Chronicles is here to promote the awareness of a healthy lifestyle and to encourage society to recognize that this lifestyle comes in many shapes and sizes.

The Spinster Chronicles is coming up on its first year anniversary and its popularity has grown thanks in part to others who explore the topic of "singles in society" in the blogging community.

In particular I want to thank the writers from The Singlutionary, Singletude, and Onely for helping to promote my blog and generate awareness about "the spinster lifestyle" to the rest of the world.

I look forward to hearing from you and exploring your inquiries in future posts.

Follow me on Twitter at SpinningLeese (twitter.com/spinningleese), and feel free to send suggestions to: SpinningLeese@gmail.com.

Team Playtex: A Coach in Your Box!

2009-10-02T11:22:00.000-07:00

The other day I helped myself to a tampon from the courtesy basket in the ladies bathroom. As I was extracting the feminine product from its packaging, I realized I was reading. There on the wrapper, was a small phrase:

“You’ve got the power!”

Come again? A task that normally takes 30 seconds turned into a good five minutes as I sat in my stall pondering the meaning of a motivational phrase on my tampon. Back at my desk, a quick Google search revealed its source: Playtex. The new “Sport Tampons” are made from special materials designed to give women confidence when their bodies are in motion so they can be stronger athletes. Popeye had spinach, we have Playtex.

It’s not that I take offense to the idea, I just think it’s stupid. But with my curiosity piqued, I bought my very own box of Sporty Tampons to see what other messages Playtex thought I would enjoy – after all, as an avid triathlete and spinning instructor, I am their target audience.

Some choice phrases from my primary research:

-Be passionate
-Life is short…get in the game!
-Practice your victory speech!

My victory speech?

“Hello everyone…” (Pause to tap microphone). “Is this on?” (Nod to tech support). “Thank you. I would like everyone to know, I couldn’t have gotten this tampon in without the help of my pointer finger."

Let’s look at “Be passionate.” What the hell does that mean? I’m not sure I care to be passionate when it’s that time of the month. And furthermore, I’m not sure Playtex is the brand that I need to hear from if I change my mind. Are we going to see vibrating tampons on the market soon, to go with the vibrating razors and mascara wands already out there? Ridiculous.

“Life is short…get in the game” Oh, Playtex. Why?

We are smart women who do not fancy the vagina as some kind of alternate media channel for your sporty branding campaign. You could have come up with something more useful than generic iterations of, “Go Team!” At least with a Snapple cap I end up with a useful piece of trivia to share.

Let’s talk about the box itself. We have a carefree woman in lime green, vamping on a backdrop of pink. I love it when feminine hygiene products go for this look. As if having one’s period is so fabulous that you can’t help but dance, it’s so wonderful when it arrives!

I only ever feel this way when I’m late and I’m treated to a day or so of inner “Holy crap” monologues where I imagine becoming the mother of a child I didn’t plan on. In that case, I would benefit from tampons with messages like, “You so can’t wait to use me,” or, “Enjoy those skinny jeans while you still can!”

What if you’re not sporty? Can this be like the Carebears with a genre for everyone? Is there a Playtex Goth? Playtex Fat Ass? (Perhaps the wrapper could double as a coupon for a free Happy Meal – everyone’s spirits being so high and all).

What about Playtex Spinster? I can see the phrases now:

-Tick, tock.
-Did you feed your cat?
-Life is short…you have no game!”

In television the term, “jump the shark,” is used when a show has gotten so ridiculous that the plot and characters have reached their peak and everything goes downhill.

Playtex, you’ve jumped the shark.

Showers for the Women of 2009

2009-09-09T15:38:00.000-07:00

You know the feeling. An envelope arrives in the mail – it isn’t a bill and it has handwriting on the front. Sometimes it’s oddly shaped. It’s not a holiday and it isn’t your birthday.

Crap. It’s going to be a shower invitation, isn’t it.

For the most part, the mere mention of a pending shower leaves women groaning and men shrugging their shoulders. Once upon a time, these parties were thrown to support the bride- or mother-to-be as she embarked upon new experiences in life. The shower provided her with the things she would need in her new role as wife or mom by furnishing an empty apartment or nursery with the basics for domestic success. Gifts and well wishes were bestowed upon her as the women in her life celebrated her upcoming journey, wishing her the best of luck.

Nowadays, it isn’t uncommon for couples to register for gaming systems, camping gear, sporting equipment and luxury appliances – hardly the necessities, and usually the kind of fare that one would wait to purchase until a bit of disposable income becomes available. The spirit of the shower suggests that people should come up with money to buy items on the registry and include gift receipts in case the presents aren’t quite what the person wanted. It seems to me that people register for things they would like to have but shouldn’t spend money on, so that shower attendees can spend their money on these things instead. This leaves people like me coughing up a sum of money to go in on a high-end hammock while I turn down a dinner invitation with friends because I’m strapped for cash. Add up the money I’ve spent on showers over the past decade, and I probably could have gone on a tropical vacation by now.

Does this seem in line with the original intention of the shower?

I can recall several times in the past 10 years where I’ve had to be conservative with money in order to pay for my own rent, living expenses and maybe a few movie rentals in the mix for some leisure time, and yet still have to come up with additional funds to go in on shower gifts that are oftentimes of the “non-essential” variety (while my budget dictates that I must steer clear of non-essential items for myself).

The point of this post isn’t to say that I wasn’t happy for my friends or that I didn’t want to support these important milestones, the point I’m trying to make is that these showers have become as commercialized as the holiday season. But unlike the holidays, showers are limited to an exclusive group – women who will wed or birth. What an archaic way to “celebrate” the woman.

As any reader of this blog knows, the women of 2009 are embarking on all kinds of adventures in their lives, and could use support in ways June Cleaver never imagined. The women of 2009 have challenges that have evolved from maintaining a healthy marriage and raising a family. I’m not trying to downplay the importance of being a wife or a mom, I’m simply trying to call attention to the fact that women have a lot of options these days when it comes to their path in life – why is our society so determined to only celebrate the ones that involve marriage and procreation? What makes those accomplishments worthy of a “shower” over anything else that a woman can commit to or produce?

In the movie Back to the Future, there is a scene where Marty nervously suggests to Doc that they must find a longer stretch of highway to give the DeLorian enough road to reach 88 MPH so they may travel through time. Doc famously replies:

“Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.

Or Onesies. Or potholders.

Behold, showers for the Women of 2009.

The Promotion Shower
Otherwise known as the “You Kick Ass at Your Job” Shower

I’m still waiting for the day when we can celebrate the career woman. When a woman gets promoted, she may need certain things to hold her place on the next rung of the corporate ladder. Her registry boasts inspiring artwork for her office walls, sassy wardrobe updates to keep her fashion forward, and a good bottle of wine to take the edge off after a stressful day.

Traditional showers recognize women being promoted in society – going form Miss to Mrs. to Mom claims several aisles at Target, where the shelves are stocked with celebratory messages from Hallmark all because a woman has decided to commit herself to a single man for the rest of time and start a family. What about the woman who commits herself to her career? To bettering society through hard work, innovation, creativity and finely-tuned skill sets?

It’s time that we give the Career Woman the credit she deserves and start celebrating a woman’s success in the board room, not just the bedroom.

The Divorce Shower
Otherwise known as the “Thank God You’re Done with Him” Shower

I’ve seen what happens when someone goes through a divorce and it seems to me that those people need more help starting their new lives than newlyweds do. When you consider that it’s become the norm for a shower registry to include things like the Nintendo Wii, it’s pretty clear that the idea of the shower to help people start their lives together has gone beyond the normal necessities of domestic life (and one could even argue that putting a gaming system in the home might stifle much-needed communication and serve as a catalyst to ultimately end the marriage). Meanwhile there’s a divorcee out there struggling to come up with enough money to buy groceries – forget about home décor and entertainment needs.

Divorce isn’t always bad and for some people it should be celebrated. Conversely, marriage between two people sometimes is bad and we’ll celebrate it anyway.

Women will stay in relationships that are terrible for them. Cheating or abusive husbands guilt their partners into believing they deserve what they’re getting and women will stay in the marriage because they know how hard it will be to move on alone. Her self-esteem, safety net, family stability – all of these things will suffer when a woman decides to end her marriage and move on with her life. Add to that the financial burden of paying attorney fees and relying on a much leaner income to support one’s self, and you have a woman that actually needs someone to buy her bathroom towels and place settings.

It’s time that we give the Divorcee the credit she deserves and start celebrating a woman’s courage to get out of a bad situation and start her life anew.

The Serious Illness Shower
Otherwise known as the “You’re Going to Kick Cancer’s Ass, and We Know It” Shower

It’s been said before that laughter is the best medicine. The power of positive thinking and a good attitude are unparalleled in the medical field. When faced with the news of a serious illness like breast cancer, what better time is there to celebrate a woman’s strength and support her through the upcoming events that will unfold? Her registry might include accent pieces to spruce up a hospital room, or a box of herbal teas to sooth the mind before lengthy doctor visits. She may register for a collection of books or DVDs that would help her to pass time through the days that she’s too tired to leave the house. Maybe she’s looking to take up a new hobby to help her relax and has had her eye on a set of knitting needles and brightly colored spools of yarn.

It’s time that we give the woman battling a serious illness the credit she deserves and start celebrating her ability to overcome life-threatening obstacles.

The New Adventure Shower
Otherwise known as the “Holy Crap, I can’t Believe You’re Going to do That!” Shower

Women who are about to be married or start a family are supported with showers largely because they are going into something new and the shower is a way to prepare them both physically (with tools and materials) and mentally (with warm wishes and inspiring messages).

It’s now nearly ten years into the second millennium and women have greatly expanded the “new experience” list. Husbands and babies have taken a back seat to any number of adventures including some of the ones the women in my life have embarked on:

• Joining the military and being deployed
• Traveling and living abroad for large periods of time
• Moving across the country with no known connections
• Starting a business
• Committing to a significant goal that requires a change in lifestyle and support from others (going to rehab for an addiction, losing 100 lbs, training for an Ironman or marathon, etc.)

It’s time that we give the adventurous woman the credit she deserves and start celebrating the idea that a significant life change isn't limited to just marriages and births.

The Homeowner Shower
Otherwise known as the “When Shit Breaks, You’re Going to Have to Fix it Now” Shower

So when a woman is to marry or become a mom, we give her lingerie and bottles, right? These are traditional shower gifts for the bride or mom-to-be. What about the woman that is about to become a first-time homeowner?

In the past few years, I know of four single women who each became new homeowners. When a single woman buys her own home, the traditional (and sexist) idea that the man will fix whatever breaks no longer applies. And there isn’t a landlord to take care of any issues either. I can’t think of a better occasion to throw a shower than to celebrate a woman who is purchasing her own home. After perusing the local hardware store, it’s clear to me that the expense of caring for a home and its corresponding lawn is not cheap (or easy).

The registry for this woman can go for miles – weed wacker, garden hose, push mower, paint brushes, hedge trimmer, garden equipment, etc.

Sure, society offers the “housewarming party” and it’s a nice way to christen the space with warm company and a good inventory of new wine, but this will help the single woman with her home about as much as a block of cheese will help a new mom with her infant.

It’s time that we give the single woman buying her first home the credit she deserves and start celebrating her independence to do something on her own that has traditionally been reserved for couples and families.

The New Pet Shower
Otherwise known as the “Throw Me a Bone, Raising a Pet is Hard, Too!” Shower

Just as some women seek out a husband for companionship (and truth be told, I’ve heard of women having children for the same reason), others seek out a pet. Though a pet’s first word may never amount to more than a bark or a purr (or the word of your choosing should you decide to get a parrot) it’s still something under your care that you are responsible for. A pet may not require midnight feedings or healthy conversations about your feelings, but it is a new relationship nonetheless and one that isn’t always easy to deal with.

There are as many books on the market for how to successfully raise a pet as there are for raising children. Pets require care and discipline just as children do. They are living things that become members of the family – yet women who are pet owners are seldom recognized (or supported) as people who are integral in raising their furry family. Why not throw a shower for the woman who just adopted from the local pet shelter? Or the woman who finally decided she was in a good position to get the Labrador retriever she’s always wanted? The registry is obvious: sub in the water dish, Kong toys, over-sized pillow bed and trendy collar for the sippy cups, mobiles, burping clothes and diaper bag.

It’s time that we give the new pet owner the same respect we give the new mom and celebrate the fact that the families of some women are comprised of cats and dogs, rather than a husband and children.

If this is all beginning to sound ridiculous, then I believe I’m successfully making my point. I could not have written this post without the confirmation from many friends and peers that my sentiments are shared.

To the married women reading this, it’s important to realize that I and other single women don’t dislike the idea of the shower – and we don’t dislike you! We dislike the discrimination in the way that ALL women are expected to buy-in to the shower celebration, but only those who are getting married or having children are eligible to have these society-inspired celebrations.

It might seem ridiculous to be expected to get a gift for a woman who is moving to a new city, purchasing a home, battling cancer, buying a dog or being promoted within her career. For us single women, it feels equally ridiculous to be expected to purchase a gift for a woman just because she has decided to get married or have a baby.

We are the women of 2009, and we all deserve recognition, support, and fanfare for the adventures we choose to embark on. I say we either start celebrating those adventures in all of their iterations, or stop the trend of baby and bridal showers altogether.

A New Low Provides the Ultimate High

2009-09-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I was at the New York State Fair, and I paid three dollars to let a carnie guess my age – a game that would reward me with the crappy toy of my choice should he guess wrong by more than two years. He was on a winning streak until I approached him, confident with my new haircut and overall spunky aura that I still might exude a bit of “twenty-something” about me. I stood before him sipping my draft beer from an oversized plastic cup, with a hip cocked to the side to make sure my Le Sportsac fanny pack was on full display (more on that later). He jotted down his guess on a piece of paper and scanned the crowd for feedback on the number. Some onlookers smirked, but I couldn’t tell if it was because the number was too high or too low.

Then he presented it to me. 27. (Insert ultimate party of the soul here).

Maybe it was the Saranac buzz I had going on, or the fact that I’d just eaten a deep-fried Oreo cookie, but seeing any number that began with a “2” was good enough. The fact that he guessed 27 was particularly exciting.

Twenty-seven was the year I met my ex-fiancé, the year that I believed all of the stress and pain of investing in terrible relationships would come to an end because I’d finally met “the one.” Two and a half years later, it broke my heart to realize that despite how much we cared for each other, it just wasn’t working. With six months to go until I hit 30, I fought with myself to remain positive that turning 30 and being newly single on the heels of a broken engagement was no big deal. Obviously this blog proves that it’s not always easy to be positive about matters of the heart and one’s life plan.

Thirty hasn’t turned out to be as awful as I was anticipating. Everyone told me that this important third decade of your life is the time when people would start to accept you as a true grown-up. One became a vessel of smart decisions armed with a “cut the crap” attitude that ensured a more fulfilling life. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but it does seem that this year has been one of particular growth for me in terms of career and personal relationships. I’m growing out of the girl I’m used to being and into the woman I’ve always wanted to become.

The idea that I am somehow 27 again is very liberating (even if only in the mind of a bull-shitting con artist hawking his hut of tsotchkes). I felt like I was getting a do-over, like I really was 27 and spending a day at the fair with a new man, in a new relationship. I don’t regret that I spent two and-a-half years with my ex-fiancé only to call it quits before the ultimate commitment, but I do feel bitter at times that I still haven’t gotten it right by the age of 30. Who doesn’t look back and consider other avenues in hindsight? Who doesn’t say “What if?”

Some days I think that turning back the clock and making better decisions is exactly what I need, even though that’s impossible and I am who I am today because of the decisions I’ve made – good and bad.

Proud of my newfound “youth,” I fastened my prize – a hot pink Koosh ball – to the belt of my fanny pack and proceeded to sashay myself around the fair with my plastic trophy on full display.

Let me expand on the matter of the fanny pack.

The New York State Fair is not the first place one thinks of when fashion comes to mind. Not good fashion, anyway. Enter through the welcome gates and behold the cornucopia of naked beer guts, feathered bangs, bedazzled Tweety-bird shirts, and “those should only be worn in your living room” sweatpants. It is for this reason that I have no qualms about donning the fanny pack when I go to the fair. It’s not that I see myself suddenly fitting into a world of fashion “No’s” – it’s more like Halloween. Sometimes it’s fun to dress the way you shouldn’t. I’ve simply opted for a fanny pack rather than neon pink thigh-highs (yes, I own a pair).

It isn’t a normal fanny pack, either. Think Carrie Bradshaw (Sex in the City) circa Season 4 wearing the Gucci logo belt bag (aka designer fanny pack). It is a fashionable way for women who need free hands to tote their things around without having to worry about the slipping strap of a purse upon the shoulder, or the “I’m about to get on a school bus” backpack. I should mention that the only time I feel this need for freed up hands is when I know I will be embarking on a day of drinking. But I digress.

In the case of the New York State Fair, I always have one hand occupied by a wine slushy or a beer, but the other is frequently ushering fried goods to my mouth. Who needs the hassle of managing a bag in the middle of all that?

By 9:30PM that evening, I was starting to feel my twenties slip away and reality was setting in…intoxicated at 30 comes with certain symptoms that I simply don’t recall from the previous decade. For starters, I was getting tired – and I was beginning to envy the people wearing their sweatpants while I continued to parade around in uncomfortable shoes and tight jeans. The fried food-a-thon that was making its way through my system in a tide of Sangria-infused Budweiser was also not feeling so great. At 27 I might have been looking for the next cab downtown to continue carrying on into the wee hours of the morning. At 30 I was jonesing for my Clarin’s Brightening Night Cream.

Before the end of the night, I decided that the Koosh ball would not be coming home with me. Though I’m amused with the idea of going back in time, I didn’t find it compelling enough to bring home a mushy piece of plastic that by that point had to have been crawling with germs. I removed it from my belt bag and handed it to the wise-cracking motorcycle man who was checking IDs at the beer tent by the Dinosaur BBQ (a popular biker bar serving food at the fair). He took the Koosh in his hands and gave it a little squeeze.

“Yep, I’ve hooked up with her already,” he said with a chuckle through his graying, unkempt beard. He tossed the ball to his friend, working the next line over. “Here, play with that!” he shouted to the man – another leather-clad dude with a tapestry of tattoos on his arm. One squeeze, and he hurled it back in our direction.

“This will be hours of fun,” he said, and I made my way past him to get one more drink…my second run at 27 now reduced to a single boob in the hands of a biker in the beer line.

The next morning I woke up with a headache and a craving for healthy food. Stripped of my fanny pack and plastic trophy, I was back to my usual self again – 30 and fabulous, and ready for a Sunday of domestic bliss. Some quality time with my boyfriend, a Swiffer, a home-cooked meal and a foreign film were just what the doctor ordered. Gallivanting about in a fanny pack with a time-machine Koosh ball and a beer could never match the high of being happy with who you are in the moment.

Spinster, Interrupted

2009-08-24T06:46:00.000-07:00

Lately I’ve been feeling free of my usual cynicism and have been passing days, weeks even, in a content mood. This month actually marks the one-year anniversary of my “independence” as it was last August that I moved out of my ex-fiance’s house and spent my first night in the new apartment.

I’ll never forget the feelings I had when I stood atop the stairs before my new home, cradling a box filled with books, spatulas and picture frames in the crook of my arm while I fumbled with my keys to unlock the door for the first time. I entered my apartment and was greeted by a large glass bong on the kitchen counter that was left behind by the former tenants.

I immediately started sobbing.

The drug paraphernalia triggered the unease in my system that I had been trying desperately to bury with thoughts of my future and moving on. I’ve never been into drugs, and seeing this instrument in the first scene of my new life conjured up images of the ex-boyfriend I dated before I got engaged. Ours was an abusive, unhealthy relationship wherein marijuana frequently took center stage (he was the feature act, I was the audience) and I couldn’t help but wonder as I set down my things, “Will I once again be faced with a parade of losers and jerks as I trade in my engagement ring for the single life?” I suddenly felt like Sandra Dee in a Rizzo world. The promise of security and stability was gone, and in its place was this clear glass omen of disaster.

That would be the first of many times I would sob alone in my apartment. For a while it seemed to occur on a regular basis at least once a week. It didn’t help that my wedding dress was being stored in one of the closets, still untailored (and never tried on) zipped in its bag like a corpse in the darkness. A quick visit to the closet to retrieve a new Swiffer pad could easily end up causing that week’s meltdown.

But things got better over time. Six months went by and I had settled into my new digs and a routine that involved spending time with friends and having fun. I read books, I tried new recipes. I watched foreign films and ate hummus.

My family remained supportive, giving my personal life a sense of calm despite the rocky road I was traveling, and I was getting consistently good feedback at work. Things weren’t bad at all. Now a full year later, I really feel like I’ve come out of the rebound phase and am fully reclaiming the happy, positive me.

With so much of my self-identity tied up in triathlon and training, I started to slump back into a state of depression in the spring when I realized that getting over my broken engagement took its toll on my body. I wasn’t as fit as in years past and the “fun” part of my new lifestyle had me drinking and eating a bit more than usual. Despite the fact that I was performing in my races with about five extra pounds in tow, I ended up doing great in the events that mattered to me. Since my last race in July, I’ve ridden the high of my awesome finish right into August where more good things have started to happen.

Something cosmic seems to be taking place within me where finally everything is falling into place. My new relationship has been challenging me in healthy ways, causing me to let go of some of the anger and stress I’ve been carrying around, and breaking down walls between us that I don’t think I’ve ever been able to remove in relationships past.

My ex-fiance is also dating someone new and it seems that we’ve both managed to move past our own failed story into something that is better for us. I met her briefly while in Lake Placid to volunteer for Ironman this year, and for a split second I thought of how awkward it was to see him in that context.

Lake Placid is saturated with my hopes and dreams. Three years ago it was the place I slept alone in my car the night before I registered for my first Ironman, while my ex returned to Syracuse to work the next morning. Last year it was the place where I completed my first Ironman while at the same time my relationship was falling apart. This year it was the place I came with the new man in my life to sign up for Ironman next year. And now my ex-fiance who never had any interest in participating in an Ironman event ever before was there holding hands with a woman who looks as though she stepped out of an LL Bean catalog. The mental assessment occurred in less than a minute and was as refreshing as the first sip of a cold beer on a scorching day. It appeared we were both moving on and happy.

The tough thing about breaking up with someone you don’t hate in a small town is that you will likely run into them a lot when the relationship is over – this is even more true when you’re involved in something like triathlon which shrinks the community down to an even smaller size. To see my ex moving on with his life, and for him to see me moving on with mine felt healthy and provided a sort of closure that I needed to really pull away from that period of my life.

My job has continued to go well and I feel that I’m where I’m meant to be, despite the fact I never saw myself working in new business development for an advertising agency. We're moving into a brand new building in December that will be designed with all the contemporary flare you’d imagine an advertising agency to have – like the way they portray creative places to look in movies and TV shows. In my fantasy of the new office, I think of Amanda and Mark from Ugly Betty visiting my cube to scold me for my choice of shoes (likely the pink Crocs that nobody seems to enjoy but me).

I’ve been given a lot more responsibility and am excited to take on new challenges. And I feel that my personal relationship is giving me more responsibilities also. Being with someone that you are able to have an even exchange of emotion with causes you to be more accountable with each other. I know that in my new relationship my emotions will be taken seriously – and that means that I take his more seriously also. Emotions are no longer chalked up to “drama” and random fits of boredom, but are regarded as delicate conversations that should be paid attention to.

I’ve found myself growing stronger in my relationships with friends. When I started my new job two years ago, I was given a “buddy” to help me get acclimated to the organization. In our first meeting, I discovered she was a former beauty pageant queen, cheerleader and sorority girl. Those might be the top three types of women that I detest the most. My “buddy” is now one of my closest, most treasured friends. I’ve made many friends this year that live off the beaten path when it comes to what women our age “should” be doing at this point in our lives. It’s like the show Lost – we were all on a plane minding our own business until it crashed and we’ve grown our own community with a lifestyle that we’re comfortable with, not be to sabotaged by the way “the others” live, who are content with suburbia environs, raising families and celebrating life as per societal norms.

With my new friends, I seldom have time to stop and think about the status of my life as a mom or a wife. It feels okay to nurture plants instead of children, to own an expensive bike rather than an expensive ring. To invest my time in making my spin class inspiring rather than matching table linens to floral arrangements at a wedding reception.

Part of my struggle in the past was trying to save relationships with people that I’ve grown apart from. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that failed friendships with some people are nobody’s fault. I don’t begrudge my married friends for starting families and enjoying the life we all thought we’d be living one day when we were in third grade. My path went in another direction from all of that and it’s hard to make plans and have conversations with someone that is never in sync with you. It’s especially hard when you realize that people won’t even try – I am the one that isn’t connecting the dots in the “when I grow up” playbook we all memorized in grade school, so it often feels like I am responsible for thinking of ways we can best relate to one another from our different lifestyles.

I’ve let it go.

It feels great to be realigned with people that I can identify with – both in person and in the blog world where I have connected with many fellow spinsters who chase the cursor across the screen with similar thoughts to my own. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who feels like giving our society a big middle finger for continuing to promote celebrations only for women who have married or are having children.

Sometimes I feel guilty maintaining a blog about being a spinster while I’ve begun to enjoy a more serious relationship that is helping to carry me further away from my anger and bitterness and back into a place where I am happy and feel whole. But being a spinster, for me, was never about the act of being in a relationship or not. It’s about married versus unmarried, traditional versus unconventional. It’s about women following their hearts and passions into places that make sense to them rather than to society. It’s about celebrating successes and milestones in the context of every woman’s life – not just the ones who are becoming a “Mrs” or a mom.

One year ago I was all too aware of what a let-down I was to society. Barraged by the “you’re still young” comments and patted on the back with the “maybe next times,” and ignored by some of the people I thought I was close to as my “ almost married” life started to unravel.

Today my body aches from starting back up with strength training. It is the only pain I am aware of at the moment. There is a peace inside of me that has been absent for a long time.

My weekends are packed with plans to visit friends, see museums, try new restaurants and explore new places with my boyfriend. I don’t have to time worry about what I “should” be doing.

As days go by, my life continues to be full in so many ways and things aren’t as bad as they once seemed, and I’m not crazy because of how I choose to live my life. As for the namesake of this post, I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes:

Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is... Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified.

-Girl, Interrupted

Walk a Mile (or 70.3) In My Shoes

2009-08-05T12:33:00.000-07:00

I wanted to write a post that departs a bit from the “spinster” theme, lest you think that I spend all of my time complaining about society and singles.

Recently I completed my racing season with one of my greatest athletic accomplishments to date and it was a total surprise. Despite a really rocky season with tough training and sub-par finishing times in all of my runs, I improved my performance at the Musselman half Ironman race by 15 minutes. The Musselman totals 70.3 miles – 1.2 miles swimming, 56 miles biking, and 13.1 miles running. I’ve done this race twice before.

In 2006 it was the longest triathlon I’d ever completed in 6 hours and 20 minutes. The following year I shaved 12 minutes off that time finishing in 6 hours and 8 minutes. In 2008 I didn’t do the Musselman because I did the full Ironman race in Lake Placid (2.4 miles swimming, 112 miles biking, 26.2 miles running). This year I decided that in lieu of doing another Ironman I would instead try to break 6 hours in the half Ironman. It was a goal that I was excited about in January when my training began, but I came to loathe in June when I realized that I just wasn’t running well and many of my usual races were completed in disappointingly slow times.

During the 5 hours and 53 minutes that I was on the course at Musselman last month, many things came and went in my mind. Yes, getting a new personal best in a race is awesome – but that isn’t what made it one of my best race experiences. Anyone who knows me well has heard me “metaphorize” training as a template for life in general. It is important to set goals, outline a path to those goals and then pull from your experience in the world to overcome obstacles down that path. Every goal you set and achieve gives you the experience to reach a little further than you did before. There is no easy way to an Ironman finish line – just like there is no easy way to most things sought in life.

And nothing happens overnight. In middle school I was unable to do the mile test in gym class (you had to be able to run a mile on the track in 12 minutes). So who would have thought that I would end up here?

A runner. A triathlete. A spinning instructor. An Ironman finisher.

Goals are set and accomplished, paving the way for new goals thereafter. They have been scattered along my path in life like a trail of breadcrumbs continuing to lead me to new and exciting places. I learn something new about myself in every race.

Here is what the last 70.3 miles taught me.

Rely on Your Weaknesses, Not Just Your Strengths
Most people approach the sport of triathlon with a dominant “strength.” Many were cyclists or runners before they were triathletes, and while they become proficient at all three disciplines of the sport, they rely on their dominant skill set for the best possible time. For me this has always been running.

My game plan for a triathlon is to be comfortable during the swim and get through it at a moderate pace. On the bike I like to go right to the edge of being aggressive – sometimes crossing the line and hammering it for a few miles, but always backing off the pace to conserve my legs for the run. Having gone from being a sprinter, to a half-miler, to a sub 22-minute 5K runner to a finisher of several marathons, I am used to running while miserable and I’ve always relied on that ability to make up time in my races.

Sunday’s race derailed from my usual game plan. As I stood waist-deep in the water before the air horn sounded to begin the swim, I didn’t think too much about what I wanted out of the day. My goal of finishing in 6 hours seemed really out of the question given how lousy I’d been running for the past few months. I decided to get through each mile feeling comfortable and having fun. If I wasn’t going to get any personal records that day, why not just enjoy myself?

Midway through the swim, I realized that I was doing pretty well. I wasn’t getting tired and I was with a small pack of swimmers in my age group that had caught up to some of the straggling swimmers from the wave that started before us (four minutes earlier). By the time I got out of the water and through Transition 1 (where you go from the swim part of the race to the bike part), I was clipped in my pedals with only 41 minutes on the clock. I recalled my last swim time in this race to be 50 minutes, so I was immediately aware that I was already competing against my previous best times.

This presented a new mindset about the day’s events. I wasn’t anticipating to feel this good, despite how much my swimming had improved this season. Now on the bike, I knew I would feel good for the whole 56 miles because many of my longer training rides were longer than 50 miles and I always felt great the whole time and afterward. None of that changed the fact that my running still sucked – I hadn’t even gotten under an 8-minute mile until very late in the season and I barely count it since the average was something like 7:54 minutes-per-mile.

I had a decision to make. Did I want to continue on with my “joy ride” sense of the morning or did I want to try and make something out of this race? I rationalized that the run was going to be tough for me no matter if I got off the bike with tired legs or fresh legs. I‘ve shown up to plenty of races this year feeling hydrated, zippy and ready to move only to find myself falling apart at paces faster than 9-minutes-per-mile, so there was no way I could make something out of the running leg of this race. Unable to resist the urge to find some success in the morning, I decided that since the swim was over with and a strong run was out of the question, it was go-time on the bike.

I’d only ridden about 6 miles when I made the executive decision to “hammer” the entire bike course with absolutely no worries for what my legs would be feeling like when I got off. For the next 50 miles I kept myself in the aero position, got in the big chain ring and pummeled the road with a cadence that I’d never dared to whip out at a race before. I ended up with a bike time of 3:04 hours and an average speed of 18.3 MPH – definitely one of my best bike legs to date.

When I dismounted to head into Transition 2 (where you go from the bike part of the race to the run), I expected to feel shooting pains through my quads, but there was nothing. I racked my bike and got into my sneakers inside of two minutes and was on my way to the run – just 13.1 miles to go before I could call it a day.

Ultimately, the decision to pursue something with what I would normally consider one of my “weaker” abilities would end up being the reason I was able to meet my goal of breaking 6 hours in this race. If my season had been going the way it normally does, with strong running and fast mile splits throughout the spring, I never would have pushed myself that way on the bike. Now I know that I’m capable of pushing in both areas and that will help me to improve even more in years to come.

My “weakness” provided me with an opportunity, and now I’ll rely on the bike again to lop even more time off this race.

Build Your Mental Arsenal
I began the run with only one thing on my mind: MUST pee. Priority one was getting into the port-a-potty located just after the first mile on the course. Luckily I was in and out and burned away only a minute or two with the nonsense of going to the bathroom.

I was surprised to feel “fresh” on the run after riding aggressively on the bike. Even so, I decided not to make any calculations about a possible run pace yet and to just run however I felt most comfortable. I’ve been fooled by seemingly fresh legs before in long-course races and I wasn’t about to tempt fate by actively pushing the limits of my hamstrings with 10 miles to go. It was still early.

While I was running, I thought of past race experiences that challenged me to a level of near-quit status. Certainly the Ironman from the previous year came to mind – where I sobbed in Transition 1 as I carefully extracted my numb foot from a wet Pearl Izumi bike shoe and guided it dutifully into the running sneaker.

“I can’t even stand up without pain in my legs – how am I supposed to finish a marathon now?” I remember saying through tears to the volunteer who helped me.

I recall thinking about my whole “I know how to run miserable” mantra and decided that at the very least, I owed it to myself and my $525 registration fee to get out there and try one mile before quitting Ironman. Inexplicably, a second wind came (more like a 19th wind, really) and I felt great for the first 13 miles. The second 13 miles were another story...but I made it to the finish!

There were many other times when I’ve suffered in races, and I let those struggles flash through my mind like a sort of film strip of my athletic "perseverance" as I was about to die with each stride forward.

I recalled images of vomit at the finish line during 800 repeats in college. An image of my own pee running down my leg because I was in too much pain to stop and squat during the run for my first ever Musselman. Flash to the image of my left hamstring during the New York City Marathon in 2005 – with two miles to go to the finish, I recall my leg slowly seizing up into a deep, painful cramp. I picture the muscle tightening like an angry fist beneath the surface of my skin doing everything it can to slow my run to a jog, my jog to a walk, my walk to a DNF (that stands for “Did Not Finish” and in the athlete world it’s akin to Harry Potter saying “Lord Voldemort” at Hogwarts).

But I never quit – not after I puked on the track, or peed on my own leg, or willed my gimpy leg to give me just two more miles through whispered F-bombs in Central Park. Not after 112 wet and chilling miles on my bike with numb feet.

These experiences are my “mental arsenal” and they are probably more important for a successful race than any tempo run, time trial or swim drill out there. If you train properly for a race, then you already know you’re showing up to the starting line with the physical fitness for a good performance. Training, rest, nutrition – these are all essential for success. But without a focused mind and a good attitude, you won’t complete the mission.

Think of it this way…You can have the best recipe for bread on the planet – but if you don’t add the yeast, it won’t rise. You’re left with a bowl of well-intentioned ingredients that can’t quite synchronize to bring you “bread.” Your mental arsenal is like yeast. When you know where you’ve been and what you’re capable of, you can rise to the occasion no matter how demanding the occasion may be.

I tapped into this mental arsenal in the last few miles of the Musselman this summer. I was struggling with only three miles to go and was definitely on track to break 6 hours if I could maintain my efforts just…a…little…longer. As anyone who does long-course races will tell you, “just a little longer” seems like time that is measured out in days rather than minutes. When the body starts to deplete and fatigue, the mind is the only thing that will move it forward. I owe my new PR in the Musselman to my mental arsenal, no doubt about it.

Stick to the Plan
The first few miles of the race I was in it to have fun – no worries about anything except for finishing. By the time I was five miles away from the finish line, not only was I sure I would break 6 hours, but I started to get a little arrogant in thinking that I could even run aggressively and pick off some of the women in my age group. (Our ages are marked on the back of our legs so you can tell who is in your age group when you’re on the course).

Around mile 9, a woman passed me with a 34 on her calf. Her stride wasn’t much faster than mine and I could have kept up with her for a while. My usual plan of attack on the run is to run next to someone and match their stride with the smallest little lead – just enough for them to keep up with me and consider pushing past me, but not too much to make them think I won’t let it happen. After a few miles, the person either has to decide to move ahead of you and take a clear lead, or they fall behind you because you’ve drained them of their spirit. It’s rare that they will stay close to you for too long because it starts to feel like an invasion of personal space that needs to be dealt with.

Since I still had four miles to go, I hung back and let the woman pass me. My reasoning was that I was definitely on track to break 6 hours, which was the original goal. I knew that my time wasn’t good enough to place me in the Top 3 of my age group, so picking off women in my age group at this point would have only been for my ego. Risking my possible sub-six-hour time for the momentary thrill of moving up in the age-group rankings seemed like a dumb idea. I had to remember what this race was supposed to be about and be thankful that my body was cooperating with me.

I was tested again in the very last mile of the race – a mile that I cobbled together with the very scraps of my soul as I mustered the strength to move my legs forward. I was really feeling depleted and beaten up by then. Another women passed me with a hefty kick. As she moved ahead of me I read the black marker on her calf – 31. She continued to lengthen the gap between us. It was only about 800 meters from her to the finish line. On a better day I could have trashed her with an all-out sprint to the finish, something I’m normally strong enough to activate in the last two miles of a race. But on this day I knew better than to tempt fate. As she whooshed by, I felt my body naturally pick up the pace to match her speed and my right quad immediately responded with a jolt of nerves that said, “Um, that’s not happening today.”

I took this as a sign that I was smart to stick to my plan way back at mile 9, and that if I had decided to start editing my goals at that point, I would have probably missed the opportunity to finish under 6 hours (pushing my pace to pass people and keep them behind me would have resulted in my having to walk the last few miles of the race, sabotaging the pace I needed to complete the run on time).

So what does this all mean out of the water, off the bike and away from the running shoes?

To me, it comes down to the simple adage, “live and learn.”

If I wasn’t forced to try things differently in this race, I don’t know that I would have willingly pushed it on the bike or ignored my urge to pass people on the run.

The experience has inspired me to play with my strategies and abilities in future races to see what comes of it. And true to my aforementioned metaphor, I’m planning to apply these same principals to my life off the race course, too. Call it “Transition 3” – where you go from the “live” part of the race, to the “learn” part of life.

The Elephant in the Room, in the Running Shoes

2009-07-14T07:39:00.000-07:00

The other night I was at the gym waiting with a group of people outside of the spinning room to teach a class. A couple of us were talking about a 15K race that happened over the weekend, comparing notes on the course and how we did. A guy overheard our conversation and decided to join in, since he too was a runner. He glanced at me in my spinning outfit – a black tank and shorts that did nothing to conceal my collection of tan lines (more like faded sunburn lines), and chuckled as he proclaimed, “Well obviously you’ve been outside training, you have the lines to prove it!” I smiled, about to politely excuse myself from the conversation to prepare for class, when he began to say something else.

“You know, it’s nice to see a runner like you that isn’t all long and lean. You always see those tall thin runners and then there’s you.”

From the look on his face I could tell that he meant this to be complimentary, and it was in its own way, but his horribly dysfunctional delivery resulted in some degree of “offended” on my part.

“Yes…I’m certainly no gazelle gliding miles upon miles over the land with ease.” I replied. As I heard myself saying this, I simultaneously recalled all of the times that my father has said that I’m “scrappy” in reference to the fact that I am 5’3” and 138 pounds of muscle. I may not be svelte, but I don’t show up to races to look pretty. I show up to kick some ass. Now I was feeling like I wanted to kick this guy’s ass. He would get his when class began.

I didn’t think the conversation could get much worse, but it did.

“So you’re married?” The guy asked. “No, no…not me,” I said.

“Really? I could have sworn that you were,” he looked off in the distance, squinting his eyes while trying to concentrate on how he knew this.

I thought that maybe he was confused because I was engaged before and he may not have heard through the grapevine that the wedding was called off. Even though the class I was teaching that night was not my own, the gym is a small place where news travels fast and this had happened more than a year ago.

“Well, I was engaged but we called the wedding off.” I told him. He looked at me, still confused that his intel was wrong.“Wow, well I just assumed that you were married and had children,” he replied.

I paused on that statement, unsure what he meant by it. Just a few weeks ago I had been carded at a convenience store while purchasing a case of Corona. When I showed the woman my ID, she gasped in shock to learn that I was 30. Her and her son could have sworn I was just 19 and I was asked to show alternate forms of ID to prove them wrong. Now I was standing in front of a guy that must have assumed that I was “at that age” that I should be married with children, despite the fact that all of my fingers were bare and nothing about me says “maternal.”

“No, no children here. I’m only 30!” I said this as if everyone knows that 30 is still young and there was plenty of time to have children if that’s what I wanted one day, but I forgot that I was in upstate New York where it seems that many women want to be done having children by 30.

I could see from the man’s face that my response was confusing him, which made sense since he mentioned he had two teen-aged daughters and I would guess that he himself was in his early 40s. By my calculations, he probably started making a family in his early 20s. In my early 20s I was living in Manhattan and unknowingly dating an attractive Irish lad from the IRA. Ah, the good days.

Deciding to add an element of humor to our dialogue, which was clearly becoming awkward, I offered my sentiments on myself as a mom.

“I think I’m much too selfish to have children right now. I have a lot of things I want to do before I have to devote my time to raising kids.” I laughed as I said this, batting my hand lightly on his shoulder as I tried to lighten the mood.

“Yes, well, it’s good that you have things you like, you know…” He trailed off with his words, but his facial expression and tone said the rest. This guy seemed to be speaking with me as if I were some candidate for the Make a Wish Foundation, and soon my opportunity to be a mom would wither up and die with my 30-year-old ovaries – but no matter, even if I could never be a mom, I would have plenty of time to do crossword puzzles and shoe shop.

“I’ll be an aunt soon,” I said.

I have no idea why I said that, but I think that some part of me felt like I had to prove to this guy that I was cognizant of the circle of life – that I was human and capable of showing some enthusiasm for babies and birth despite the fact that I was not yet experiencing these things with my own body.

One of the things I like to do to remind myself that I still have time to be a mom is read US Weekly and learn about the celebrities that are pregnant. They always put the person’s age in parenthesis after their name and lately that age has been well over 30 – moms that are 35, or even 38! The shame.

On that note, we started to walk into the spinning room and I went to set up my bike and prep the music for class. The conversation left me feeling confused and angry. How did any of that even come up? It was like a “your life sucks” bomb was being dropped on me from out of nowhere. What’s worse is that I had arrived to the gym feeling really great. I got home from work and was able to start laundry, vacuum, dust, take the garbage out, and figure out what I’d make for dinner later on all within an hour. Who was this guy to come in and dilute my “multi-tasking” high?

Fueled by irritation, I punished the class with challenging cadences and frequent increases in resistance, favoring a drill sergeant interpretation of each track over my usual motivational tone. My legs were sore from the race I completed the day before, but I needed to work hard as my soul was sore from yet another conversation about my shortcomings as a 30-year-old woman. The self-pity was short-lived because the exercise high always trumps all and by the end of the workout I was relaxed and feeling very good. The lactic acid from Sunday’s 15K left my legs and I was easily hammering through each song on my workout mix. Everyone was energized and responding well to my coaching, and the guy that was talking to me in the hallway was barely reaching pace in the last 20 minutes of the workout. Ha.

“I’ll show you long and lean,” I thought to myself as sweat coursed over my brow, through my eyes, around my nose and over my lips like white-water rapids.

We hit the last song for cool down and proceeded to the floor for stretching. By then, I had totally separated myself from the earlier conversation in the hallway. As class came to an end, I thanked everyone for coming and started to pack up my things to leave. My mood skyrocketed when I remembered that I’d completed all of my chores before getting to the gym so all that was required of me when I got home was the consumption of a cold glass of wine and hitting “play” on my DVR to watch “So You Think You Can Dance.”

In my peripheral vision I saw the man come toward me. Sigh.

He wrapped his towel around his neck and stood over me as I jammed my water bottle into my gym bag.

“I was thinking…I hope I didn’t offend you before when we were talking, I didn’t mean to say that you were overweight or anything…” he seemed genuinely concerned. “Obviously you are in great shape and I didn’t mean for it to sound like you should be skinny to be a good runner.”

I knew his intention was never to offend, and he didn’t realize that my issues with the conversation had more to do with his reactions to my being single and childless at 30, than with my ability to run while carrying a few extra pounds. So I gave him the reaction he needed to feel better about it all.

“Are you kidding me? Don’t worry about a thing – I was flattered by what you said!” I plastered the most gracious smile on my face that you’ve ever seen. It was as if someone had just mistaken me for a movie star (albeit a sweaty one).

“Really, it was such a nice thing to hear! Who wants to be long and lean?” I continued on for full effect, shrugging my shoulders at the very idea of having zero body fat to worry about.

While there was a part of me that was slightly taken aback by the notion that I am somehow not a real runner because I am not tall and skinny, that was never the part of the conversation that pushed my buttons. What really got to me was the idea that I’m somehow not a real woman without a husband and a baby and that this guy didn’t even realize that his comments conveyed that loud and clear. It’s like the elephant in the room, in the sneakers. I’m this obviously present woman living my life the way I want to. I’m not committed to a marriage; I’m not responsible for children. I’m not what you’d expect a marathon-running, Ironman-finishing woman to look like, but I’m not what you’d expect in many areas. And why should I be?

Social Media and Spinster Landmines

2009-07-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

I remember being a young girl and watching my mom open Christmas cards from all of our family friends. She read them to us at the dinner table as we passed around pictures of people I didn’t know. It always seemed like the point of these cards was to wish everyone in the family well, while sharing a bit of excitement over good news and recent events in people’s lives. I recall looking forward to these kinds of cards, and was also interested in the ones my mother sent to her own list of recipients. It was nice to see such a happy summation of one’s life over the course of a year, and I daydreamed about writing my own someday.

As the years go by, I’ve felt various emotions over Christmas cards and other pieces of festive correspondence. When I was in my twenties, receiving a wedding invitation or a holiday card with a family portrait of my friends and their new families was a thrill, and I still thought of myself as a likely candidate to share the same kinds of cards with them. I was excited for the way our lives were changing, and anxious to experience similar things in my own life. Maybe next year…

Or the year after that…

My twenties went by and I responded to a steady stream of RSVPs for other people’s weddings and showers, while receiving pictures of children in pumpkin patches or smiling faces of friends with their fiancés, husbands or pets. I’ve designed invitations to bachelorette parties, “Save the Date” magnets, and wedding brochures for many friends. I continued to be hopeful that one day it would be my turn, and then it was.

When I was 27 I got engaged and found myself sitting in the driver’s seat of my very own wedding (secretly very relieved that it was happening before I turned 30 because I have been conditioned to see that as the "deadline age" for doing the things a woman should do as a grown-up).

Finally my mother had news of her engaged daughter to send in her Christmas cards, and I tooled around in Photoshop designing my own wedding paraphernalia. I created “Save the Date” cards and had them printed, but they were never sent. When the wedding was called off, there was a hard stop to my newfound enthusiasm even as I believed I was making the right choice. I felt myself empty like a balloon with a hole in it – its once taut surface now a withered shell amid a sea of invoices and receipts for a wedding that was planned but that never took place.

Coinciding with my broken engagement was the rise of social media and my 30th birthday. The combination is deadly for the single woman that is “aging” and dramatically out of sync with her peers. On sites like Facebook, the good news of couplehood is no longer restricted to the annual Christmas card or wedding announcement, and unavoidable if you have many friends. Since Facebook “friends” are comprised of everyone from your most inner circle to those that you are only loosely acquainted with, one can amass quite a community within their social networking profile. It is not uncommon for me to learn within the first 10 minutes of logging on to my Facebook account who is having a baby, who is closing on a house with her husband, who is newly engaged, and who had a bridal shower over the weekend. (The tally includes multiples in each category.)

While couples are posting photos and updates on their new puppy, smoothie-maker or honeymoon – some of us stare at our monitors and wonder what we have to show for our several years on this planet? Forget about having to come up with something fabulous for your Christmas card – now you’ve got to worry about an entire profile on a regular basis. Facebook is like a digital scrapbook of what your life is all about, but unlike the one you used to make with rubber cement and scissors, this one isn’t stashed under your bed to be consumed only by you and your closest friends at your discretion. It’s out there for the world to see.

My profile is chock full of all the things I am at the age of 30 – an Ironman finisher, a person with a decent grasp on the English language, a fitness instructor, a world traveler. But at times Facebook makes me only aware of what I am not – a mother, a wife, a homeowner. Generally I feel very comfortable with who I am and what my life is comprised of, but there are times when being single at 30 just plain sucks.

It’s hard enough to learn that the universe of people you are connected to is moving forward in “important ways” while you feel stuck in reverse with stories of first dates, blind dates, and new relationship doubts and fears…but what is even worse is the fact that Facebook has some kind of sick way to connect you with people you don’t even want to know about anymore. Like ex-boyfriends that broke up with you because they didn’t want to be so seriously committed or try to keep a distance relationship alive. Next thing you know there is a “Friend Suggestion” in the top right corner of your computer screen and a picture of that same ex-boyfriend with his face smushed lovingly against the girl he started dating after you (the one that lived an hour further away than you, who he proposed to six months after dumping you). The reason for this unfortunate friend suggestion is because Facebook, with its “six degrees of separation” connectivity, has noticed that my ex and me have some mutual friends and so surely we would fancy a friendship of our own, right? Hardly. Because what I really need is to see my ex wading in a sea of Mr. Potato Head parts while he plays with his son on the floor of the home he bought with his wife.

Another fun feature of social media sites like Facebook is the way it tailors the advertisements framing your profile with products and services that it believes you need in your life based on the information you provide. The moment you let it know you are “single,” an icon of a broken heart appears in your status updates and an ad for a dating website pops up on screen. I’ve also seen ads for depression. When it comes to any status updates that employ the “broken heart” icon (i.e. any indication that you are now alone), there are no positive ads to be found. They are all self-help oriented or geared toward getting immediately paired up again. I hate to sound like a broken record, but this just seems like more evidence that our society celebrates couples and discriminates against singles. At the very least couldn’t there be the option to use a “party hat” icon for a break-up if the end of the relationship was a good thing? Couldn’t there be some way to celebrate a woman who is strong enough to (gasp) be on her own in the world?

Why does being single have to be construed as being an awful thing? I am a healthy person living a blessed life struggling to be happy some days and it seems like that mood is always derived from my apparent shortcomings as a 30-year old woman. Why am I not engaged, married or starting a family? Why when people hear that I am 30 and single do they say things like, “You still have time?” How is someone in my situation supposed to feel about my status in life when it is regarded as some kind of “social cancer” that can be treated if it’s caught early enough?

Lately logging on to Facebook feels as though I’m looking at a growth chart that I can’t quite measure up to. I can see the marks above me and I know where I should be, but I can’t get there. Everyone within five years of my age seems to be riding effortlessly from one social milestone to the next, while I continue on with my training wheels (an ironic metaphor considering I teach two spin classes and spend several hours clipped into a Cervelo P2SL each week).

I’m lucky to have found a group of people in my life that are in the same situation I am (that is, they are within range of the “deadline age” and enjoying fabulous lives that have nothing to do with babies or weddings). With these women I feel that my life has relevance and meaning even if by society’s standards it is sub par. As comforting as it is to have a group of people that applauds my lifestyle, it still hurts when some of the people closest to me seem to be let down or uninterested in my “news” because it pertains to things they don’t understand or agree with. I’m in a new relationship that I would like to share with everyone but when I bring it up in conversation it doesn’t seem to register with the other person that it’s important to me. There are no follow-up questions, there is no dialogue, there is only me saying something about it and the other person waiting for the subject to change.

Sometimes I wish I could take a sonogram of my brain so I could capture a visual of the energy that is displaced within when I’m spending time in my new relationship. Maybe if I present this information in a context that people seem to pay attention to they will acknowledge it and share some of my enthusiasm. Or maybe I’ll just have to wait until the next time there’s an engagement ring on my finger.

For all of my complaining about how Facebook makes me feel about what I don’t have at the age of 30, I want to be sure I convey to anyone reading this that I don’t have any ill feelings toward any of the people I’m friends with. I am very close to my friends and family and this isn’t a commentary on any specific individual – it’s a commentary on the social expectations that our culture has encouraged for decades and how those expectations influence the feelings of a single woman in her thirties.

Social media makes me more aware of these feelings. I believe that being connected with so many “peers” in real time will inevitably cause us to compare ourselves to others that we’re exposed to – whether it’s family, friends from high school, friends from college, people we’ve worked with, or new acquaintances. Facebook allows us to connect with one another on the things we have in common – but I would like to think that it could also allow us to admire each other for the things that we don’t.

*Image credit: Sean Ellis, Getty Images

Kitsch is a Girl’s Best Friend

2009-06-19T13:14:00.000-07:00

My first ever jewelry box was made out of hot-pink plastic and featured a large figurine of Hello Kitty on its lid. A heart-shaped fastener was affixed to the front, providing my stash of jelly bracelets a place for safekeeping.

I probably should have known from that moment on that I would have a kitschy taste in jewelry, but I grew up believing that instead, I was some sort of trailblazer when it came to accessorizing and fashion.

There were other signs, too.

Whenever I went shopping with my best friend at the time, there would be great entertainment derived from the garments I would pause to consider for purchase. It wasn’t unusual to find me fussing with a pair of mesh gloves, T-Shirts emblazoned with Mr. Spock’s face across the torso (well before the show became popular again), over-sized plastic rings, or anything embellished with sequins and fringe. What would have been unusual was to catch me pondering items designed in “earth tones” or styles that were prominently featured on a mannequin. I just wasn’t interested in mainstream. Blame it on my mother, who on my first day of Kindergarten dressed me in an outfit that consisted of a skirt worn over pants (again, well before this was fashionable).

Soon I would tire from the mall altogether and find new ways to ensure that my wardrobe stayed off the beaten path. Ruffled poet’s shirts were cut up with scissors and my mom, a good sport through this period of my life, would sigh as I asked if she could please sew the ruffles to the bottoms of my jeans (which were often hand-painted by yours truly).

Another garment became a unique (and heavy) spin on sequins. While working as a clerk at an auction house, I bid on a carousel of blank keys from a hardware store that was going out of business. You say, “keys” – I say, “long vertical sequins made from metal.” Weeks later, I wandered into school with a jean skirt that I covered with hundreds of these keys sewn into a wild pattern of silver, gold and bronze. Each step I took in that skirt sounded like a team of Salvation Army bell ringers working a Wal-Mart entrance during the holiday season.

My year abroad in Italy was perhaps one of the better years for my sense of style, as the culture shifted my taste into classics, but it didn’t last long. While European fashion toned down some of my kitsch, it brought out even more of my “free spirited” nature. Many of the fashions at the time were made from sheer fabrics that didn’t always lend themselves well to undergarments – so I simply didn’t wear them (the undergarments, that is). For the first semester of my freshman year at college, my roommate assumed the responsibility of beating me until I put on a bra every time we went out. I’d convinced myself that one of the benefits of being small-busted was that the occasional exposure of one’s nipple was actually tasteful, not inappropriate.

College fashion wasn’t just about nudity for me, it was about finding new ways to deviate from the norm. Nothing dramatic came of it, as there wasn’t much one could do short of wearing couture that would be noticed too much on my campus. Looking back through old photos though, I came upon a couple telltale images that reminded me of some attempts. There was the phase of wearing several watches at once on a single wrist, and the mixing and matching of earrings. A dangling silver earring in one ear, a rhinestone stud in the other. Topping off this combination was a fuchsia tank top with Madonna’s face silk-screened in the center that I had ripped at the neck so that my cleavage (such that it is) ran down the middle of her forehead. Put all this together, and it really looked like a time when I may have been exploring my sexuality rather than my closet.

It didn’t stop there.

Finishing off my college years, I went to the Senior Ball dressed in what I considered to be a tribute to Sarah Jessica Parker (aka Carrie Bradshaw). I paired a crocheted black top (and fully visible black bra) with a 60s style hot pink poodle skirt (sans poodle), and a leather cord belt with an oversized black flower positioned off-center at the waist. When my friend’s family saw pictures from the event, she was asked whether or not it was a costume party.

I’d like to say that things improved when I moved to Manhattan that summer, but it just isn’t true. Usually people who live in the city for some time start to lose color in their wardrobe and go all black. I seemed to go in the opposite direction, acquiring a great deal of clothing that was frequently neon or fluorescent. It was as if I’d made a commitment to wear colors only found in the LA Gear color palette from 1989.

Now in my 30s, when I’m apparently supposed to be settling down and more mature, I still find that I have yet to do that in the closet or jewelry box. I’ve acquired some nice pieces of jewelry over the years and have been passing myself off as a grown-up on most days with horrible “business casual” staples and pearls here and there -- but I haven’t forgotten my roots.

I still rock earrings that look like over-sized Life Saver candies, and metallic silver sneakers with Bermuda shorts and leather-sequined (yes – sequins made from leather!) turquoise tank-tops. Recently, I willingly (and enthusiastically) purchased a pair of blindingly pink patent leather stilettos with chrome heels, and continue to wear glass rings the size of punch bowls as if they were rare baubles crafted by Harry Winston.

The classiest, most amazing piece of jewelry I’ve ever worn was probably my engagement ring, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss it – but I guess I miss what it represented more than the ring itself. Wearing something that symbolized the promise of a future was empowering and really wonderful. And let’s be honest, what girl doesn’t feel great with diamonds on her fingers?

But wearing my usual obnoxious cocktail rings is empowering, too. It reminds me of the girl I was all those years ago with her Hello Kitty jewelry box. It reminds me of the girl who wore large purple clip-ons in third grade because her ears weren’t pierced yet, and the girl whose legs ached from wearing 10 pounds of metal to school as a skirt.

The rings I wear today would have gone with any number of outfits I dressed up in through college, Italy and Manhattan. My jewelry today might not be expensive or symbolic of the “milestones” I’ve achieved in my relationships or my career, but it is symbolic of a woman who has always remained true to herself.

Bronze Ambition

2009-05-29T08:43:00.000-07:00

It begins with an unmanicured pointer finger. Pressing it firmly against the small triangle embossed on my stereo’s smooth, rectangular buttons, I am greeted by warm bossa nova melodies winding their way through my living room as they follow me into the bathroom. There on the counter beneath the vanity mirror, a bottle of Corona with a lime wedged in its neck just begins to sweat as the bright bulbs do their best impression of relentless sunshine. Welcome to my beach, my bronze ambition.

For years now, well alright – decades, really, I have been attempting to change my body through a strict self-tanning regimen.

My first encounter with sunless tanning cream happened in middle school during a time when I was desperate to break free from my geek status and join the world of teen popularity. It never happened, thanks in part to the quality of sunless tanning lotions in the early 1990s. The anticipation of my newly bronzed body as I worked the cream over each arm, leg and plane of skin made me dizzy with excitement. I went to bed anxious to wake up as the new and exotic me.

Morning came, and I ran to the full-length mirror in my bedroom the way a child charges the tree on Christmas. The reflection was devastating.

Slowly, I peeled the layers of clothing from my body to reveal a pattern of swirly, striped and splotchy skin in various hues of beige and orange. A kind of paisley inspired wandering of color covered just enough of my body to suggest that it was meant to be more consistent, but not enough to look as though I’d had any clue as to what I was doing. Despite exfoliating and careful application of the cream, I looked like a sepia girl in a Technicolor world.

Over time I perfected the sunless tanning technique, baring my sun-kissed limbs without the zebra-like stripes on the wrists, ankles and knees that plagued less seasoned “sunbathers.” For a while I could credit all of the muscle tone in my arms to the many times per week I applied self-tanning lotion, and the methodical massaging technique I came up with that ensured it was going on correctly.

While living abroad in Italy as an exchange student, I finally got a real suntan after vacationing in Sardinia for two weeks with my boyfriend and his family. We spent our days lounging on large rocks that jutted into the Mediterranean sea, a landscape so magnificent that I wasn’t sure who had the starring role: the emerald waves ebbing and flowing into the shoreline, or the rocky fjords that broke them up.

It was such a magical environment, that my skin miraculously responded favorably to the sun. For the first time in my life my body darkened into a rich bronze color contrasting with locks of dirty blond hair that soon transformed into platinum strands of gold. It was as if my “Fairy Bod Mother” had visited me. Suddenly I saw myself as an attractive woman. And I was in love, and I was speaking fluent Italian.

I had never before encountered the woman I was while standing before a mirror during those days and it was very hard to see her fade as my time in Sardinia, and then Italy came to an end. The next four years I was a student at Ithaca College, and then went on to live in New York City before ending up back here in Syracuse. At times, it seems that I’ve spent the last eight years looking for that version of me that was glowing from the inside out on the beaches of Sardinia. New York State weather and the romantic endeavors of my twenties did little to reinstate that glow as any attempts to surrender myself to the sun or men have left me badly burned.

It seems that with the first nice day of each summer, I somehow forget that I am fair and freckled and should really be putting SPF on to avoid damaging my skin. For whatever reason, I convince myself that it will be different this time – that laying on a towel all day in late May is a good idea and “sun protection factors” will only hamper the sun goddess within me that has been waiting patiently to emerge if only she could find a few rays of solar splendor.

How very wrong I always end up being. Solar splendor quickly changes to solar sizzle as the day comes to an end. With a bottle of aloe in hand, I do what I can to make things better.

Similarly, I do this very same thing with men. I meet one that is seemingly wonderful and commence to invest in him without worrying too much about the consequences. As the “chase” comes to an end, so too does our relationship. With a bottle of Chardonnay in hand, I do what I can to make things better.

It amazes me that I have proven to myself time and time again that I am not built to receive large quantities of sun and that using an SPF is in my best interest. I wonder if there is such a thing as a “Spinster Protection Factor” – something I could apply before first dates that would ensure my heart won’t get broken after the first few months of getting to know someone?

Luckily, we live in a world that has started to realize how terrible the sun can be for you and even the people who easily tan are starting to change their sun-worshipping ways. This makes it easier for us white folks to carry on with our pastiness as we take precautions to protect ourselves from the effects of too much sun. A tan might look good, but it’s not always the best thing for our overall well-being.

The same can be said about a husband, at least in my case.

These days I still visit my special bathroom beach, and though I’m not laying on a blanket of white sand with a tropical beverage in my hand, I still find it plenty relaxing. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to care less about what people think about me and more about what I need to do to think positively of myself. I’ve been an athlete for nearly 15 years and it has made me appreciate my body in important ways. I no longer regard it as just a canvas that I need to paint and decorate to look good for the viewing pleasure of others – I see it as a means to an end. This body allows me to run, bike and swim – to feel myself persevere through pain, push past limits and get to know myself from the inside out in a powerful way. I know how my breathing sounds when I’m running a seven-minute mile, and I know how free I will feel if I continue running at that pace to push through moments where I thought I had to stop running or I would collapse. These things aren’t just significant to me as an athlete – they’re also good for me to know as a human living in a tough world. When I think of all this body has achieved in my life, it seems petty that I get upset with it for not tanning easily in the sun.

Now when I sip Coronas in my bathroom while applying self-tanning lotion, I use it as a time to relax with myself and honor my body for what I demand of it each day. I say hello to the beauty mark to the left of my knee, and drop by for a lengthy visit to my right trapezius muscle. I love the added bonus of finding myself a bit bronzed the next day, but I no longer do it because I feel that I have to in order to impress someone. I do it for me.

I do it because I look forward to that time spent with myself and feel proud that the process of self-tanning no longer means I’m trying to change who I am because I think I’m supposed to be a certain way. I do it because I like the woman that I have become and I don’t tell her so enough between workouts, family and career obligations. Sometimes I put too many walls up and I forget that she needs to hear it.

So here’s to a healthy glow – both inside and out. Bottoms up, walls down and bronze away!

A Tribute to the Last 40,000 Miles

2009-05-12T07:06:00.000-07:00

When we first met, I wasn’t sure it could ever work. She required so much more maintenance than I was used to, and she was much more hands on than I like to get on the first date. My father actually set us up and I didn’t have much choice but to get to know her, to listen and understand her needs and follow her lead. We spent a lot of time in my driveway those first few weeks, and she didn’t usually smell so great when we were done. Those were the first few miles on my 2000 Volkswagen Jetta.

She was a used car, with 60,000 miles on her and plenty of life left in her wheels. There was a nick here, a scratch there, but an impeccable stereo with good bass and space for six CDs at a time. That was all I needed to know.

A year and 40,000 miles into our relationship, she’d already seen me cry countless times. Draped over the steering wheel as the proverbial shoulder to cry on, I sobbed in the protective environs of my Jetta several times while working at a horrible little publishing company with more dysfunction than Dunder Mifflin. Soon after starting there as online editor, I would also splash the dash with (gross) tears of desperation as I tried to pull myself together after countless break-ups with my on-again/off-again personal trainer boyfriend. The Jetta would wait patiently while I moaned and snorted my way through a few minutes of concentrated angst, and then she’d rumble to life when I turned the key to go home. It was almost as if she were offering me her condolences as we moved along the road…

“Now, now…Did you really want to hang around and pine for someone with a lava lamp and a week’s worth of dirty dishes piling up beside his water bed?” A few quick maneuvers from second to fifth gear told me I did not.

As in all of my relationships, there came a time when I started to lose some faith in the Jetta. She was always so good to me that I didn’t know how to react when she started to become a slow drain on my bank account. Her taillights went out frequently, and I started to think she enjoyed it when the same state trooper on Route 20 pulled us over time after time.

“You realize that we spoke about this problem last week, right?” The cop asked as he peered into my car.

I always felt bad for him because I was usually pulled over late at night after coming back from my parents’ house where I spent the evening doing laundry after a long run in my old stomping grounds. As a result, I probably didn’t fit the profile of the usual suspects trolling the highways at 2:00AM with malfunctioning cars. With my laundry neatly stacked in the passenger seat, my wet hair back in a pony-tail, and NPR humming in the background, I peered over my dark framed glasses at the officer and promised him I’d have the lights checked out. Not too exciting, where cop stories are concerned.

Due to the ever-demanding maintenance the Jetta required, she earned herself the nickname Junka. Born from a blog I wrote about her in 2006 when she had just 110,000 miles on her (posted below), the nickname was a result of some ranting I felt the need to do after a series of repairs that cost me almost $1000. I once took an all-inclusive vacation to Aruba for that much money. It pained me to shell out the same amount to fix parts of my car that I’d never even see.

My relationship with the Junka wasn’t all bad, we did have many good times together. I’ve traveled to almost every triathlon I’ve ever competed in and every race I’ve ever run in that car. She’s kept my hands steady many a time as I nervously drove to each event, visualizing how it would go over and over again, anxious to know if I would be able to do as well as I’d hoped. And she was there to congratulate me with a soft seat after I crossed the finish lines, practically saying “I told you so” when I’d hang an age-group award medal from the rear-view mirror. She’s waited patiently in parking lots as I called everyone I knew to tell them how it went, while my sweat-soaked racing garments soiled her fabrics in the hot summer heat.

The Junka has taken quite a bit of abuse over the years. She’s suffered through hot coffee spills on her center console as I jerked the car to work in a hurried frenzy, and spilled barbecue sauce from late-night stops to Burger King when I needed a little snack after happy hours. She’s a potpourri of stray blonde hairs, old winter road salt, and caked off mud from running shoes that are tossed into the car without care. I seldom vacuum her or wash her out because the time and effort seemed stupid to spend on an “old car.” Though I did have her detailed once a couple of years ago when I realized that there was barbecue sauce in more places than I could reach with a toothbrush.

I’m amazed that the Junka has hung in there for so long after I wrote about her at 110,000 miles. Nearly 40,000 miles later, I’m actually sorry to see her go. In the last year she’s lost a muffler, developed an oil leak and seems to have developed “dashboard” Tourette’s syndrome, where the warning lights will randomly flicker on and off, and the needles in the gauges surge forward then back to normal with no rhyme or reason. Her key has broken in half so that I now carry around the remote end in one pocket, and the manual entry half in the other. When I lock her from the outside, she pushes out a homely, sickly honk akin to a goose with a sinus infection, perhaps. Patches of rust flake from her sides like old skin from a bad sunburn.

As I prepare to part ways with the Junka, I reflect on all the time I spent at her wheel. We’ve come a long way, so much further than the 87,000 miles we actually drove together. We’ve been through three jobs, three boyfriends and one fiancé. Ironically, just last night as I was tearing through the glove compartment to find the title to the car, I came across a piece of paper folded up – an email from my ex-fiance with directions to his place. It was the email I’d printed for the very first time I went to his house. Those directions once represented a beginning, found after almost three years in a car that was coming to an end. I couldn’t help but pause for a moment, letting myself dabble in sad.

I remind myself that when one door closes, another opens. I’ve started to come out of the long, dark funk I’ve been in since breaking my engagement. I see that life goes on, as it must. I know that not everything can last forever and sometimes you have to stop investing in something if it’s doing you more harm than good – like my engagement, like my car.

I wasn’t sure about getting a new car…dealing with another monthly payment, getting rid of something that’s become such a time capsule for my twenties…but I’m 30 now. I’ve made a lot of changes in my life in the past year, and I guess getting a new car was something that was bound to happen at some point.

I looked at lots of options – thinking that maybe I wanted an SUV – maybe the Tiguan? Or a Honda CRV? But what about something cheaper, like a Civic?

I ended up going with another Jetta, even after I was sure that I hated the 2009 model -- probably because I was convinced I ought to go with something different after so many years in the same car.

She’s a lot fancier than the Junka, and it will take a while for this new kid to develop the kind of character that the Junka had, but she is pretty spectacular and I look forward to a long relationship with her, too. Because the Jetta isn’t the kind of car you drive a couple of times and then kick to the curb. With the Jetta, you go steady. I’m looking forward to the next 87,000 miles of my life.

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Wednesday, September 20, 2006

The Volkswagen Junka

Here's a new tagline for the Jetta:

"The Jetta - For people who like to throw money into a black hole." How about this one: "Farfegbankrupten!"

True, my car and I have had a love/hate relationship from day one. I test drove it with my father in the passenger seat nearly three years ago. The test drive will be forever memorialized as the time when I demonstrated to my father how poor my stick shift skills were.

About three miles from the dealership is a gravel parking lot where I was given the simple exercise of moving the car forward just one inch at a time, so to show my father that I could take the car on the road and integrate with actual traffic (as opposed to flying down back roads where only a random squirrel would suffer the consequences of my rampant driving). I've never heard swear words combined in quite the same way as when my father braced himself on the passenger door and dashboard after a session of bucking about the parking lot in the Jetta that afternoon.

"Jesus Chr*st, Lisa. I don't have any confidence that you will ever be able to drive this car," he concluded.

Despite my apparently poor display (I was actually pretty good at this point - my friend Danielle had taught me to drive standard months ago and worked with me in a much more "serious" condition), I ended up getting the car and the Jetta and I have had a fairly decent relationship over the years, save for past few months.

Jetta has been pissing me off. To start, her exterior lights have gone out one after the other which has prompted many annoying pull-overs by the local police. Then her wiper got messed up, so that a long black strand of rubber would trail behind the rest of the blade every time I turned them on. For months my dashboard was lit up like Vegas - with every possible warning light turning on at random times for no reason. My personal favorite is the orange light shaped like an engine with a thunder bolt striking it. What exactly is that supposed to mean?

Is the car about to blow up? Am I going to be damned for driving 4,000 miles over my oil change number? It's very vague. I usually let that one go for a while before pulling into a garage to inquire. That's another thing about car troubles...

"Inquiring" about these troubles usually leads to a hefty swipe on the credit card. Turning off the orange light costs about $200 dollars. I can make it go away with a Sharpie for about 75 cents. YOU do the math.

Following all of this, I noticed my car starting to feel like a saucer sled on wet roads. It was mid-July and I lost control of my car going 40 mph on a major highway with some drizzle on it as if I were on black ice in mid-March. Upon further examination, and after my father's plea to come outside and "look at the goddamn tires," I saw that the front wheels were all shiny with little silver threads. What's the remedy? An alignment and new tires - cha-ching!

Another favorite ailment that plagues my car, is the fun game of "power window hide and go seek." The game is really short. Driver attempts to lower window using "down" button, window decides to fall inside of door and screw you with a 20 minute drive to work in the rain, yeah! Oh yeah - and cha-ching!

Finally, my brakes decided to call in sick Monday morning. While pulling out of the parking lot at my apartment, I missed mowing down the kids waiting for the school bus by about five inches when I discovered that Plan A) Brake for children, would be replaced with Plan B) Swerve to avoid hitting children. (And please note that this action has nothing to do with my prior blog, Kids Suck).

Not all of the Jetta's problems are from old age and quality German engineering. I take some of the blame for things gone wrong, because I have been known to inflict pain on the car. Backing into a boat hitch twice inside of five minutes comes to mind. And after a fight with an ex boyfriend a year ago, I attempted a fast exit in reverse out of a steep and narrow driveway, which resulted in my careening through the lawn over a grassy knoll. I removed a large portion of the earth with something underneath my car (a big, plastic black part broke off that I've since relocated to the trunk for safekeeping), moonlighting my Jetta as a backhoe.

Ah yes, me and the Jetta and the love between us. She's got 110,000 miles on her and things can only get better with time, right? Like a bottle of wine...the longer it's around, the more money it will cost you.

Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place

2009-05-05T07:53:00.000-07:00

Perhaps one of the biggest disadvantages to being single at an older age is the fact that you become so reliant on yourself, that you find it hard – and possibly even detrimental – to allow yourself to rely on anyone else. And conversely, allowing someone else to rely on you.

I was once obsessed with the idea of being in a committed relationship. I remember having a crush on a boy named Waylon as far back as Kindergarten and asking him ridiculous questions at lunch.

“If I were about to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, would you try to save me?” I’d ask.

I don’t remember what his response was, but it seemed to me that at some point I decided a man was supposed to save me in some way if he really liked me. Maybe I never learned how to rely on a guy for much of anything because Waylon decided it was fine if I went over the falls in a barrel.

Things didn’t get much better as I made my way through elementary school. In an effort to woo my crush in the fifth grade, I borrowed a pair of my older cousin’s tap shoes from her dance class. Though they were much too big for me, I wore them over a thick pair of socks and click-clacked my way past his desk en route to the pencil sharpener, pausing dramatically to see if he’d noticed me when I got there. He did not, but my teacher seemed to take issue with tap shoes in the classroom and I was asked not to wear them again.

By middle school I was well into my three-year phase of sporting a bowl cut – something my mother plagued me with for as long as she could before I started to take more interest in my appearance. Many of the girls in my grade were starting to pair up with boys, declaring themselves as “girlfriends” and it became clear to those of us without boyfriends that we were huge dorks. The bowl cut didn’t help, nor did the fact that other girls were starting to get boobs while I began to enjoy the nickname “Flatware” from boys who teased me – and not because they were flirting with me.

In high school I realized that the serious relationship was not something that would happen to me any time soon, and set out to find other ways to become noticed in lieu of being romantically linked to someone who was “cool” or “popular.”

Eventually, I would graduate from high school with a reputation for being a good singer, a humorous girl, and a strong track runner. Though during my senior year I finally got to kiss the boy who sat near the pencil sharpener in the fifth grade, we never became more than friends and I left high school still lacking the experience of a committed relationship. What’s more, the guy that I was probably closest to through most of high school eventually came out of the closet and declared he was gay. Thus, the man issues continued.

As an exchange student the very next year, I finally found love in Italy with a boy, who like me, had never been romantically involved with anyone before. I came to enjoy the idea of being someone’s girlfriend, though I have to admit that experiencing these things with Northern Italy as the back-drop may have set the bar a little high for the rest of my life.

Case in point, my Italian boyfriend and I broke up after I came back to the United States and dating in college proved to be an utter disappointment in comparison. It didn’t help that the very next boyfriend I had was a self-indulgent baseball player from Boca Raton who whisked me away to the Bahamas for a weekend after which his girlfriend from another school found out and made him introduce her to me. I became painfully aware of what a broken heart felt like.

During the rest of my college years I would go through an assortment of awful dating experiences, including another emotional interlude with pencil-sharpener boy from high school, a grown man who still used the word “mommy,” and a boyfriend who I was seconds away from kissing for the first time before we were in a horrific car accident that resulted in several injuries and the death of someone in the car. I graduated college in pretty much the same condition that I’d graduated high school. A well-rounded woman in many areas, save for the long-term relationship.

Through four years of high school and four years in college, I had girlfriends who were always somehow “officially” attached to men. I’ve been marinating in conversations of love, anniversaries and commitment for more than a decade now and only in my late twenties did I finally come to peace with the fact that I was just not having those same experiences. It used to bother me a great deal because I felt that I was missing out on something, that I wasn’t able to truly be a grown up without that strong bond to a man. I had some more serious relationships with a few guys after college, but they proved to be their usual dysfunctional experiences in the end (one guy was reading my journals and hacking into my email, another was a pot-smoking verbally abusive loser, and the other was an alcoholic from West Point who used the word “ain’t” in every sentence. I could go on about him, but it would exceed the PG rating I try to maintain for this blog).

My past has taught me that being in a relationship isn’t always the key to finding stability. While my friends seemed to have thrived and grown as women while in their relationships, I actually was at my best when I was NOT in a relationship. This gave me time to indulge in all sorts of soul-searching activity, the least of which was running and training for triathlon – both things that made me feel strong, empowered and worthwhile. I had an identity: Maybe I wasn’t anyone’s girlfriend, but I was an athlete. I was focused on making myself into the best ME I could be.

Since I could never rely on any of the guys I was involved with for much else than a guaranteed argument and the occasional dinner date, I started to regard men as extraneous entities in my life. They were like chew toys for a dog – if one was hurled my way, it might have piqued my curiosity to play with it for a while, but I’d eventually get bored and move on. If another dog came along to chew on the toy I may have convinced myself I needed it back again, but I always got over it.

When I was engaged I felt that I’d finally found a path away from dysfunction because my fiancé was everything that my previous boyfriends were not – he was polite, responsible, professional, and respectful. I finally felt like I was with someone that I could rely on – someone I even started to rely on, until it became apparent that there were some hurdles in our relationship that we couldn’t get over. Tempting as it was to ignore those hurdles and continue on with the bliss of being a bride-to-be, I am not trained to stay in a relationship for stability’s sake and I had to end it. I’ve never had a rock, but I’ve always had myself.

I realize that I have had to be my own rock, and maybe that’s not always a great thing.

The allure of going through with my wedding and living happily ever after was hard to walk away from. It felt like a diss to the girl that has cried herself to sleep so many times since grade school when nobody would come to find me during the slow songs at school dances, when I went to the prom with a friend instead of my crush, when holidays came around year after year and my friends shared stories of their significant others’ gifts and family get-togethers and travel plans. Each time I wondered when it would be my turn, and then it was…and then it wasn’t anymore.

While some women find comfort in their families – their husbands and children – I still turn to the tried and true miles that wait for heavy shoes to find them as I move silently over the terrain to find my rock. Running brings an inner peace that slowly makes its way through my core, diluting my worries with a simple, “Shh…” as I feel myself unwind from within, relaxing to the realization that I can access this kind of stability any time I want to, and it doesn’t require anyone but me.

I’ve started dating someone new and the relationship has been moving into more serious territory, the kind where we should “be there” for each other.

It’s come to my attention, that I might have work to do in that area. It’s not that I’m selfish and don’t think of what someone's needs might be, it’s that my relationship experience has never required me to be someone’s rock.

I’ve never been in a relationship with someone where we are both willing to share our inner most thoughts and feelings, and have conversations that require each person to really try and authentically understand what the other person is saying.

I’m not sure if this is part of being someone’s rock, and them becoming yours, but it’s the first time that I’ve ever been able to discuss raw emotional feelings with someone with such ease – and I need that in order to trust someone enough to ever rely on them. The absence of this ability in my engagement is what caused me to end it and move on. I don’t feel that two people can be truly connected if they withhold some part of themselves from the other – no matter what that part is, or how painful it may be to share it. I think of it like the Carfax services…how are you to know how a vehicle will run and the maintenance it may require to be at its best if you don’t know its history and what you’re dealing with? What may seem like a minor detail in the car’s history may come back later to cause engine failure and then nobody is going anywhere. But if you’d known about it sooner, things could have been done to prevent that from happening.

It has been more than a year since my wedding date was postponed, and nine months since the engagement was officially broken. It has seemed like a long and impossible road to travel and many of my closest relationships were tested during that time. Some of them didn’t survive and it has made me even more aware of how much I’ve come to rely on myself for stability in this world.

I know I have to learn to let go a little bit, and trust that there is someone in the world that wants to be there for me who believes I am equipped to be there for them. My relationships won’t always feel as one-sided and dysfunctional as they have in the past, and while it’s good that I can be my own rock, I don’t think I need to continue fighting the opportunities to experience what a truly healthy relationship could be like. I never thought of being there for myself as a bad thing, until I realized that it just might be getting in the way of letting someone else be there for me too.

Do Peeps Give You the Creeps?

2009-04-06T09:10:00.000-07:00

If you're ever totally clueless as to what time of the year it is, just take a stroll through your local grocery store. There is always some kind of themed candy being hawked invariably in the direct path to the nearest check-out line. So came the realization that Easter is just around the corner, after a little run-in with some Peeps last night in grocery store.

Am I the only one that is totally freaked out by Peeps? Is there a more disturbing candy than a Peep? I contend that there is not. How lazy was the artist that decided a baby chicken's body should 1) be made of marshmallow, and 2) be comprised of nothing but a large brown eye and a huge swooping ass. Top that off with a neon yellow sugary coating and yeah – I'm thinking baby chick. What did the Just Born manufacturing company say on the morning that the creative team rolled in with the first Peep?

"Whoa, folks. The resemblance to an actual baby chick here is uncanny. The Cadbury Egg will be a thing of the past, let's jam this cash cow into the nearest Easter basket, STAT!"

Apparently they were onto something though because people seem to love Peeps. Don't ask me why, because I think they are totally nasty. The only candy that could beat them in a Gross-Off would be the pastel orange Circus Peanut, which is another marshmallow goody that has the texture and consistency of a Pink Pet eraser.

I hear people talk about eating their Peeps in various stages of decay. Some like to leave them out for two weeks before biting into them, others wait way longer – knowing their perseverance will pay off when biting into the Peep will actually produce a crunching sound. Um, it's marshmallow…it's not meant to make crunching sounds unless it became part of a Smores, OK?

Then you have your recreational Peeps users. These are the people that were always told to stop playing with their food when they were younger. According to Wikipedia, blowing up Peeps for fun is a regular pastime. Behold the marvels of "Peep Jousting" (as described under Alternative Uses on the Peeps page as per Wikipedia):

The messy and largely self-entertaining game, "Peep Jousting" is played with a microwave. One takes two Peeps, and licks the right-hand side of each until sticky. A toothpick is thereby adhered to each Peep, pointing forward like a jousting lance. The Peeps are then set in a microwave, squared off against one another, and heated up. As they expand, the toothpick lances thrust toward each opponent, and the winner is the one that does not pop and deflate. There have been many confirmed deaths of peeps. Ties (both fatal and harmless) are common. Both usually are eaten after the competition, however, regardless who the victor was, calling into question the nature of "winning" in such a circumstance. This folkloric tradition has been noted by the Washington Post. Rumors of Peeps' purported indestructibility have evolved into a veritable myth that has come to define the product's place in the lore of pop-culture ephemera. In an effort to establish this legend as fact or fiction, scientists at Emory University performed experiments on batches of Peeps to see whether they could be dissolved. They concluded that the candy is indeed difficult to destroy, according to CNN reports.

The talk of Peeps being indestructible brings to mind the similar cases made about Twinkies. Isn't it strange to anyone else that both of these soft, yellow substances appear to have an infinite lifespan? Do you really want to put something like this in your body? I can picture it now…I swallow a Peep and there it is in my stomach planning its revenge. It will stand up and take note of its new environs with that gigantic brown eye and start walking back up my esophagus until it reaches the larynx upon which it will choke me. I'll take the Cadbury Egg, thanks.

Unfortunately, just because you run into a few boxes of Peeps in the grocery store it doesn't necessarily mean Easter is coming up. Just Born expanded upon its initial creation to include Peeps for all seasons. From the scary ghosts of Halloween, to the jolly snowmen of Christmas, to the smitten teddy bears of Valentine’s Day – there is a sugarcoated swooping ass for every occasion. Aren’t we the lucky ones?

* This blog was originally published on my MySpace profile on March 21, 2007

Single at 30: Time to Switch Teams?

2009-03-30T05:33:00.001-07:00

Recently I experienced a Saturday that I can safely say was very much out of the ordinary. I spent my afternoon at a dodgeball tournament, and my evening at a gay bar.

I haven’t been involved with dodgeball since I was in sixth grade, save for the many times I’ve watched the movie about the beloved elementary school sport starring Ben Stiller. Based on that, I was expecting to see squads of muscular men hurling wrenches at one another to prepare for the event, but in actuality many of them opted to simply drink beer from a can while placing brightly colored sweatbands on their heads and wrists. Most teams were comprised of the kinds of guys that probably do something “officially athletic” (re: someone’s keeping the score) only a couple times per year, and looked as though they were wearing the first T-shirt and pair of mesh shorts they could find. There were a few serious contenders on the scene though, and one guy with a buzz cut that seemed particularly threatening and probably started most of his sentences with the word, “Son.”

The tournament was held in a school gym, which made it feel somehow wrong to be drinking beer atop the bleachers amid random posters made from construction paper promoting the school’s “anti-bullying” policy, but then I’d drank beer many times beneath the bleachers in my own high school, so I warmed up to the idea. The format of the tournament was that each team got to play until it lost three games, and then the two teams that wound up on top got to play for the championship. I was there to support a team of my co-workers who almost immediately lost two games, but then managed to pull out a win so to prolong their inevitable loss in the tournament.

Carrying our team was a random substitute player the referee scrounged up at the last minute to round out the six guys the team needed to play. My friend Mariel and I cheered loudly and obnoxiously for him, as only women drinking Budweiser from the bleachers can, screaming “Go Ed!” to the substitute. We learned later his actual name was Ben.

If you’ve ever wanted to see a grown man freak out at full capacity, you should get yourself to a dodgeball tournament. One of the rules is that your foot cannot cross the center line on the court of play when you throw the ball at the opponents. If you hit someone with the ball and your foot was even an inch over the line, it doesn’t count. Being that this wasn’t exactly an ESPN-sponsored event and most participants were drinking beer all afternoon, the referees didn’t catch everything that was happening – but the spectators sure did. The “sweatbands” team happened to catch an over-the-liner while watching two other teams play, and proceeded to call the ref out on his negligence with the kind of anger usually reserved for things like “blackouts on TV during the Super Bowl.”

Last year’s defending champions ended up winning the tournament again, and a buffet of pizza and wings was unfurled in the gym to conclude the event.

I didn’t think I would feel like going out that night having spent my afternoon drinking crappy beer, but my friend Mariel convinced me to meet her downtown to watch an artist she wanted to see performing. I agreed, with the caveat that we had to end up at the gay bar to go dancing.

A month or so ago, it was Mariel’s birthday and a bunch of people were out celebrating. After many martinis, a group of us decided we felt like dancing and ended up at the “college bar” on a Saturday night dancing in a sea of sweaty, rude students to songs I did not know the words to, and beats that did not make sense to my body (I should mention that few moves outside of the power fist and running man make sense to my body when I’m dancing, but I digress).

The experience left me feeling happily too old to partake in the college go-out scene, but with an insatiable need to dance. Recalling an episode of Sex in the City where Charlotte goes to the gay bar to dance herself crazy, I decided that I too needed to go where I knew the music would be good and the people would be fun.

I knew the moment I arrived at the club later that night that I had found my happy place. “Disco Inferno” was playing, mirror balls were whirling, and many people were power-fisting to the music (that was not a pun).

I made my way back to the main dance area and for a half an hour straight, I danced to songs I knew the words to and felt the kind of calm that only a Britney remix paired with Cosmopolitans can make one feel. And how freeing it was to be able to move about without having to peel layers of inebriated men off of my Seven jeans -- because I should not be able to tell what scent of AXE Effect someone has on without consenting to it. This time nobody was crossing the line into my personal space, and it was refreshing.

But wait…is that girl giving me “the eyes?”

That’s when things started to get weird. I’m no stranger to being hit on, since all it usually takes at 12:00AM in a place where the music is too loud to talk is eye contact lasting for longer than three seconds, but I found myself momentarily confused by this girl that was quite obviously taking an interest in me. I’m also not a stranger to communicating my explicit non-interest in guys that cross the line with me on the bar scene, but this girl was tripping me up. She was respecting my space, despite her optometric solicitations for further interaction. She had me hiding behind my long hair, taking a peek between my bangs just long enough to see if she was still staring at me. It felt like I was a child peering through the door of my blanket fort to make sure my mom wasn't going to come into the living room and give me hell for dismantling the sofa again (those cushions made the best blanket-fort walls!).

For starters, she looked more or less exactly like me. Long blonde hair, average build, same height. Add to that the fact that she was stealing almost all of my moves AND my dance pout, and I couldn’t feign one more second of indifference.

She was working the dance floor from every angle. Breaking it down to J-Lo near the pool table, then flitting over to the stage area for Kelly Clarkson’s “My Life Would Suck Without You.” When Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” came on, I was coquettishly dancing in place (for fear that any movement in her general direction would give her the green light to totally get in my space and challenge everything I believe to know about my sexuality), but I was not able to stay there long.

You see, the girl continued walking past me shrugging her shoulders and giving me the “I invite you to a dance-off” face, which is apparently a turn-on for me from any sex. I can’t stay still when someone is inviting me to “bring it” and I know that I can. Not only that I can, but also because it is more like a sense of urgency – like I MUST bring it. I become far too excited to remain calm. To me, a good Duran Duran song inspires the kind of enthusiasm that third-graders get when they hear there’s a snow day.

By the time “Poker Face” ended, a remix of the Tings Tings’ “That’s Not My Name” came on (did I mention I love the gay bar?) and the square foot of space I was occupying was no longer big enough to contain me. Like microwaving spaghetti sauce, I was about to bust all over that place in a fury of splattering movements.

I got on stage and started throwing out elbows as if I were alone. Split fingers were gliding smoothly over my eyes, then dissolving into jazz hands somewhere near my hips. Enter the triple hair toss somewhere thereafter, and it was on.

It didn’t take long for my female admirer to join me and we danced together for one song (ironically it was the “Hot and Cold” song by Katy Perry) She took my hand and twirled me around, then laughed and said, “this is where it’s at, girlfriend!” While I did not “taste her cherry chap-stick,” as the aforementioned artist would have suggested, I did smile at her lots and was having the best time out that I’ve had in a while.

By the time I got home, it was nearly 3:00AM. For someone that seldom stays up past 11:00PM even on the weekends, this was extraordinarily out of the norm for me. It’s not that I don’t like to be out having a good time, it’s more that I’ve gotten tired of the bar scene over the years and have learned to invest my time in other things that fulfill me – like training for triathlon, which requires early nights to bed and early mornings in the pool, on the bike or out in the running shoes. These are the things that have come to make me feel good about myself, and the things that I can invest in knowing full well I’ll get something out of them.

It has been a long time since I’ve gotten anything out of a $50 bar tab and a hung-over Sunday morning. To be honest, the best thing about that investment always seemed to be the “these calories don’t count” mentality I engaged in the next morning while mowing through greasy breakfast platters with my friends at the local diner.

What I took away from this random Saturday was that it doesn’t matter what team you’re on – whether it’s in dodgeball or dating, it’s all about having a good time, and not crossing the line!

Barbie at 50 – Iconic and Ironic

2009-03-23T12:26:00.001-07:00

There has been much in the media about Barbie’s 50th birthday, as our favorite 11 and a half-inch style icon hits a milestone. I’ve read some interesting articles about Barbie pertaining to “spinsterhood” with regard to the fact that Barbie has managed to remain single even as she reaches the half-century line. (I suspect that many girls will contest that Barbie did in fact marry, and many times. I myself spent countless afternoons dragging her perfectly stiletto-ed toes along a makeshift aisle on my carpet at the end of which was a Ken propped up awaiting her arrival. Then I would choreograph their perfectly vertical bodies through a ceremony deeming them “man and wife”).

As many young girls likely concluded, it would only be natural for Barbie to marry Ken. After all, he was sold alongside the Barbie Dream House and Barbie Corvette, as items that Barbie needed to have in order to maintain her perpetually smiling face.

I played Barbies in quite a few circles when I was younger, and it always ended up the same way. You could count on two things: The first is that your best friend would immediately call “shot gun” on hairdresser for her Barbie’s job (a coveted position because it meant you basically got to be in charge of your friend’s Barbie’s hair), and the second is that the afternoon of Barbie-play would always lead to a wedding.

Mattel’s “doll du jour” did more than make me recall the ins and outs of playing Barbies and the time I spent marching her around my bedroom amid the accoutrements of a perfect life. It made me think about how my own success story was forming when I was only nine years old.

At that age, I think playing Barbies with each other is a way for girls to manifest their feelings on what life ought to be like as they grow up. They’re just beginning to identify themselves as “women” and as women among women, “peers.” The landscape of their Barbies’ lives emulates what they know about their own lives and ultimately where they think they should be going. Based on this, I think most young girls conclude that they’re supposed to get married.

The problem with this is that nobody ever counters the idea of a wedding with any thoughts on how it might not be right for Barbie. Young girls don’t say, “You know, my Barbie is kind of sick of dating and she’d really like to spend her time traveling and writing and not worry about her biological clock. And also, she’s tired of doing your Barbie’s hair. She’s going to go work at an advertising agency in business development. Peace out.”

Young girls have also never snatched their Barbie out of a wedding after all of the set-up was complete gasping, “My Barbie’s gut instinct says this isn’t right and she can’t go through with it!”

Much work had to be done for the Barbie wedding, and it would have been pretty upsetting if the event had been hampered in any way. Seating was already arranged (Kleenex boxes were gathered from all corners of the house and lined up as “pews” for whatever random dolls had to be called in as extras for the festivities). Your friend, the hairdresser in Barbie-ville, had already spent hours brushing your Barbie’s hair into the perfect ponytail for her nuptials. Barbie’s best clothes and accessories were taken out of the very special case you kept your most sacred toys in, and festooned upon her as she prepared to walk the aisle to a tuxedo-ed Ken whose lines were already written for him…(Ken’s vows were always some combination of what we wish boys in fifth grade would have said to us, and our interpretation of tidbits we’d catch from the soap operas our mothers watched).

The point is that to disrupt what we as young girls had already accepted as “normal” in our afternoon microcosms, was to challenge what we would later perceive as acceptable behavior from our peers growing up.

Young girls romanticizing what their lives should be like via Barbie dolls and other “fairytale” networks is nothing new, but I never thought about how ironic it is that the very doll that has done so much to inspire young girls to believe that they should accomplish certain things in their lives to become successful, is the same doll that I’ve been reading about as the “ultimate spinster” on her 50th birthday.

I wonder what would have happened if one afternoon my mother knocked on the door during a Barbie wedding ceremony and dropped the bomb on us that Barbie actually didn’t want it that way? That she would go on to be the same stylish and successful icon she’s always been WITHOUT a Ken by her side and a “Mrs” before her name. Would we have still been drawn toward the fuchsia aisle in the toy store if our perception of Barbie went from “beautiful bride with a dream house” to “independent woman who listens to her gut instincts?” It’s an interesting thought.

Of course Barbie isn’t the only thing out there giving young girls the notion that they should grow up to be “have-it-all housewives.” The Easy Bake Oven has been hawking the home-making dream for decades now, and Cabbage Patch kids have young girls excited about baby clothes about 10 minutes after they stop wearing Onesies. Throw in the whole “self-esteem” problem where girls start looking for “favorable male reactions” to validate their entire existence, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster that even a Stepford Wife couldn’t fix with an arsenal of secret ingredients.

I’m inspired by the idea that Barbie is in fact a spinster. I’m inspired because I have fond memories of those afternoons playing Barbies with my friends – afternoons where I dumped all of Barbie’s belongings onto my floor, uprooting her life and sorting through her things haphazardly to prepare her for a date with Ken – and that despite the mess that was sometimes made, she came out alright. And so did I.

*Image courtesy of Getty Images

Etiquette – Not Just For the Dinner Table

2009-03-17T08:13:00.000-07:00

In the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing a lack of manners in a variety of situations. In no particular order, I wanted to share my observations with the hope that some of this rude behavior might be corrected. Most people can pull together a basic set of manners when they’re in a formal dining situation, but I think it’s important to recognize that etiquette goes beyond the salad fork and the bread plate.

The Bathroom

I know there are men out there who believe the women’s bathroom is a place of powdered noses and eyelash curlers, but I’m sorry to say that it’s not. Lately I’ve been opening the stall door and asking myself if I’ve mistakenly walked into the men’s room because there seems to be a trend with women urinating on the toilet seat.

I understand that us women have to get creative when we’re using public bathrooms that seem to be negligent in their hygienic maintenance – rather than place our bare skin on any questionable surfaces, we opt for a quick thigh workout and perform a balancing act over the toilet bowl that could pass for an audition to be in Cirque du Soleil. Be that as it may, there is no excuse for finishing your business and then leaving it behind for the next person to discover. If you tinkle on the seat, wipe it with a sheet (Let’s all commit this to memory by way of the cute rhyme).

The Theater

While recently attending a play, I found myself momentarily removed from the world on stage after noticing a small stream of sound coming from behind me to the left. It was as if the playwright had penned in parenthesis after one of the leading character’s most dramatic lines:

“Insert crinkling M&Ms wrapper here.”
“Cue annoying blonde chick to start talking about Facebook stalking again.”

In case you weren’t a musical theater geek in high school like I was, with a chorus teacher who preached etiquette to us as often as she ran scales, let me be the one to tell you that making extraneous noise in the theater while a show is going on is super rude. If you must fuss with wrappers and other noisy items, you should wait until a louder scene is being performed – preferably something where a cannon might go off, or several people break out in song during a large musical number that will dilute your fidgeting into irrelevance. Otherwise you should sit still and enjoy the show like everyone else manages to do. Or leave.

The Parking Lot

The other day I pulled into the parking lot at the store and was gathering my things to get out of the car. Just as I was about to open the door, a truck rounded the corner to park in the space right beside me. This wasn’t an issue until I realized he’d left me only five inches to open my door and slide myself out of the front seat. What made it worse, was the driver looked across the passenger seat of his truck and directly into my eyes, before he decided there was no problem. He got out and walked away from his vehicle with no concern for the fact that I was desperately trying to shove myself through the small crevice between my car and the door. Since my body has a girth that is larger than a sheet of paper, it would have been nice for him to see the panic in my eyes as my non-verbal communication begged for more space. I probably could have made it through the opening, but would have definitely had to slide my body down the side of the car for a good two feet before I could clear the door.

If you know anything about upstate New York in March, you would know that you do whatever it takes not to make contact with the outside of your car lest you want to be covered in a special kind of dust made from the salt, dirt, and powdered debris that stays faithfully stuck to your vehicle for the entire winter season.

The parking lot is a fairly easy concept, people. There are two yellow lines, and you pull the car in between them. The yellow lines are wider than the outlines they put in coloring books for a one-year old. The margin of error is two feet! This shouldn’t be a challenging task, so let’s park between the lines, not on top of them.

The Gym

Ah, the gym. It’s almost as if donning Lycra and sweating in public gives you carte blanche on all things polite. Stand at the water fountain for long enough, and behold the parade of ball-scratching, wedgy-picking, nose-wiping individuals who will amble past you to place their salty, sticky bodies onto the surfaces of all of your favorite machines (and then walk away without wiping them down). It’s not the hygiene factor that irritates me the most though – it’s the sense of entitlement I notice from the benches of the locker-room to the lane lines in the pool.

The other day I was changing after my swim, and was taking up about two feet on the bench. My bag was placed beside me and I was routing through it for various articles of clothing. A woman approached the bench, set her things down, and proceeded to pick up my bag and place it on the floor so she could place her items in the same spot. Confused by this, I apologized for apparently taking up so much space on the bench, despite the fact that she was now occupying three-quarters of its total surface area. She said nothing back to me. The same woman would later use the blow-driers provided in the gym to dry her feet, but that’s a story for a different blog.

Other times in the locker room I will find myself leaving and nearly running into someone in the hallway because they are barreling down the middle of the walkway without any concern for “oncoming traffic.” While I’m flattening myself and my many satchels of gear to the wall to avoid being knocked over, this person continues to walk by as if I was inconveniencing her by using the same hallway in and out of the locker-room.

Basic etiquette resides in two simple words: “Pardon me.” A simple “Pardon me” as the woman moved past me would have immediately changed my attitude to this situation. It would imply that she is somewhat accountable for her reckless walking. That’s all I’m looking for, a little accountability for one’s actions.

The Door

I have a theory that you can tell if a person is a jerk by the way they deal with the door. Most everyone knows to hold a door open if you are approaching it with someone. If it’s a woman and a man, old-fashioned tradition says that the man will open the door for the woman. Or if someone is carrying many items, the other person will open the door. However it plays out, one person opens the door while the other enters.

But that isn’t what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the gray area where two people approach a door, and the first person will likely make it in the door just as the second person arrives to it.

The problem with the “gray area” is that the person is at an awkward distance away from you. If you stand and hold the door open, you’ll be there for a minute and could come off like some kind of weird stalker-type as you stare at the person advancing toward the door. In that scenario, you could look away while you’re holding the door open, but then you risk looking like you have one million things that are better to do that taking a couple minutes out of your day to be polite. The other option is to go in the door and let it close. Then you have to deal with the awkwardness once the person makes it inside with you and they give you the look.

The “Really? You’re so busy that you couldn’t hold the door open an extra second?” look.

My feeling is that if you’re the kind of person that can take a couple of seconds out of your day to hold the door open for the person coming in the building after you, then you’re alright in my book. It’s simply polite to do this when the alternative is to basically let a door “gently slam” in the face of another person.

A Wino at the Gyno

2009-03-02T13:38:00.000-08:00

The female wellness appointment is perhaps one of my least favorite times of the year, second only to Valentine’s Day and Halloweens where my thighs are too large to wear sexy costumes. Somehow I was hoping that the appointment would be less miserable now that I’m 30, but it turns out even my gynecologist wanted to weigh in on my sordid lifestyle.

The whole appointment started with the usual stack of stupid forms to be filled out (even though they have a whole folder filled with my forms, filled out exactly the same for the past 10 years). I sat on a paisley couch next to a woman who chatted loudly on her cell phone as she worked with someone on the other end of the line to provide as much detail on her forms as she possibly could. I know this because I heard most of the details parroted back as she scribbled them down. Many of the words she was using suggested to me that the call should have been made in a more private place – but at the gynecologist I guess women just feel that “it’s all out on the table” anyway, so who cares about editing our symptoms whilst we speak about them in front of complete strangers.

Complimenting the blatant absence of etiquette in the waiting room is an interior design treatment that is screaming for a makeover. I’m not sure who signed off on the look and feel, but they clearly had a thing for large fruit, Elizabethan fashion and windmills. I can see how fruit might relate to a woman’s womb, and lacey corsets are feminine, but what does a windmill have to do with my reproductive system? To be honest, the first thing I think of when I see a windmill is Don Quixote. There is something disturbing when you are single, 30, and sitting in the gynecologist’s office with “The Impossible Dream” stuck in your head.

Back on the paisley couch, I have burned through three forms by dragging my pen through a series of boxes indicating my answer was “No” to all of the questions. I know from jiggering with these boxes in the past, that nobody even reads them because I’ve provided some information in these areas on things I felt were worthy of additional explanation and the doctor didn’t inquire about any of them.

The area that I always seem to be questioned about is my alcohol consumption. I always mark the same thing on my forms, which is the truth: I have two or three glasses of wine each day. My night sweats, irregular heart rhythms, anxiety disorders and psychic big toe yield zero follow-up questions – but the fact that I can drink a small bottle of wine on my own on a Wednesday evening seems to be a major concern.

“Would you say that you are consuming a lot of alcohol?” the doctor asks me.

“I would say that I’m consuming two to three glasses per day.” I repeat my answer from the form.

“And is this fairly normal for you?” he probes.

“Yes. It happens daily.” Redundant. Tick, tock, tick, tock. I am here on my lunch hour, you know.

This response usually isn’t enough and I feel the need to augment my answer with some background information. I can tell from the curious nature of the doctor’s voice that he expects to hear something about how I used to drink more than three glasses of wine per day until I tired of blacking out every night, so I scaled it back to just two. Instead I provide a very uninteresting rationale.

“I usually have one while I’m preparing dinner. Since dicing up vegetables takes so long and I like to prep my own meals rather than microwave them, this can easily last through the first glass of wine. Glass number two is consumed with dinner. I usually make something very good that lends itself to a glass of wine. After dinner I continue my evening with an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, or perhaps some American Idol. Both of which merit the consumption of a third glass of wine. Then I go to bed and read, that is, if the words haven’t begun to blur on the page.”

The conversation ends there and moves on to more pressing issues like my relationship status.

This is a personal favorite of mine these days, and it’s especially fun to talk about with my doctor since I’ve gone from being single, to engaged, to spinster all while coming to the same guy for my annual visits. I cringe when the nurse smiles at me and simply asks, “marital status?” Why does the status have to default to “marital”? What does being married or not have to do with the well-being of my female organs? I wish the doctor would just cut to the chase and ask me something like, “Are your ovaries smiling?“ Then I could respond with, “No, they are not smiling today. They are hoping for a suitable candidate to come along and provide them with the means to create a human inside so I can carry on with the business of becoming a PODS unit for a nuclear family.”

Drawing the conclusion that I will remain sexually active in my newly single state, I feel further degraded when the doctor goes into the same spiels about safe sex that I heard when I was 25. As if I’m trolling MySpace looking for a flavor of the week and need to be reminded of the consequences.

They say “all is well that ends well,” and my annual appointments usually do, save for the lectures I get about doing regular self-breast examinations. My visits always end with the gifting of “breast exam” chotchkies. Usually it’s a plastic card that hangs on a showerhead like a do-not-disturb sign, showing the correct way to move one’s fingers about the breast to find any abnormalities. I leave the office with good intentions to do these kinds of activities faithfully each month, but the card has yet to see the inside of my shower. Perhaps if this information could make it onto the label of a wine bottle I could work it into my schedule.

Single and the Spreadsheet

2009-02-23T11:38:00.000-08:00

When I graduated from college seven years ago, the HBO series “Sex in the City” was in the middle of its six-season stronghold on American women. The show offered a sequined utopia of self-indulgence wherein its characters frolicked amid their drama in designer fashions, quipping “the meaning of life” with sentences just small enough to fit into their wristlets (save for Carrie Bradshaw – whose introspective monologues wove the show together and served as a theme from one adventure to the next). The show was entertaining to watch, and for many women (including myself) it served as a sort of support group for the single women slaying dragons on the dating scene – turning otherwise awful experiences into an anecdotal archive between friends who routinely shared their stories with each other over coffee and cosmos. It became acceptable to screw up your life, so long as you could summarize the lessons learned and live by the mantra, “when life gives you lemons, make martinis and be fabulous.”

I was quickly aware of the fact that while the show was very honest in its portrayal of women, dating and their emotions – it did not offer a realistic image of a single woman living on a budget, trying to simultaneously make ends meet and look good doing it. For one, the show’s main character, columnist Carrie Bradshaw, lived in a “rent-controlled” apartment. For all that I could tell when I lived in the city, rent-controlled apartments seemed to be an urban legend. I’d never seen one for myself, and even if I was aware of one existing, legend has it that they are very tough to get your hands on if you aren’t in the right type of network (i.e. friends or family of the current tenants). For two, my entry-level position in advertising provided the annual starting salary of about $25,000. These two facts were enough to keep me from being disillusioned by the reality of “the city” that set the stage for the characters I so desperately wanted to emulate in my early twenties.

And so it went, I was in New York City living as a single woman with a low-paying job, supported by the only man in my life at the time – my father. Over the course of the next five years, I realized that the city life (the reality version of it anyway) was not for me and I eventually moved back to the Syracuse area where my money went a lot further. I was grateful to my father for helping me out while I was in Manhattan, but I was ready to move into my mid-twenties as a financially independent woman.

Over the past few years I have steadily increased my income and I’ve made some progress with money despite the obvious setbacks of breaking an engagement and dealing with a recession. In an effort to get a better handle on my budget in these tough economic times, last night my father helped me to prepare a financial statement. It’s pretty depressing to divvy up your life over a list of line items in a spreadsheet – but important to realize how much of your money is spoken for before you can even think about spending $12 on a martini. In a way it makes a show like “Sex in the City” a nice break from the grind of real life – but it also makes a show like this into a potentially dangerous message for young women (and men), and not just the ones in the city.

We’re taught by shows like this that we can have it all. It doesn’t matter if you have someone to split expenses with, or a job that supports the lifestyle you want to live, or money in the bank for “just in case” scenarios. We should feel entitled to get the things we want (and that society says we should want) even if we can’t afford them because, darn it all, we deserve them. But the reality is, you can’t have it all – you can have what your “discretionary income” allows you to have. You can budget, save, and plan for the life that you want to have and hope for the best. It’s not Sex and the City; it’s Single and the Spreadsheet.

In Single and the Spreadsheet, life is a little bit different. There is no line item for expensive whims. “Break-up Fendis” and “I had to have them” Christian Louboutin shoes do not exist in the Single and the Spreadsheet world. Expensive whims in my world include things like organic arugula and kosher salt. My exotic vacations can be summed up by the line item for Netflix in my financial statement – where for $14.95 a month I can enjoy a bevy of foreign films like “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” allowing me to listen to a couple of hours of Spanish while reading subtitles to understand a complex love triangle unfolding on the beaches of Mexico (the experience is augmented by a six-pack of Corona, and throwing my flip-flopped feet onto the coffee table. Beach towel seat cover is optional).

In Single and the Spreadsheet, the line item for my vehicle as an asset and my triathlon bike as an asset are within $500 of each other (after this winter, the bike may trump the car for top value), and my calculated net worth could probably afford me Carrie Bradshaw’s left shoe.

The point is that being single is not as glamorous as the sets and screenwriting of shows like “Sex and the City” would have you believe. It’s not even appealing when my married friends say they’d like to live vicariously through me as I embark on the dating scene again. Let’s be honest: nobody likes the dating scene, they like the positive outcome that may be attributed to the dating scene in the long run. The dating scene is like grad school. You just do it so you can get an MBA and hopefully a better job afterward. You put up with it because it’s a means to an end. Like dating, it costs money, takes time, and feels like a lot of stalling to get on to the “real world.” Only sadists like the dating scene. More to the point are comments like “I can’t imagine being out there again.” A former friend said this to me years ago. With no man, no house, and no one to split up expenses with, it was as if I’d been exiled to some kind of “Survivor” challenge, and in a way, it sort of feels like that. The difference is that there isn’t a production crew waiting off the camera to clean up the mess for me. And there’s no real reward for “surviving” single life, other than bragging rights and an ironclad sense of pride.

As a single woman now in my thirties, I’m getting used to hearing of my coupled counterparts and their investments and adventures. New houses, new babies, family vacations, etc. At times I feel that living alone in an apartment at the age of 30 means that I’ve somehow gone backwards in my life, but my spreadsheet has apparently told me otherwise. Looking through all the figures with my father last night, there was something oddly calming in his reaction (he was surprised to find that I was better off than he had originally anticipated!). The bad news is that I have a lot of expenses that I’m responsible for all on my own with a limited budget, and it will be that way for the foreseeable future. The good news is that I’m succeeding. I might not be able to raise a glass of Dom Perignon to that, but I can always raise the corners of my mouth and remain optimistic as I’m getting through this in one piece (and if I may say so myself, I don’t think I look half bad doing it).

An Open Letter to My Skinny Jeans

2009-02-11T08:14:00.001-08:00

Dear Skinny Jeans,

Please stop taunting me. I tried to put you on, and it’s not working out. I’ve had a long, stressful summer and though my triathlon training has kept me in good shape and I was able to hang out with you on a somewhat regular basis, I’ve really enjoyed my time off after the marathon in September and I haven’t missed you that much.

I’ve been spending my evenings at home, eating Cheetos and drinking wine while watching re-runs of The Office and dabbling in the occasional bag of M&Ms. I’ve been giving in to any old whim – from peanut butter milkshakes for breakfast to night-caps of Port wine and Grand Marnier (yes, even after several glasses of chardonnay). And what’s it to you? Most of my year is devoted to being in shape and training for races where I spend a great deal of time in some combination of form-fitting neoprene, unforgiving bike shorts, and sports bras. As much as I love to reward myself by donning you with cute tank tops and high heels, I need a break from all of that when the training season ends.

And really, you should be happy about this. You’re such a prima donna. I don’t know why you insist on trying to hang around with me in the fall when I’m trying to decide the best course of action for removing my black toenails. You always complain when I pair you with the same boring pair of black heels, or worse, sneakers. But you can’t have it all, Skinny Jeans. If you want to stay in my life, we’ve got to keep the 20-mile runs and 7-hour bike rides coming – and that means my toenails will be taking one for the team, so you’ll have to get used to me adjusting my footwear accordingly.

And don’t start with me about the alcohol consumption. Yes, I know that drinking less wine would help keep the weight down in the off-season, but are you kidding me? Don’t you recall how many happy hours we had to skip or parties we had to cut short over the summer because we had to get home and hydrate and then go to sleep in order to get important workouts completed the next day? Seriously, you’re such a slave driver asking me to meet all these demands just so YOU can get out once in a while. It’s not all about you, you know.

I know you’ve seen me hanging around new, bigger jeans. It’s not like you hide your feelings. Do you really think you’re being subtle when I put them on and hear you mooing in the background? Get over yourself. The last time we tried to hang out together, you left me battered and bruised with imprints of seams seared into my flesh as if you had branded them there. And any attempt to sit down made me feel as if someone was performing the Heimlich maneuver on me.

At first I thought that maybe you were being difficult because you’d just come out of the dryer. You always fight me a little after laundry day, but then you come around and realize that I only wash you because I love you. We go back to our usual routine of looking fabulous and strutting around like divas. But these days you don’t even give me the range of motion to strut. It’s almost like you’re punishing me for taking some time off from training. And lately you’re just being downright rude – THAT is why you were sorted out from my other clothes and placed in the “tentative donation” pile. You keep this crappy attitude up, and the next place you’re headed is the black garbage bag of doom. Or better yet, maybe you’d like to cozy up to a used toaster oven as you wait for a neighborhood garage sale to seal your fate.

So here’s what I want to say to you, Skinny Jeans. We’ve come a long way. We rocked college together and then you made it through three years in New York City with me, and you’ve been holding your own now for significant periods of time in the past five years since I’ve moved back to Syracuse and gotten into the multi-sport lifestyle. I know that I’ve gained more weight than usual in the past two years, but I was going through a lot with a broken engagement, moving into a new apartment, starting a new job and cutting way back on training after my first-ever Ironman race. You need to relax and let me enjoy this time off before I start my training again in March.

No more complaining about my frozen pizza dinners. No more passive aggressive comments about watching a week’s worth of General Hospital on my DVR in one sitting. And absolutely no more trash-talking my fat jeans. They’ve been good to me, you know. Unlike you, they’re kind and gentle and embrace my sneakers and the present circumference of my hips. They’re even friends with my sweatpants (have some tact here, and just continue reading without taking any low blows).

Take care of yourself, Skinny Jeans, because we will cross paths again. I hope you can consider my feelings and try to take the high road the next time I’m in the off-season. I’ll remember who my real friends are when I’m back on top of my game.

The Bell Lap

2009-01-30T14:46:00.001-08:00

Steve Prefontaine (known as “Pre”) is a long-distance runner from the 1970s who once held the American record in the five distance track events from 2,000 meters to 10,000 meters. He died tragically in a car accident at the age of 24 in the prime of his athleticism. Recently, the movie “Prefontaine” was on ESPN Classics. This movie about his life left me in a state of introspection I haven’t experienced since the last time I got caught up in a Sex in the City Marathon.

“Prefontaine” is not an Oscar-winning film by any means. It’s actually quite distracting to engage in the story of an iconic distance runner when you’re forced to watch him as portrayed by Jared Leto with stick-on sideburns and an unkempt mustache (although he’s not too bad on the eyes during the sweaty running scenes, but I digress). Tougher to take still, is watching Ed O’Neill as his assistant track coach. There’s something about watching Ed Bundy shepherd a young boy on his voyage to Olympic Gold that doesn’t sit right with me (insert image of hand-in-pants on couch here).

While the movie was aesthetically displeasing, its message is worth more than any Olympic or Oscar Gold. Steve Prefontaine’s running career reminded me of all the ways that running is a metaphor for life. In the final scenes of the movie we are at his funeral service as a hearse circles the track with his body inside. The score clock at Hayward Field counts down the time that he had aspired to run for the three-mile distance, as his former coach narrates the final moments of the would-have-been race. He speaks of Pre’s gift to the sport of track and field and how he ran every race like it was his last.

“This is his last race, this is the bell lap for Steve Prefontaine.”

In track, distance races last for multiple laps around the track. When the first runner makes it to the last lap, a bell is sounded to alert him that he has 400 yards to go. This is known as the bell lap. Pre’s life ended too soon, and some believe it was before he ever realized his full potential. His running career is a reminder of how we can all seek to better our lives before our own bell lap is sounding off.

Here, the lessons learned by walking (or running) in the shoes of Steve Prefontaine.

Sometimes success is found where you least expect it.
Pre wanted to be a miler in track and field, the same way most little boys dream of being a quarterback on the football team. At the time, dominating in the mile was one of the most celebrated successes in the sport. Little else was acknowledged or spoken about with regard to track. In the movie, when Pre begins working with coach Bill Bowerman, he expresses his interest in training to win in the mile despite his shortcomings in that distance. Bill Bowerman urges him to focus his efforts on the 5,000-meter race (roughly three miles) instead.

Pre’s response was, “Nobody cares about the 5,000.” His coach: “So make them.”

It’s easy to look at what others already do well and aspire to do it better, but sometimes the opportunities lurk in the less obvious places. Sometimes people get so caught up in having to matter in some kind of pre-defined list of “success stories” that they forget their own quirks and skill sets might be the true key to being successful. Forget about “The Mile” – when Steve Prefontaine was done with the 5,000 he not only highlighted other areas in track and field, but the idea of running as a whole. Along with his coach Bill Bowerman (eventual co-founder of Nike) he has been largely credited for the “jogging” phenomenon.

You don’t always have to fit the part to get the part.
Based on the movie, Pre actually wanted to take part in the usual team sports like baseball, basketball and football when he was younger, but since he was built smaller than other boys his age he never made the team. He turned to running and began his career as a freshman cross-country runner. Though he didn’t possess the ideal build for a distance runner either, he trained hard to improve. His first two years were nothing spectacular as he was finding his rhythm as a runner in different events and working through issues with injuries and competition that was stronger than him, but by his junior year he came into his own to set 19 national high school records in track. He continued his winning streak as he moved into college, training with Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon where he would win three Division I NCAA Cross Country Championships and four straight three-mile/5000-meter titles in track and field. Ironically, among his only defeats in college were two races in the mile.

It has been said that Steve Prefontaine turned running into a blood sport – not bad for someone who was cut from the football team and doomed to participate in the “dork” sport of cross-country.

Life isn’t fair.
After college, Pre went on to compete in the 1972 Summer Games in Munich at only 21 years old (two years younger than anyone else in the 5,000-meter field). Taking the lead with a mile to go, and holding it until less than 600 meters remaining, he ultimately finished fourth (13:28.25) behind Lasse Viren of Finland (first, 13:26.42), Mohamed Gammoudi of Tunisia (second, 13:27.33) and Ian Stewart of Great Britain (third, 13:27.61). Stewart passed Prefontaine less than 10 meters from the finish line for the final medal.

During the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, a group of eight Palestinian terrorists belonging to the Black September organization broke into the Olympic Village and took eleven Israeli athletes hostage in their apartment, killing two of the hostages in the apartment after fighting back; the subsequent standoff in the Olympic Village lasted for almost 18 hours. This became known as the Munich Massacre.

“Prefontaine” the movie, shows how this event effected the athletes participating in the Olympics at the time, and how it may have stirred Pre up in ways that eventually cost him an Olympic medal in the 5,000. It doesn’t seem fair that his Olympic experience (and potential to win a medal) was marred by terrorism – and it seems even less fair that just three years later he would die in a terrible car accident before he could return to the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal to prove himself. Many believe that Pre had yet to peak as an all-star runner, but he would never get the chance to find out.

Passion, applied to anything, will make it stronger.
One of the things Pre was best known for was his aggressive front-running style. It isn’t usually advised to take the lead in a pack of runners, since doing so drains the leader while enabling the rest of the pack to draft behind. Pre’s philosophy on running was to get the race to a place where only pure heart and soul mattered. It didn’t matter to him who was bigger or smaller, stronger or lighter, or who knew how to put together a better race. He didn’t care about the logistics of the race – he cared about the desire. There are many quotes from Pre on what drives him, but the one below is one of my favorites because I think it perfectly sums up the idea that applying passion to something gives it that “X” factor. There’s an intangible quality to things that truly have a force in the world – something about them that can’t be grasped, recreated, or extracted for safekeeping. You can be aware of it, but you’ll struggle to define it because it can’t be captured – only experienced.

I'm going to work so that it's a pure guts race at the end, and if it is, I am the only one who can win it. – Steve Prefontaine.

You may read this and wonder what you could have in common with an iconic runner from the 1970s. Steve Prefontaine’s story isn’t just about a gifted athlete whose life was cut short. It’s the story of a man who played with the cards he was dealt to the best of his ability and along the way, showed the world a thing or two about passion, guts and perseverance. His spirit was what we should all hope to possess inside: the will to push harder, the desire to dig deeper, the courage to change something as we know it. They celebrated this spirit during Pre’s bell lap. What will people celebrate when it’s your turn?

Simple Pleasures

2009-01-15T06:13:00.000-08:00

I’ve been enjoying simple pleasures as of late, seeing as how the economy is terrible and I’m not a millionaire, I can no longer afford to “shop away” my bad moods or get my nails done when I’m feeling a little off (bargain deals at TJ Maxx followed by a French manicure at Miracle Nail makes for a revitalizing afternoon). And so I’ve been combining random activities to entertain myself on the cheap. For example, did you know how much fun it is to vacuum while enjoying a few cocktails? Consider it the woman’s version of mowing the lawn while enjoying a six-pack of beer on the zero-turn. Lawn mowed, spirits raised. Whoever said you shouldn’t mix business with pleasure has obviously not tapped into how exciting it is to operate a Bissell on a bottle and a half of Chardonnay. When is the last time your buzz yielded clean floors? Spectacular. Next on the list will be the Swiffer Wet Jet paired with Lemon Drops.

My simple pleasures often involve some kind of food. Lately I’ve had an insatiable need for Jelly Belly jelly beans. I’m not really a jelly bean fan, but I like that I can experience buttered popcorn, grape jelly, toasted marshmallow, orange sherbet and cotton candy at my leisure just by selecting something the size of a pebble from a tiny bag that fits in my palm. The novelty of such access to a myriad of flavor explosions is almost too much for me to handle. Almost.

I’ve been enhancing my Jelly Belly indulgence with the viewing of some really bad reality TV (think Rock of Love Bus with Bret Michaels) and have also added the swilling of beer to this cornucopia of simple pleasures. Last Saturday, I fully intended to get cozy on my couch and read the stack of Runner’s World and Triathlete magazines that have been piling up around my apartment, but a quick scan through the TV guide landed me smack in the middle of a Real Housewives of Atlanta marathon playing on Bravo. Like Pavlov’s dog, I scurried to the kitchen for a bag of Jelly Bellies and a Blue Moon, and proceeded to watch four hours of the series as if in a fever. I even watched the reunion show that aired after the series was over with. As if this wasn’t bad enough, I then tried to locate the premier of the new season to get it scheduled onto my DVR.

My bean binge has likely had an effect on the sales numbers at Jelly Belly Candy Company, as I’ve been regularly purchasing a few bags of them the way most people pick up a carton of eggs and a gallon of milk. It’s becoming a staple. However, I’m starting to wonder if the consequences of chewing on 40 pounds of sugar every day will start to take its toll on my teeth. I have excellent oral hygiene, but still, this must be challenging my mouth’s ability to stave off cavities. I actually started to think about this because the other day one of my co-workers shared some of his beans with me when I was desperate for an at-work fix, and he told me that another Jelly Junkie had recently filled three cavities. He credited the Jelly Bellies for this. I laughed it off while my brain suddenly played a filmstrip of all the recent times I’d polished off whole bags of these things by myself. Something definitely needed to change.

The next day I was grocery shopping, and happened upon the Jelly Belly section of the candy aisle. The beans strained against their bright plastic packaging, willing me to grab them – daring me to walk away. The pina colada bean (my favorite one), was prominently placed in the middle of the clear plastic window, whispering sweet nothings to me.

“Lisa, porqué tu no me quieres más?”

I compromised and reached to the left of them, grabbing the sugar-free Jelly Bellies instead. Surely they would taste the same, wouldn’t they?

No, they sure don’t. The flavor and overall consistency of the beans were compromised by eliminating the sugar; sabotaged by a string of words I can’t pronounce in the ingredients. These were not the beans I knew and loved. Furthermore, I began gaping at the bag upon reading this:

Warning: Consumption may cause stomach discomfort and/or laxative effect. Individual tolerance will vary; we suggest starting with eight beans or less.

So much is wrong with this – starting with the recommendation that one should eat eight beans or less. Were they kidding? Who eats eight jelly beans and then stops? And if they’re supposed to be less bad for you, you can kiss the eight-beans serving good-bye. It goes without saying that things like Oreos and Jelly Bellies don’t operate in terms of serving size, anyway. Ridiculous. And what is this about stomach discomfort and laxative effects? If I wanted that kind of outcome, I would develop a Taco Bell fixation – not a Jelly Belly craving. I know they’re jelly beans – but they aren’t real beans, people!

Needless to say, Jelly Belly is becoming less of a simple pleasure and more of a complicated pain in my ass – quite literally, as it were.

It figures that something that looks so good – too good to be true – could actually end up hurting you and making you miserable. I wonder if Jelly Belly has a flavor called “ex-boyfriend.” They could just rename the licorice one to that – nobody likes that flavor anyway.

Oh well. I suppose I should move on to discover other simple pleasures – preferably ones that could aid in my pants size going down. I have been getting back to the gym with a vengeance and am excited to start training for triathlon again, but I still need to lose all of my “racing season is over, yahoo!” weight. When my serious training starts in March, I’ll have less time for bad television and empty calories – replacing these simple pleasures with more complex ones, like shaving 20 minutes from my finish time in the half Ironman race this July and qualifying for the Boston Marathon in September. Jelly Belly can’t make a flavor that tastes as good as the sweat that you capture from your lips when you cross the finish line after a hard race.

No Pain, No Gain.

2009-01-05T13:35:00.000-08:00

2009. Like a new piece of white paper, wide open and ready for anything. Sometimes I get to the end of a year, and feel as though I’ve doodled and sketched through all the spaces on my piece of paper. Eraser marks have worn holes in areas I’ve tried desperately to get rid of. Sometimes you can’t erase your mistakes, so you just draw around them to make them less unsightly – as if a series of tiny spirals and shaded cubes might somehow make you less aware of the hole in the paper. But on the first day of a new year, you get to flip the page over and doodle anew. And the older you are, the more tools you have at your disposal to create something meaningful on your piece of paper (ah, life experience. The gorgeous hues of YOU). Approaching 30, I feel well equipped to evolve from the anxious doodling of my 20s. I’m thinking of larger brush strokes, more colors. More texture. Thirty years have taken me through a spectrum of emotions and physical sensations. Some painful, some remarkable, some unexpected. Together they form a palette of color that that leaves me no shortage for expressing who I am and what I’d like out of life. I like to think of myself as the big box of Crayola Crayons...96 colors with the sharpener built in.

Part of the new year for me always involves getting back into my training routines for triathlon in the spring and summer months. Money that could be going toward car repairs and groceries, is instead spent on no less than five race registrations. Every year I do a long-course triathlon (half to full Ironman distance), a couple of shorter course triathlons, three or four 10K to half-marathon road races, a full marathon, and any other race that might come up on the radar and pique my interest. I like to know that I’m committed to these things well before they pop up on my BlackBerry as “one week away” reminders. I don’t think about how much all of this costs, because to me the experience of training and racing is invaluable.

For the first time since moving in August, I’ve started running from my new apartment on the east side of Syracuse, NY. I live on a steep incline and relish the fact that every run starts with a five minute trudge uphill (and since it’s winter right now, it’s also accompanied by a bitter lung-freezing chill). I like this sensation the same way I imagine Rocky Balboa loving that first punch to his face. Over the crest of that hill are many more miles that will be so deeply satisfying, I’m willing to withstand some frosty lungs and screaming quads to get to them. No pain, no gain.

So far in the new year I’ve run three times, for an hour each time. The pace has been slow, but those familiar soul-searching strides cause the adrenaline to flow through me as if it broke a levee somewhere deep inside and I’m suddenly free from all stress, anxiety and apprehension. Training makes me feel like I’m on top of the world.

Jeans fit better. My thoughts have rhythm. Lip gloss accents a more authentic smile. My ability to “go with the flow” comes back to me like a long lost friend who can pick up the conversation with me no matter how long the hiatus between us has been.

Sometimes, when I haven’t been working out for a long stretch of time, I find myself fixated on material things. I want more stuff. I see a nice car and wonder why I can’t have the same thing? I notice a woman’s jewelry and develop a craving for diamond studs. I go through all the ways life isn’t fair, and especially how it hasn’t been fair to me. I self-loathe. Any notes of jealousy or angst that I attempt to bury beneath my “Mary Sunshine” demeanor immediately surface like a U-Boat coming up on the attack.

But training changes all of that. As my body gets back into shape, I melt into a state of self-actualization that no material thing could ever recreate for me. I slip into a pair of sleek and defined hamstrings the way Sarah Jessica Parker slips into the latest piece of haute couture. Diamond studs? Like I care. A sculpted set of deltoids is a far better accessory.

I suppose it’s good for me to take a break from racing and training as fall approaches, so that I have unlimited time through the holiday season to focus on family and friends. Sadly, however, this time of the year also emphasizes material things. The getting and giving of gifts. The holidays are the black ice of society’s superficial side. Buy, spend, brag. I got, I want, I need. How much, how little, how big, how small. I knew a girl in the city that actually broke down in tears because her parents didn’t spend as much money on her as they did on her sister. Her sister, it turns out, was a soldier in Iraq. I’m not sure how one is able to summon liquid from the tear ducts in an effort to display sadness that they are not getting as many presents as someone that is literally risking their life for this country’s freedom.

And so it comes and goes – another year, another batch of holiday madness, another tattered and worn paper at capacity with its doodles, stains and rips. Some years I find myself rolling the ol’ page back gently, allowing it to quietly fall in line with the past. Other years I tear it from the book in a fury, already impatient to see where the first lines of the new year will fall.

This year, I’ve decided to be very unceremonious about the whole thing and simply move from a completed page to a blank page. 2008 was like a backhanded compliment. On one hand it’s a good thing that I realized I shouldn’t be getting married and I broke my engagement. On the other hand, it’s really hard to morph from bride-to-be to ex-fiance.

On one hand, completing an Ironman is a great accomplishment. On the other hand, doing it under monsoon conditions that rob you of the ability to do things the way you trained to do them sort of diminishes the whole experience and almost makes you feel like it didn’t really happen.

So I look at it like this: I will be in another relationship again and I will know that if it’s right and meant to be forever, I won’t have the kind of doubts I experienced last time. And I will do another Ironman in 2010, and I will know that no matter what the conditions are I will find my way to the finish line because I’ve done it already in what were considered the all-time worst conditions the race has ever seen.

These aren’t the kinds of things I want to forget as I move into a new year, let alone a new decade of my life. The clean slate of 2009. I inhale its fresh, manila scent. I behold its promise of “all things are possible.” I smile at its bland and sturdy surface, but I keep the smudges and rips of 2008 close to my heart. If there’s one thing a spinster triathlete like myself needs to carry into the new year, it’s that she can weather the storm. Punches to the face and all.

My Sugar is Raw

2008-12-15T08:48:00.000-08:00

The inaugural blog on The Spinster Chronicles has been met with a mix of criticism and praise. Those who have read my blogs from previous venues have probably come to expect the uncensored, candid nature in which I write, while newcomers have simply said, “nice piece of writing.” The criticism so far has been from people that feel personally attacked by what I’ve written, which I knew going into this was a possibility. There are two things I want to say about writing.

The first is this: In order to write well, you must write about what you know about.

I’ve kept a journal since I was 11 years old. The journals evolved into years of crappy poetry throughout high school, and when I left for Italy as an exchange student the summer after I graduated, they became a way for me to console myself. During those first few months living in a foreign country, in a house with complete strangers that I could not understand, I found a retreat within my journal where my emotions, fears and thoughts hung on the page as proof that I was making it through another day. As things got better, the journal evolved yet again and became a time capsule for the life I started to live so passionately. I realized that living abroad was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and that I would never be able to recreate the nuances and small moments that made it so special. Sure I would always remember going to Venice, or experiencing my first Christmas away from home, but it was the smaller things I wanted to capture. Moments like laughing with my friend Roberta the day she realized I had no idea how to use an European public bathroom (i.e. A hole in the floor you must squat over). Or the magic I felt when I heard myself sharing a dialog with someone in full Italian...realizing that I was hearing and understanding a string of words in a foreign language and responding with my own words and phrases in a full-blown fluent conversation.

The journal became a hybrid of a scrapbook and an autobiography, capturing my life each day. It layered factual descriptions of trips taken and sights seen, with the emotional fall-out of missing home, and the sentiments of a young love brewing on the shores of Lake Como. One page is decorated with leaves from the running path that wove its way through the foothills of the Alps, glued there as souvenirs for simple breaths on a crisp day. Other pages are stark white with only a few scrolling thoughts penned in fine-point Sharpie off in the corner. The journal became so much more than just a place to dump thoughts. It became a textured commentary of the woman I was becoming, and the one that I wanted to be.

I came home from Italy with four completed notebooks, each one with contents that outgrew the confines of the tightly woven spine, spewing all of my mundane treasures outside of the book like a pirate’s chest overflowing with gold coins and rare gems. So valuable were these books to me, that I purchased a fire-proof box to keep them in.

Throughout college, I continued to document my life as if one day it might be an interesting tale for someone to stumble upon. There are times when I imagine this “someone” being my daughter, or grand-daughter, or even great grand-daughter. Someone who might want to see a little of themselves in their ancestors from way back in 2002. It is that idea that inspires me to be so very raw when I write. I’m writing about what I know about. My life. I am not an expert in anything, or a famous person with a book deal, or a person with a tale of drug addiction, sexual abuse, or living in the wild for years by myself. I am an average person who enjoys writing about average things. I want to perfect the syntax of the Average Joe. The common denominator of the human experience. Who am I to write about all of this? What is it that I think I know about?

I know about status meetings that happen on Tuesday mornings.

I know about road construction on the highway I have to drive on every day.

I’m an expert at waiting in line at the grocery store behind someone writing a check and feeling myself age in the process.

I happen to be somewhat talented at getting mascara smudges on my face.

For years now, I have been practicing the art of being obsessive compulsive over the placement of my remote control on the coffee table.

My point is that I know about nothing of great importance, really...but I’ve become pretty good at capturing an environment, a moment in time, a scene in the filmstrip of everyday life. I cannot write fiction. I have tried. My computer is where Chapter Ones come to die. No matter how much I try to put my life experience behind a fictional tale with characters “based on” me or my life, I cannot generate anything that feels organic. I think I find so much to say about the actual world around me, that I don’t feel the need to try and write about a fictional world somewhere deep in my creative psyche.

The second thing I want to say about writing, is that it is a craft, and in my opinion, a kind of art.

Given that, it is meant to be moving in some way. One of my favorite quotes about art is from the show Six Feet Under , when Olivier the pretentious art teacher expounded that good art should literally make people vomit. I couldn’t agree more. A safe piece of writing is one that will please all audiences, apologize for how it might hurt, and play nice for everyone. In this day and age, it will be mindful of race, color, sex, religion, class and vernacular. It will stay inside the lines so to not come off offensive to anyone. It will never make you vomit, but it will never move you either. Few people will connect with a piece of writing that wasn’t allowed to have the teeth it needed to pierce someone’s soul.

I think there is nothing more profound than realizing the moment you tap into another person’s soul. Whether it’s falling in love or bonding with someone through similar experiences or just finding some inexplicable, intangible alignment with another person’s fabric, it is an awesome thing to realize you are at one with something inside of someone else. We can find this through music, or through our sense of touch, and by talking to each other and learning of our similar paths or goals. But here is the secret to finding it at all: it requires raw emotion.

So much of who we are and how we feel is broadcast to the world in an edited fashion. Consider your soul is nestled somewhere within, not so far from your heart. It is mere inches from the outside world in its raw form, yet any attempt to communicate its contents generally yields some “user friendly” version of what you’re really feeling. We avoid conflict. We are polite. We lie. We sugarcoat. We say what we think people want to hear. We are seldom raw.

Writing is an intimate medium. Its very nature asks us to invite someone else’s words into ourselves where they fall through our brains like pachinko balls tumbling through an array of pins. Some just fall to the bottom with no effect, but some hit the jackpot and totally inspire you. This is writing at its greatest. This is writing that is art. Writing that is worth reading.

How lucky am I, to have realized over the years that I can continue to be raw in my writing and find people here reading these words, finding meaning in them. Pausing for thought. Some people smile, some vomit. This is my writing, and I cannot do it any other way.

New Decade, New Blog.

2008-12-09T10:52:00.000-08:00

I read somewhere that your twenties were all about messing up and that your thirties were the years when you started to get your act together. This was never something I subscribed to having graduated from college at 22 with a job in advertising already lined up for me. I was convinced that I already had my act together and that this particular "pearl of wisdom" was for the lazier, party-time minded crop of twenty-somethings that weren't mapping out the milestones of their adult lives the way I had been doing since I was 16.

I'm now 29, just a little over a month away from my 30th birthday. In the wake of my arrival to this all-important third decade of my life, I have left a job in advertising working on a major salad dressing account; completed internships in publishing akin to The Devil Wears Prada (I thought I was done with advertising and wanted to be a writer instead); acquired an entry-level editorial job at a Hasidic Jewish publishing company where I wrote about blood diamonds and the brilliant cut; moved out of the city for a small-town publishing job where I worked for a pair of dysfunctional, lesbian psychos and wrote about forklifts; and then finally took up a stint in the family business where I realized there was no way I could work with my father in a professional capacity. I now work at an advertising agency (ironic) where I love my job and can picture myself staying put for the first time in my professional life.

Peppered amid my circus of work experience, were several dead-end relationships including a string of first dates with a member of the IRA, a long-term relationship with a computer hacker, an on-again/off-again relationship with a pot-smoking personal trainer who lived with his mom, and brief relationships with one guy from every faction of the American military minus the Airforce and the Navy. I've dated engineers and artists, Europeans and best friends. As if all of that wasn't enough, I also made it through two years with a wonderful man I was ready to marry, but alas, it just wasn't right and I broke the engagement.

In my twenties, I have lived in London, New York City, with my parents in the very rural countryside of upstate New York, alone in an apartment in Cazenovia, NY, with my ex-fiance in a house in Syracuse, and back to living alone in an apartment. While I've missed milestones like marriage and having my first baby, I've instead acquired fluency in the Italian language, an Ironman finish, and enjoy a second part-time job as a well-regarded fitness instructor teaching two spin classes a week at Gold's Gym.

It goes without saying that the course I had neatly charted for myself at the age of 22 is nothing like the road I actually traveled over the past nine years. Nine years, each one unfolding like the next installment of Harry Potter. What in the world will Spinster Lisa find herself meddling in next? Unlike Harry Potter though, I do not have any magic to help me along here. Just good old fashioned sarcasm and a sense of humor.

My rock has always been training for triathlon and writing about this wad of time that is apparently my life. I am generally pretty happy with who I am, but sometimes I find myself in situations that force me to compare myself to the "society ideal" of a woman. Enter "the baby shower."

Just in this past week, I've attended two baby showers. Two. Being at a baby shower makes me feel like somebody is tying me to a chair and holding me prisoner until I provide an explanation as to why I haven't gotten my act together yet to find a husband and start thinking about the creation of a nuclear family?

One of the showers was for a girlfriend of mine from high school. All of my friends from high school are married and having babies now. Most of them are teachers, though a couple are stay-at-home moms. Whenever I roll onto the scene at one of these events, I immediately feel anxiety over the fact that I probably have nothing to talk about with anyone.

Topics of conversation range from the best way to clean Cheerios puke off the wall, to what should be done with children's bangs. Occasionally some dialog about a Swiffer or a vacuum will come up (in this case it was the sexy Dirt Devil hand-vac that looks like a lava lamp) and I find myself sighing with relief because I can totally talk Swiffer for hours (that isn't sarcasm, I'm a cleaning freak). Sometimes my married mommy friends will ask me how things are going, because typically we're all too busy to get together and we fall out of touch. So I tell them about triathlon training, or the gym, or something interesting about my job. If I'm feeling sassy, I'll throw in something anecdotal about my wacked love life, but for the most part my trying to talk about any of these things at great length is always cut short by another "guess what little Billy did the other day?" kind of story. Few of my stories can compete with the likes of someone's big toe moving for the first time.

At this particular shower, I was sitting with some of my friends who casually asked me how the "boy situation" was going (code for: I heard you broke your engagement, how about some details?). Another woman at our table was talking about her daughter's wedding plans. Having just paid off the non-refundable deposits for my "almost wedding," I steered clear of that conversation all together. Then there were some comments about how we're all turning 30 soon and how most of my friends have decided they are done having children! Meanwhile, I haven't even started, not that having a child is even something I'm sure I want to do. The point is that while I sit at these kinds of parties (baby showers and wedding showers), I start to realize that the only "expected" gathering of friends and family to support and celebrate a woman are for when she is either getting married or having a baby.

I wonder why society doesn't do anything to recognize the woman that is out there trying to be independent, kick ass at her career, or make the hard decision to break her engagement to a man she loves, but cannot marry. It seems ironic to me that if I had decided to marry my ex-fiance because it would be easier than being single again, I would be celebrated by society! Or how about the people that become pregnant because they believe a baby will fix their relationship? Those people get to have a baby shower and they are celebrated and rewarded with a society-inspired need to recognize these kinds of milestones.

Does a single woman making hard decisions and doing the right thing not deserve some recognition? Is a single woman moving out of a house and into an apartment not worthy of a new food processor, a blender, a set of silverware and some new bathroom towels? When I add up all of the money that I've spent over the years supporting my friends' weddings and babies, it is quite significant. Furthermore, at these gatherings you are usually expected to fill out your own Thank You card to make it easier for the person who is receiving all of the gifts to let you know that they are appreciative of your efforts. It just seems so contrived to me. I don't write this to say that I think my friends aren't truly thankful, I know that they are and they would be there for me if I asked them for anything...but my point is that society doesn't encourage that kind of support for people like me.

In fact, breaking my engagement has shown me the true colors of a lot of people and has made me feel like some kind of spinster witch. I think I would be more accepted in some circles if I had gone through with a wedding I didn't believe in 100 percent and then got a divorce a few years later.

One thing I know from my twenties, I am not a society-driven girl. I have never done anything because "that's what is done." I don't send Christmas cards...not because I'm the grinch, but because I reach out to people in other ways, in my own ways. I do not follow trends, because I find what works for me and do my own thing. I am a loner with several introspective hobbies. I want to be married one day, but I want that because of the bond it represents...the act of having found that one person that is your soul mate. Not because it's easier or it's "supposed to happen." Not because I want to spend days picking out the perfect cake and making groups of women miserable wearing dresses that don't fit in hideous colors.

Do I want a baby? I don't know. Right now I feel that I've got a lot more on my to-do list then creating another human. I want to do an Ironman again. I want to travel more and continue writing. Most of all, I want to stay true to myself which means I'll probably continue down some kind of tumultuous path in the eyes of society on my quest for "things that make me tick."

So I'm embracing these last few moments in my twenties and reflecting upon the haphazard mosaic of my own personal milestones over the past ten years. I don't know what 30 will bring or the years that will make up the next precious decade of my life, but I am done with feeling bad about where I am in life, or rather, where I'm not.

I've started weeding things out of my life that give me stress, that I've been investing in because I feel like I have to. Maybe that's what they mean when they say you start to get your act together in your thirties. Maybe you start to channel your energy into the things that truly matter to you, rather than wasting it on the things that don't, or the things you can't change.

In the spirit of rechanneling that energy, I'm embracing my spinsterness and sharing it here. Welcome to The Spinster Chronicles, a line-by-line account of all the ways I'm defying our society's expectations, and loving every minute of it.