Warning: This post is disgusting. You probably shouldn’t read it. I wrote it because while this whole ordeal was gross and embarrassing and contains more information than you would ever want to know about my nether region, it’s still kind of funny and interesting. And there’s some science involved, so maybe you could learn something. Something gross, but hey, it’s better than nothing, right? So I went to the Coeur d’Alene training camp, did a fever and cold-induced 80 mile bike ride, and came home with a Fergie-approved lovely lady lump in my nethers. It hurt like a mofo over the weekend but subsided into a “feels like a slight bruise” sensation. Unfortunately, despite the pain level decreasing, the size and hardness of this mass remained the same. I started to get concerned because I had three bike workouts on my schedule for this week and Honu was right around the corner, so I couldn’t afford to stay off the bike and wait for this thing to go away on its own. My “situation” was quite the topic of interest among my female teammates: [at our group run at Greenlake] Jill: “How are you feeling?” Me: “Much better! I think my cold is gone now.” Jill: “I mean…how are you feeling.” Me: “…oh, right. That thing. Yeah, it’s still there.” [two minutes later] Vicki: “Hey, Rebecca! How are things feeling?” Me, sighing: “Yeah, it’s still there.” By Wednesday the blob was still hanging around places it shouldn’t be, so I called the women’s health clinic at my go-to medical center to try and make an appointment. Receptionist: “So are you just wanting a routine checkup?” Me: “Well, I guess we could do a checkup, yeah, but I want to get this potential cyst looked at. It formed after a bike ride on Friday and I need to get it dealt with as soon as possible.” Receptionist: “Okay…” [clack clack clack clack clack] “…I have a June 6th appointment available. Will that work for you?” Me: Me: “Seriously, three weeks? Don’t you have anything sooner?” Receptionist: “I’ll have to look and call you back.” Annoyed, I tried a different clinic. The soonest they could get me in to see a doctor was Monday, so I tentatively made an appointment but kept calling around trying to find a better option. Clinic #3 receptionist: “How can I help you?” Me: “I was wondering if you had any open appointments for the gynecologist.” Receptionist: “Uhhhh…I don’t think we do that here.” Me: “Oh, okay.” Receptionist: “Let meeeeee cheeeeeck…..” [clack clack clack clack clack] “…yeah, we don’t have cardiologists here.” Me: “Not cardiologists, gynecologists.” Receptionist: “Oh, radiologists?” Me, shouting: “GYNECOLOGIST! WOMEN’S HEALTH!!” I glanced over at Jason, whose shoulders were shaking with laughter. I could only imagine my conversation with this deaf woman escalating to me screeching “VAG DOCTOR!! I’M HAVING COOCH PROBLEMS!! THERE’S A CYST NEAR MY POON!!!” Receptionist: “OHHHHHHHHHHH…..let me give you the number to our women’s health clinic.” Good grief. I called the clinic she referred me to and spoke with a fourth receptionist. Clinic #4 receptionist: “How may I help you?” Me: “I need to make an appointment to see a gynecologist. First available, if possible.” Receptionist: “Okay, what’s the reason for the visit?” Me, as if reciting from a script because I’ve explained this roughly 1,000 times already: “I’m training for a race and I did an 80 mile bike ride over the weekend and I developed a hard lump near my pubic bone and my friend who’s a nurse said it’s probably a cyst and told me to have a doctor check it out to make sure it’s...

Forever ago I introduced Triathlete Woes. My first woe experienced by triathletes, cyclists, and runners alike was the friggin’ bugs that you encounter when training. This time I wanted to talk about the bane of this damn sport and of being active in general. Of course, I’m talking about everyone’s common enemy: chafing. I’ve gotten chafing everywhere. And by “everywhere,” I mean everywhere. My ankles, my armpits, my sternum, the small of my back, my inner thighs, my ribcage, the back of my neck, and yes, the demoralizing “are you freakin’ kidding me” spot known as the asscrack. This diagram fully illustrates which parts of my body have been rubbed raw from friction, clothing, or some other random bullshit while training or racing: I’ve gotten ankle chafing from timing chips: I’ve gotten thigh chafing from a pair of shorts I had worn a hundred times before, but when I wore them for a half marathon, they inexplicably tore my legs up so bad that I had to cover the scabs in gauze for a few days. I’ve gotten pelvis chafing from swimsuits, which is just mind-boggling. I’ve developed thick neck scabs from wet suit chafing. If you threw a dart at a diagram of a body, chances are I’ve gotten chafing there. Here’s a chafe mark along the lower part of my stomach that looks like I got slashed by a knife-wielding maniac: And here’s a chest chafing that looks like the shape of New Jersey: This past weekend my sternum got torn to shit during a hill repeat run: My sternum has gotten chewed up so much from heart rate monitors that I have resorted to covering the spot with a Band-aid before workouts (which has led to Jason calling me King Hippo), but even that failed me on Saturday. Chafing sucks. It has no pattern, no rhyme or reason. I’ll use a crapton of Glide and will still get it. I’ll wear a tried and true pair of shorts and will still get it. I’ll have a short workout and will get a mark out of nowhere. But the worst part of the chafing isn’t its randomness. No sir. That I’m getting used to. I’ve grown accustomed to sudden chafe marks in various parts of my body I previously thought were immune to chafing. No, the absolute worst part of chafing is the post-workout shower. It’s like a scene out of Psycho–I peel off my soggy, sweat-soaked clothes, turn the shower on to its hottest setting, and step in, preparing for a luxurious and relaxing cleansing. Then a single bead of water propels out of the shower head and pellets onto the one half square inch of skin on my entire body that has been rubbed raw, a spot I didn’t even know existed until now, and it feels like someone threw hydrochloric acid all over me. I screech and start whirling around in a frenzy, howling, “AGHHHGHHHHHHH WHATTTTT THE HELLLLLLLLL,” not being able to pinpoint the exact spot that has betrayed me until several seconds later when the pain subsides and I succeed in curling myself into the tiniest ball imaginable in the corner of the tub, away from the Razor Droplets from Hell and whimpering like a stray dog. The best part of my day, the glorious post-workout shower, has now been robbed of all its splendor because of one tiny fucking chafe mark. So here’s to you, chafing, you miserable, awful side effect of endurance sports. I hate you with the intensity of a thousand Christian Bales. By the time I’ve thrown in the towel with this sport, I’ll have more marks on my...

I swear, I must be the only person alive who seems to be getting worse the more she tries to swim. I’m like the Benjamin Button of swimming — the more time I spend in the water, the crappier I seem to get. My good swims are at about a 25-33%, meaning one out of every three or four swims actually feels decent. On the rare chance I”ll have what I think is a “good” swim workout (meaning I was just tragically slow instead of abysmally slow), the next 2-3 swims will be freaking awful and I’ll beat myself up over how hopeless I am until my body throws me a bone with a semi-decent swim again. Take today’s workout for example. Teresa persuaded me to do the “postal swim,” which is an hour-long time trial. The rule is simple: see how far you can swim in 60 minutes. She pestered me via email and asked if I was going to sign up, and I sighed and responded with, “I don’t really want to do it, but I will if you think it’ll be good for me.” By the time I stopped dragging my feet and committed to doing the workout, there were only a couple slots left. Teresa cheerfully jammed me into the first of three waves. Wave #1 started at 7 am. On a Sunday. FML. As if getting up at the ass crack of dawn on a Sunday morning for a bullshit swim workout wasn’t bad enough, I scanned the list of folks who were swimming in Wave #1 and realized that I was woefully outpaced among my fellow teammates. All of the fast assholes on my team were swimming at 7 am. I needed to be in Wave #3, which started at 9:30…or Teresa needed to make a separate “slowest of the slow” wave that started at noon and consisted of me and a no armed, one legged drifter named Hobo Joe. Also making the swim worse was the fact that I was out of town this past week for work, so my weekend workouts were especially heavy duty to make up for my travel time. I spent the weekdays in Denver before flying home and forcing myself to do a swim workout on Friday. My swim wasn’t great, which gave me a glimmer of hope that, by the Law of Transitive Beccas, my Sunday swim would be better. On Saturday I had a “Welcome back to Ironman training you lazy bastard” workout that consisted of 3×1 hour bike intervals with a 15 minute brick run after each set. By the end of my 3:45 workout, I was exhausted, my legs were aching, and I was dreading the early morning swim that would end my weekend. This morning I woke up at a soul-crushingly early 5:30 am and puttered around as nervous as I would be if it were an actual race. I was irrationally anxious and agonized over what to eat for breakfast. I even sucked down a cup of coffee, something I only do on race mornings. Jason and I hopped into the car (he didn’t want to do the postal swim either, but I nagged him into Band of Brothers-ing it with me) and drove over to Mercer Island. It was stupid and dark outside–as in “dark enough that I should still be in bed instead of driving to a turdtastic swim workout.” The island has no streetlights and the pool center was dark too, resulting in a supremely paranoid left turn into the parking lot since I was worried about missing the driveway and careening down an embankment (which, admittedly, still...

I’ve been forcing myself to go to the group swims held every other weekend in an effort to improve my swim splits this coming season from “abysmal” to “passably mediocre.” I went to the first one on dead legs thanks to two hours of workouts beforehand, then missed the second group swim because I was running on empty and needed a rest day. The third class was this past weekend, and as always, I dreaded it because it involved me getting into a pool and using horrible form to propel myself through chilly chlorinated water. For this particular swim class, however, Teresa decided to torture me further by announcing that we were all going to work on flip turns. Unsurprisingly, this mediocre athlete don’t do flip turns. I very obviously lack the coordination and skill to pull off a graceful somersault in the water and push off the wall in one fluid motion. Once I went to a flip turn clinic that Teresa was teaching at the Seattle Athletic Club, and not only did I burn out my sinuses from the military-grade chlorine that flooded my nasal passages every time I contorted my body underwater (Teresa’s shouts to “Tuck your chin!” did not help, as apparently I am incapable of scrunching my head in that manner), I would more often than not attempt to flip at the end of the lane and end up in the one next to me, having somehow maneuvered myself underneath the lane divider and crookedly emerging in some other swimmer’s personal space. “Just practice doing flip turns during your warm ups and cool downs!”, Teresa would tell me. Uh yeah, if I can’t even stay in my lane during a mostly empty swim clinic, I can’t imagine a pool full of lap swimmers would appreciate my flailing appendages slapping into them while I repeatedly apologize and insist to their bruised faces that practice makes perfect. So yeah, flip turns aren’t for me. It’s not a big deal–I’m slow and crappy enough as it is, so adding a flip turn into the mix isn’t going to be the deciding factor in me suddenly becoming as fast as Dara Torres. When I get to the wall I just turn around and push off, so it’s not like I’m taking a five minute break at each end. I’ve accepted the fact that flip turns and I will never have a future together in a pool with a yard and a white picket fence and 2.5 kiddie pools, and that’s okay. Or so I thought. Here T was trying to force flip turns on me once again. She’d have us swim for a bit and then do something dumb like somersault in the middle of the pool. Fortunately, she exempted those of us who “got dizzy” when trying flip turns, so I feigned vertigo and opted just to swim a couple laps instead. The next step was to have people swim to the end of a lane and attempt a flip turn, but I opted to splash around in the middle of the pool and daydream about the day when the swim portion of a triathlon would be replaced with something more practical like light stretching or cookie eating. After the flip turn nonsense, as the workout came to an end I thought I was in the clear. And then T did something especially dastardly: she combined my two most loathed swim activities, flip turns and relays. Teresa is a fan of concluding the swim classes with some relay bullshit, which I hate because it makes me irrationally stressed. She breaks us into groups and gives us some...

I suffer from allergies and receive regular allergy shots to build up my tolerance against various atrocities that assault my immune system. It’s nothing deadly like licking a shrimp will cause me to balloon up and die, or being within three square miles of a bumblebee will result in a development of cankles and neck fat which will consequently cause me to balloon up and die. Nonetheless, my allergies have made me uncomfortable enough since childhood that my allergist determined weekly injections were the best course of action. While I have no food allergies, I’m allergic to a ton of pollens and mildews and grasses and some pet dander (cat being the worst). I get two shots, one for cat dander and one that’s a cocktail of trees, grasses, dust mites and mildew. Right now I’m in “maintenance” mode for the cat shot, meaning I only get that shot once a month. I’m still building up the other shot though so I receive that once a week. Yesterday I went to the medical center to receive my weekly injection. The nurse was someone I hadn’t seen before and I was less than impressed with her needlework. After a more-uncomfortable-than-usual shot, I texted Jas: Stupid new nurse pulled the needle out at an angle. Blood ensued. Come on, junkies take more care than this. Whenever I get a shot I have to wait around for 30 minutes afterwards to make sure I don’t have a systemic reaction from the allergens that were injected, so I wiped the blood from my arm and waited until my time was up, not knowing that the botched shot would serve as ominous foreshadowing to how the rest of my day would go. As I was driving home, I started to feel a pain in the middle of my chest. Not like a heart attack-type pain, but like a really bad bout of acid reflux or like there was a wad of something stuck in my esophagus. By the time I got home the pain would sharply flare up every few minutes and course from the middle of my chest up to my throat. I told Jas about my discomfort and he gave me a “WTF call the doctor” look. The ensuing conversation went as follows: Receptionist (in a bored, flat voice): “Medical Specialties.” Me: “Hi, I just came in for an allergy shot and I think I’m having an adverse reaction.” Receptionist (slightly less bored now): “Uh, okay, what’s your name?” Me: “Rebecca Kelley. K-E-L-L-E-Y.” Receptionist: “One moment.” Abrupt silence. Then: Voice: “REBECCA IT’S JEAN CALL 911!” Jean is one of the head nurses who typically administers my shots. She is very sweet and exceptionally cautious, as I came to find out from our phone call. Me: “Whuh–” Jean: “CALL 911 AND TELL THEM YOU’RE HAVING A SYSTEMIC REACTION! …then call us and schedule a follow up appointment, mkay?” Me: “Uh, my boyfriend is right here, can’t he just drive me to the–” Jean: “NO, IT COULD ESCALATE SO YOU NEED TO CALL 911!” Me: “Well where should I go, should I go back to the UW Medical Center?” Jean: “Whereever’sclosestI’mhangingupnowcall911bye.” I hung up the phone and looked at Jason to relay the conversation, but considering that Jean was shouting at me in a panicked Jack Bauer state, he had heard everything and the look on his face went from “WTF” to “Jesus Christ WTF was that?!!!” Me: “Screw it, I’m not calling an ambulance to take me half a mile. Jason, can you drive me to Swedish?” We headed to the hospital. The pain in my chest continued intermittently and I was feeling...