I’m currently sitting on a flight from Seattle to New York (well, Newark) feeling fidgety and uncomfortable. No, it’s not because of your standard “sardines packed into a tin” dread of being crammed into a metal bird with a couple hundred of your closest germ-riddled stranger-neighbors. My constant shifting and pained expressions have to do with something horribly awful and appropriately Mediocre.

I’m writing this post from hot, humid, and sunny (well, not right now — it’s pouring rain) St. Croix, nursing a mild sunburn and a round belly (don’t worry, it’s just the food baby) on the eve of Ironman St. Croix 70.3. I had grand plans to run a marathon before kicking off my triathlon season by tackling the Beast, but the marathon never happened and neither will the race tomorrow (for me, anyway). Truthfully, the months after Ironman Canada have been tough for me mentally as well as physically. After my crashtacular finish, I took some extra time to recover and focus on work. Unfortunately, that focus made me realize how unhappy I was at my new job, and that realization caused a lot of stress and headaches through fall and winter. I’ve noticed this in past seasons: my happiness levels in my personal life greatly affect my success in training and races. Whenever there’s a big imbalance, my motivation suffers and my training swiftly circles down the shitter. So this past fall and winter have been somewhat difficult for me as I struggled to keep it together professionally and drove Jason crazy with typical Quarter Life Crisis freak out laments: Me: “All of our friends our age have ‘grown up’ but us! We should be grownups!” Jason: “What the hell does that mean?” Me: “I don’t know, we should travel more! Or buy a house! We should get married soon! When should we have kids?!” Jason: “So, to be clear, you think we should buy a house but still travel the world, but we should get married first and crap out a few kids? Before the house and travel stuff or after?” Me: “I DON’T KNOWWWW HOW DO GROWN UPS DO THIS?! I need a better job! One that makes me happy! Should I open a Roth-IRA? What the hell is a Roth-IRA? I need to train for a marathon! Everyone on our team is getting faster and having an awesome season and I’m getting fatter and slower by the day! Can we get a dog? I really want a dog! I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M SAYINNNGGGGGG!!!!” I was depressed. I isolated myself from my friends and training buddies because I wasn’t in a good mental place and because my heart wasn’t into exercising or being social. While Jason has been enjoying trail racing and is successfully training for an upcoming 50 mile ultramarathon, I was drowning in despair, ignoring workouts and replacing anything remotely active with eating and sleeping. It got bad enough to the point where Jason and I discussed whether I should seek out professional help and talk to a therapist about some of the things I had been struggling with lately. We both agreed that something needed to change — I had not been myself for several months, and every aspect of my life was being negatively affected. Jason missed his stubborn yet goofy and fun girlfriend, and I missed me, too. But much like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, I endured a mile of shit and darkness and finally emerged into the light. I found a new job, which I’ll officially start on the 15th, and I was able to head into my vacation in St. Croix less stressed out and feeling optimistic and excited for the first time in months. My new gig brings me back to my startup roots, an environment I really enjoy and thrive in, and has me working with smart, passionate people. Plus, one of my bosses has done several Ironman races, so he understands my kooky hobby enough not to raise an eyebrow when I...

I’ve mentioned my post-Ironman weight gain with much exasperation, but I haven’t been entirely honest with you. There’s a reason why I’ve been packing on the pounds lately, but I didn’t want to say anything just yet. Now that a few months have passed, however, it’s safe enough to finally let the cat out of the bag. First, let me preface my announcement by saying this isn’t something I expected to happen so quickly after Ironman Canada, but when you’re suddenly faced with a lot of free time, you’ve got to fill it somehow, amirite? Nonetheless, I wouldn’t call the situation an “oops,” more like a surprising side effect of too much “recovery” time after a long, grueling season of training and racing. Even though this has been completely unexpected, Jason’s been incredibly supportive throughout this period. He’s a good guy. Totes love him. Anyway, without dragging it out any further, I’m just going to come right out and say it: I’m having a food baby. Like I said, this wasn’t really planned at all, but when you spend September through January gorging on various delectable treats with insufficient exercise to balance things out, you end up incubating a little food fetus. It’s hard to say exactly what makes up this little miracle, but if I had to guess I’d wager it’s comprised of pizza, pad thai, ice cream, nachos, Moscow Mules, burgers, and an irresponsible amount of poutine. I’m already starting to show and none of my pants fit. This little guy is growing so fast! My resting heart rate has gotten higher and I’m easily winded during simple workouts, which goes to show how much bigger my food paunch is getting each day. Jason has been such a rockstar, bringing home carryout whenever I have cravings. He’s doing his part to make sure this burrito baby is being taken care of. The pregnancy hasn’t felt that long, but looking back I realize it’s been almost six months since Ironman Canada. Time sure does fly when you’re eating like a fat-ass, doesn’t it? But as proud as I am of my growing bundle of bulge, I’m not sure I can continue incubating it much longer. In fact, I may need to give him up for adoption. I just don’t think I’m ready to carry this responsibility long-term. There are so many races I want to do, so many bikinis to wear, so many skinny jeans to yank on. So as exciting as this time is for me, I’m afraid it can’t persist for much longer. It’s been a great six months, Food Baby, but you’re gonna have to go. If anyone’s interested in adopting a 15-lb bundle of joy from me, that would be really great. The deadline for this offer is before I go to St. Croix in May. Make sure you give Gordo a good home, because this little dude has overstayed his...

After my first Ironman in 2010 and my most recent one in August, I figured post-Ironman I could keep the momentum going and snowball my fitness levels into training for the next Great Big Bad-Ass Event. I’d kick ass, take names, polish my six-pack abs with a ShamWow, all that good stuff. And like clockwork, after each season I got hit with the Post-Ironman Blues pretty hard, proving once again that I am my own worst enemy. The first time around, I was training for a December marathon and ended up getting injured with Achilles tendinitis. With running removed from my fitness equation, I became unmotivated and depressed, packing on weight and working on my TV tan. My 2011 season was uneventful, and I vowed to crawl out of my bunker and bounce back with a fantastic 2012. My 2012 season was mostly fantastic–I slimmed down, improved in all three disciplines, and had some great race PRs (and even podium’d at a couple races thanks to being a big fish in a tiny pond). As with 2010, this time I promised to keep the momentum going and segue into another fit season where I’d be even slimmer and faster than ever before… …and here I am, unmotivated, tired, unfocused, chubbier. I had plans to aggressively train for a marathon in January in hopes of qualifying for Boston after my BFG managed to qualify for the 2014 race at Portland. That January race got pushed to February as my training became more and more inconsistent, and now it’s postponed to sometime this summer. I read my teammates’ status updates about all of the great workouts they’ve been doing lately and ask myself why I feel less energetic than them, why I’m struggling to find motivation after having the grit and determination to push myself to complete an Ironman while injured. I wonder if I’m less “tough” than my seemingly superhuman friends who can easily bust out one, two, or even three Ironman races a year. I struggle to understand why I feel depressed and lethargic at the end of every season while others seem to bounce back quickly, always happy to train for their next big race. I make lofty goals but drag my feet when it comes to getting started. It’s been a confusing few months where my body and my brain battle against each other for supremacy. It’s not that I’ve not enjoyed my time off from constantly training and exercising. My race season started back in March, after all, and it didn’t conclude until the end of August. As such, I’ve greatly enjoyed the copious amounts of eating and drinking the past four months, though I’ve not enjoyed gaining 18 lbs from my most svelte state (about 10 lbs since Ironman Canada). But I always marvel at those who spring out of bed after just a couple short weeks of rest and are ready to get back in action while I still feel somewhat lost and unfocused for 2013. Maybe 2012 was harder on me, both physically and mentally, than I thought. Maybe I needed this extra time off to truly fully recover as I tried to restore a sense of balance to my home and professional life instead of tipping my focus in triathlon’s favor so heavily. Maybe I’m having a full-on Jessie Spano caffeine pill freakout now as I try to organize home projects, find happiness and satisfaction at work, figure out this whole “living like a grown up” thing, and hit all my workouts. (Side note: how the hell do you folks with kids juggle all this shit? I can barely take care of myself on a regular basis, let alone a brood...

I did Ironman Canada again, crashed at mile 30, and managed to mostly keep it together to finish. I was hurting pretty bad during the race but went through a Rollercoaster of Ouch afterwards–some days I’d feel fine, other days I’d be in a lot of pain again. The day after the race I was stiff but not feeling too terrible until I got home that night and realized I had shoved my sore and bruised body into a car for five hours. And then Tuesday rolled around. I’ve often told people that when you do an endurance race, you hit “max soreness.” I’ve felt about as sore after a marathon as I have after a full Ironman, so I figure that my body had hit maximum soreness. It’s uncomfortable but manageable, so after this most recent Ironman, I anticipated hitting “max soreness” like I always have and being able to deal with it fine. Unfortunately, I was wrong. “Max soreness” isn’t when you finish a marathon or an Ironman, it’s when you finish an Ironman race where you also happened to eat pavement. I was hurting bad on Tuesday. Not only did I have the standard post-race soreness, I was still in a considerable amount of pain from the accident. Just walking from my car to the office left me panting and wincing while holding my ribs. I was mostly useless at work and resorted to pained weight shifts and whimpers during our company meeting while the CMO looked at me like I was a dog that needed to get put down. On Wednesday I felt better, but my ribs and the left side of my head would continue to ache on and off for the next month or so. A couple weeks after the race, I showed up to the team track workout to do an easy 30 minute run but had to bail after about 20 when my head started throbbing like crazy. When Jason passed me on the track and asked how I was feeling, I pouted and responded with “My concussion hurts!” like a four-year old. But the human body is a resilient beast and eventually I healed up. Here’s a little photo journey of the nastiness: Naturally, since I wiped out at mile 32.4 of a 140.6 mile race and continued on for several hours before I tended to my wounds, my scrapes quickly evolved into “Nasty Mode” and got angry and red before switching over to liquid-y and disgusting: My most shameful moment was when I was at work talking to my boss, and his eyes flickered over to my left shoulder. I followed suit and glance down, realizing that my shoulder grossness had seeped through my shirt. He looked thoroughly disgusted as I apologized profusely for looking like the thing that emerged from the barrel in Return of the Living Dead. When it finally dried out, my left shoulder started to resemble one of those geode rock thingies you play with in third grade: The scabs are gone now, thankfully. My right hand scars are angry and purplish. The left knee is fading pretty decently, but the left shoulder is a ridiculously hue of “new skin” pink. (My gobstopper tan lines aren’t helping with the contrast.) I’ve been slathering it with lotion as well as sunscreen whenever it’s exposed to sunshine, so hopefully it’ll fade to a less horrific shade soon. Annoyingly enough, everyone who sees it (including a couple of nurses at my allergy clinic) thinks it’s a sunburn that I managed to get only in one concentrated area on my left shoulder, as if I were some sort of long-haul trucker...