What? You thought my recovery wasn't going well? Well - I'd been sick and out of it, barely hanging in at work and not doing workouts. Then I realized that I've only done 2 triathlons this year, and I felt like I really wanted three so I could see how I was doing compared to last year in the USAT rankings. I looked for a shorter race, but there were none to be had close to Houston this late in the season.
So Wednesday night I thought - I can do this, and I signed up for the race at packet pickup.
We went camping in the cold with the cub scouts for the weekend and then I was off to Conroe for the race. It was cold. The swim was not short as in previous years, but I only missed my swim PR by 10 secs or so. Then the bike ride - another PR averaging 16.1 mph (including a stop to get a bee out of my hair!). And then the run - another PR for the race. My time of 6:40 lopped about 40 minutes off of my previous best effort and it was a great way to end the 2008 triathlon season.
In "Celiac retrospect," the best part was that after waking up at 4:30 am, I went by myself, recovered well after the race, loaded up all the equipment, drove home and unloaded it. I came home and went straight into watching the kids, making dinner, etc and didn't go to bed until 10:30. I'm not saying I wasn't dog-tired, but it's such a far cry from efforts in prior years, where I've had significant support from my wife, slept on site, slept after the race, etc. And it's even farther away from the days before I was diagnosed when I used to sleep for hours after my Saturday long runs.
What a blessing it has been to me and my family to know and eat right. Eating gluten was such a physical boundary for me before my diagnosis, and I think some of those boundaries crept into how I thought about the world. Not anymore. Not anymore.
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