oak hill flyer: pennsylvania (camp 1 of 5)
forgive me, but i'm loving the status update format. i don't know if this is a reflection of my ability to communicate efficiently or my inability to keep the church of work and the state of play separate, but nevermind that for now.
- i made it to camp 1. this was my first major test, to see if my knee could withstand an uptick in workload. my knee (body, and mind!) passed with flying colors. the week of june 14th consisted of 4.5M of swimming, 130M of biking, and 24M of running. my knee seemed to really loosen up en route to this camp, almost to the point where i stopped worrying about it. however, with four more camps to go, i won't be forgetting about my fragile knee anytime soon.
- k and i spent the ensuing rest week in pennsylvania. it was terrific! i went open water swimming for the first time back home, and it was a surreal mash-up of my aquatic life here in austin and my non-aquatic upbringing. although i spent the better part of two decades beside it, i had never been in east branch lake until last month. k and i could have stayed all weekend amongst the green trees, sunshine and 71-degree water. sure, the park ranger said that our swimming wasn't exactly legal, but he did allude that he wasn't necessarily going to track us down either.
- i want to petition for open water swimming to be legal back home. knowing what i know now--and feeling what i feel now--about open water swimming, i almost want to uproot everything, move back home and lobby for open water swimming to be legal and start a movement. i feel as if there's such a beautiful world out there going to waste! certainly there are other ways to enjoy the outdoors, but it's odd when a park ranger looks at you funny just because you don't have a fishing rod. i enjoy eating fish and going fishing, don't get me wrong, but with all that beautiful acreage, surely some of it could be roped off for swimmers. lucky are we to not let initial reports of no swimming not deter us--we had to drive ~3 miles of dirt roads to find a suitable entry point for swimming, but once we did it felt like our secret shangri-la.
- i saw a cross country coach from my hs days for the first time in over twelve years. and we saw each other on the running trail back home, nonetheless! another surreal mash-up: i'm so accustomed to bumping into my friends on the trails in austin, yet it never happens back home (largely because there aren't too many runners!). back in 1998, jim showed me the running logs of lee foster. lee was our area's prefontaine: complete with long hair, moustache and incredible race times. he was a quiet individual if i recall correctly, and his logs were years of running the same four mile loop in the forest, with the occassional trip to boston or some other prestigous race. sadly like prefontaine, he died very young (mining accident). the first race i ever ran was a race in lee's honor. lee was a generation before me; i never knew him personally. jim was a good friend of lee's however; i was so very glad to see jim still running that morning.
- the ironman seems like a very real possibility. what once was a dream filled with doubt and built on faith, is now a tangible goal with only time and work standing between me and it.
camp two is scheduled for the week of july 12th, with another uptick in workload and possibly even my first brick run. after that, a vacation in northern california. head west, young man.
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