Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Training on a Broken Heart.

Well, this sucks.

I've been putting off an entry post-Everest since... well... post-Everest. That last post was the last time I would be in a relationship with my vegan roadie boyfriend, who, upon return to LA  vanished  to ruminate on his DNF for over a day and then declared himself incapable of being a good boyfriend. He has since been MIA. This was a big shock to me, as, if you could not tell by the fact that I climbed the equivalent of Mount Everest on a bike for him, I didn't see any end in sight for the current moment. Otherwise I maybe wouldn't have what... climbed Mount Everest on a bike for him.

It puts a serious damper on your training when the sight of your bike makes you burst into tears, when trying to do 100 miles out in Malibu reminds you of him cheering you on during your first podium race, when you have to stop during long runs to sob and when your friends say, "How was Everest?!" your face contorts like a baby who's just been accidentally smacked in the face. But I kept on training, of course, because what option do I have? Stop life? Nope. Painful as it's been, I've been putting in my miles. I also conveniently stopped eating most of the time, which, if you can't do the math, means I'd have already increased caloric deficit from the added volume of my peak training days with now an inadequate amount of fuel. So I lost over 10 pounds. In under three weeks. So... Hooray for race weight? I went to the body fat truck recently (yes it is a real thing, a mobile body fat test center... look it up online!) to get dunked in a tank of comfortably warm water and find out my real composition. Tanita be damned. I'm down to 141, and 21.4% body fat. Another six pounds and I'm at peak race body fat of 18%. Strange to think about winning Malibu at 151... I wonder how much of that weight was also muscle... not too much I hope...

This month has been an ongoing torture fest of me hoping and hoping and hoping to get some explanation or closure, and I'm finally at the conclusion that, if a person who claims to have loved and respected me can toss me out like a sack of garbage, can ignore my texts for five days after promising to meet up, can treat me like I'm less than nothing... well... the love and respect thing doesn't really hold. And since he won't fill in the gaps, I have to create my own piece of the narrative. Namely that he never cared and I should forget those months as they were fiction. They seemed awfully real to me, though. But I can't keep spending my hours on the bike going over and over this in my mind. He won't put it to rest for me, so I have to move on without understanding. Which is the ultimate and most lasting way to injure someone you dumped... make them feel like the entire relationship was a farce.

Is this entry too much personal information? Hell yes. But I have all these unresolved feelings, and no place to put them. So I'm putting them here, and hoping they go away, so that I may continue swimming, biking and running without them dragging me down anymore. I have been through a series of terrible romantic encounters, which stuck me in a series of ruts over the past year. It hurt my training, hurt my heart, stalled my life. I'm determined to not let that happen this time. It's just truly pathetic that something simple and nice turned into this horrible plague of brokenheartedness. Earlier in the month, when I was waiting for the talk that never came, I said "I feel like I'm underwater and I'm waiting to catch a breath or develop gills." I think I've developed gills. It's time to scar over.

1 comment:

  1. I am a mixture of sad, angry, and violently angry for you, and I am so sorry this happened to you. What a d-bag; capital D. You don't deserve it and I hope you truly believe that you don't. It will pass. :(

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