Team in Training Update

This update is from last week:

April 18, 2009. We finished our 11th week of training at Lake Del Valle in Livermore, long one of my family's favorite places to hike and swim with the dogs. This time despite it being 8 am, brutal for a musician, the water was in the low 60 degrees, unlike our first open water experience, where it had been 10 degrees colder. In a wetsuit, it felt positively balmy. I swam about 40 minutes, and during the last half managed to find some rhythm. Afterwards I did my usual lamenting about being slow and got some more tips from other swimmers. One thing I can't duplicate is that many of the swimmers started in High School. Parents, put your kids on swim team so when they decide to take up triathlons in their 30s they're ready!

However, I kicked ass on the bike. Another woman and I paired up and rode 13 miles out on Mines Road. Beautiful! It was great to accomplish a 26-mile bike ride with a modicum of speed, and I knew it would be our last chance to get that distance in before we began tapering (reducing intensity/mileage to conserve energy for the race).

After we had a great honoree picnic in which several cancer survivors and family members spoke about their experiences, and the meaning of our support. The pain of cancer lingers, but it's deep. Cancer is not a disease you eliminate quickly, it's a process. These people and their families have been so challenged. It's depressing and scary. You want to look away. You want not to think about mortality. You want to crack a joke, lighten the mood, not catch what they caught.

But it's just as human to want to find meaning. To know that you survived cancer, beat it, only to go on to better things. Or to know that you got a few years you wouldn't have had before new chemotherapies were invented, and you use those years to do the very thing you have always known you were meant to do. Or that after coming back from the brink of death you met the woman of your dreams, a woman whose heart beats with enough strength for the two of you and everyone you know.

At the honoree picnic, I realized that these were stories of true love. Sometimes love seems fictional. The stuff of movies and pop songs and department stores. Yet there it was, catching unexpectedly in our throats. We can't live without you.