This photo was taken by my teammate Kathleen Jones at the Lake Stevens Olympic distance triathlon over the weekend:

Have I mentioned that triathlons are an effing expensive sport? Oh how I miss the “I only run” days — $120 for a good pair of running shoes a couple times a year is a laughable expense compared to what I bleed out every season for triathlons. Today Speedy Reedy happily took $270 from me. Between my time trial bike, countless fuel purchases, new tubes, and other paraphanalia, I think I single-handedly financed their move into a new building. Why was I at Speedy Reedy this time? Well, seeing as how I’m one of the unluckiest cyclists on our team, earlier this week I noticed a chunk missing from my rear tire. You’ve got to be kidding me — last year I blogged about how I had to replace my front tire after I shredded it on a B.S. ride in Lake Stevens. One year later and wouldn’t you know it, I have to replace the rear tire too. Son of a bitch. By the way, let me interject by saying that after nearly three years of this sport, I’ve gotten seven flats and have ruined three tires (the first of which was for a bike that wasn’t even mine — I had borrowed it from a former coworker). Jason has had one flat that happened during a training ride, and he didn’t even have to change it because his dad did it for him. I call epic bullshit on this, which makes him mad because he’s convinced I’m jinxing him for the biggest bike fail ever when we race in Canada. Anyway, back to the rear tire. There goes $40 right there. I also had to buy a new bike computer because my old one has been acting on the fritz lately and the cadence sensor stopped working. When you start training with a bike computer, you quickly become unnaturally attached to it. I mentioned before about how I almost forgot it before Boise 70.3 and went into a panic because I wasn’t going to know my cadence while racing. I replaced my bike computer with a new wireless one that cost $110. Pricey, but necessary in my opinion. Where’d the rest of my money go? Frickin’ fuel. I’m starting to spend more on training fuel than on actual groceries. You’d be surprised by how many stupid gels we consume in a week. This crap never seems to last very long. I shelled out a dumb amount of money for drink mix, Rocktane, and Hammer gels. One time someone mentioned to me how he doesn’t understand why I need to refuel with calorie drinks and gels during workouts because he never does and he seems to do fine. I had to remind him that exercising for 1-2 hours at an easy to moderate pace isn’t the same as a four or five hour workout and trying to prep your body to be able to carry you through a several hour-long race. It’s easy to forget that the general public isn’t as insane as us endurance athletes. So just like that, I dropped nearly three hundred bones in a short amount of time. You’d think that’d be the end of the spending, but I still need to get a new helmet, replace my sad, pathetic bike trainer, and hopefully spring for a new pair of sunglasses and recovery tights sometime this season, not to mention the perpetual wave of team gear that Teresa seems to always be ordering. *shakes fist* I actually have most of my receipts from each season, so maybe if I’m feeling especially depressed, I can add them up to see how much I spend annually...

I work out with a fairly big group of people, and the vast majority of the women have such an unreal wardrobe of workout apparel that it’s giving me quite the complex. Half of these girls look like fitness models, rocking out in cute, bright colored tops and pants. I, on the other hand, am not so blessed… Case in point: On Tuesday I show up at track wearing my Seafair pirate finisher’s shirt (arrrrrrghhh!) and a sad pair of shorts that make my stump legs look even shorter than usual. I also have some decidedly unattractive bags under my eyes and a sloppy ponytail. When doing my warmup, I notice two of my teammates running side by side looking like the Doublemint twins in matching lime green tops and cute little shorts. They’re all bright-eyed and hardly breaking a sweat, and their ponytails are bouncing like they’re in some uber-chic shampoo commercial where the models shake out their hair in slow motion. The fashion doesn’t end with those two though. I think most of my teammates with two X chromosomes are sponsored by Lulu Lemon. No joke, freaking every female athlete I know has virtually their entire spring collection. One time I ducked into the store so I could emulate the cool kids, and not only could I not fit my massive stump quad into a pair of shorts (the sizing there is suicide-inducing), the clothes are so expensive that I suspect my female teammates are operating a secret meth lab in order to afford this lavish wardrobe. Admittedly, my workout clothes collection is pretty sad. It mostly consists of a too-big finisher’s shirt from a previous race and a cheapo pair of shorts. Every once in a while I’ll even bust out a couple of sad cotton tank tops I bought at Target about five years ago. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have cute plaid and pink and pastel tops that wick sweat and auto-spray perfume on me to counteract any funky odor my body is unleashing, but I can’t a) afford said wondrous clothing, or b) wear any of these tops without sporting a massive sausage roll around my midsection. It seems that a lot of stars need to align before I can improve the gear; namely, continuing Operation De-Chunkify and possibly winning the lottery. Until then, look for the tired girl in the ill-fitting Rock ‘n Roll Marathon finisher’s shirt and bunched up shorts and tell her she looks good....

Last year was my first triathlon year, and since I wanted to do it on the cheap (well, as cheaply as I could, anyway), I borrowed a ton of gear from my friend, Christine. She lent me her old bike, swim caps, goggles, her race belt, timing chip anklet, and her old wetsuit. The wetsuit was a bit old but did its job — it prevented me from freezing to death in the chilly lake waters and it kept me buoyant. However, by the end of the season the wetsuit was starting to get even more loose fitting and tattered than when Christine had initially lent it to me — the left leg was starting to look like a bell bottom due to an increasingly growing tear, and seams started bursting all over the place. Whenever I swam I felt like water was wooshing through the suit due to its loosey gooseyness. I knew that if I wanted to race again next season, I’d have to get my own wetsuit. Well, 2009 rolled around and my training group, TN Multisports, secured a sweet sponsorship deal from Zoot. My trainer’s boyfriend, Mark, convinced me to get an uber-hardcore Zoot suit, the Zenith 2. It’s a seriously bad ass suit, with extra padded areas on the torso and legs and a thinner material on the arms and shoulders for better range of motion. The extra padding and streamlines make the suit look like the Batsuit or a superhero suit, only without the stylish cape and handy utility belt. (Note the $650 price tag — holy hell, that is an expensive wetsuit. Thankfully, I received a nice team discount.) I finally got off my lazy ass and picked up my suit yesterday. I had to try it on to make sure it fit well, and once I squeezed my flabby body into it I wanted to take some pictures but my camera battery was dead. I ended up lounging around the house and reading crap on my laptop for 30 minutes while sweating in my wetsuit until my battery was charged enough to snap a couple photos. At one point Jason shouted from upstairs, “Do you still have your wetsuit on?!” I said, “Um…”, and he came downstairs, saw me, and burst out laughing. Anyway, for your viewing pleasure: I tried going for a cool superhero pose but ended up looking mentally disabled This is exactly what I look like when I run to the transition area from the swim The only time you’ll see me smiling and swimming at the same time I’m looking forward to trying this bad boy out in the open water and seeing if it makes any sort of difference in my swim. I expect it to turn me into Dara Torres — I have the technology to be bigger, faster, strongerrrrrr. Or at least post a sub-50 minute 1.2 mile...

When Jason and I entered our freshman year of triathlons, we didn’t want to invest much money into the sport because we were unsure as to whether or not we’d like it. Scientifically speaking, triathlons cost a buttload of money. There’s running shoes, triathlon shorts, tri tops, proper running socks, visors, sunglasses, wetsuits, bikes, helmets, bike shoes, fuel, fuel and more fuel, not to mention the cost to sign up for races. That all adds up to a BUTT LOAD of cash. It ain’t cheap. But let me get back to the whole bike thing. Holy shit, if triathlons themselves cost a buttload then the bikes are like an ass cheek’s worth of money. Bikes are expensive! I had no idea they cost as much as they did! I had a pink and purple 10-speed Huffy when I was in elementary school and that thing probably set my parents back a couple hundred bucks at K-Mart, so I figured that good bikes cost like $1,000 or so, right? Wrong. They cost an ass cheek, which is why for our first tri season Jason and I were like “Eff this, we’ll borrow some bikes.” We then proceeded to remain the laughingstock of our training group until about November 2008. For about nine months I rocked out on my coworker Christine’s aluminum Giant, which was built for teeny people but weighed a ton (adding to the weight were mountain bike pedals that I was too lazy to change). The bike was too small for me (Christine’s 5’1″ and I’m 5’5″ — even with my stumpy legs, that’s a considerable size difference) and I never got a proper adjustment, so I rode on a bike that didn’t fit me for an entire season. Here’s a picture of me and Christine’s bike after the Victoria Half Ironman: Notice how it’s sportin’ the aero bars. Putting aero bars on that heavy mofo is kind of like ordering a Diet Coke with your triple quarter pounder with cheese, but I did stick aero bars on it (mostly so I could drink without having to wobbily reach down and grab a bottle from my cage — I’ve since gotten better at doing that). I also put new tires on the bike after I tore the rear one during my first sprint triathlon (I’ll get to that in a future post). While I had made some modifications to the bike, it never felt like mine, and after I decided that I liked racing, it was time to go shopping for a bike I could call my own. Jason, meanwhile, was tearin’ it up on his dad’s old, old, old bike. Here’s a picture of it: Haha, just kidding. The bike isn’t that old. Jason’s dad has a Klein that’s about 20 years old and has the shifters down on the frame. Now that’s old school. My racing buddy borrowed the bike the whole season and stubbornly raced with it amongst the fancy Cervelos, Scotts, Felts, Gurus, and Quintana Roos. You can sort of see the Klein in the above pic where Jason is in T1 at the Victoria Half Ironman. Though it ain’t much to look at, the bike did get Jason through a half dozen races this year (and he passed his fair share of athletes on fancy $3,000 time trial bikes. Suck it, losers!). Jason made some much needed upgrades to the bike as well — the front derailleur needed replacing and he also swapped out the seat. Much like me, however, Jason didn’t have a bike of his own and wanted to join his fellow athletes in the 21st century with upgraded, lighter technology....