When I first started this nonsense sport, Teresa lent me an extra bike trainer she had so I’d be able to do indoor rides. It was a sad little thing that Jason wasn’t allowed to use because I was convinced he’d snap it in half. After a couple seasons of slumming it on the little trainer that could, I finally shelled out major coinage for a Kinetic fluid road bike trainer, the luxury sedans of trainers. It’s supposed to be one of the quietest trainers on the market, meaning I’d be able to ride and actually hear the movie I’m watching without having to blast the volume up so loud, my neighbors want to murder me. The first one I bought had some B.S. problem where some hole wasn’t drilled properly, forcing Jason to hammer the screw in all janky-like. You’d think shelling out a few hundred bones for a pricey hunk of metal meant it would be engineered properly, but I guess that’s not the case. Despite the minor setback, I was pretty stoked to finally be rollin’ on a “grown up” trainer, and a whisper quiet one at that! …or so I thought. About six months after using the trainer, one day I hopped on my bike for a spin and my Kinetic promptly sounded as if the Inception buzzy noise had personified, gotten stuck behind my wheel, and was being slowly and tortuously ground to death. I tried to ignore it at first, but this stupid noise got louder and louder to the point where I was blasting Teen Mom 2 at full volume in a futile effort to hear whiny girls and their baby daddy drama over the honking whir of my trainer (yes, I watch Teen Mom — it’s part of a Scared Straight program for my uterus so it doesn’t try any funny business). Eventually I gave up and hauled the bright green abomination back to whence it came so I could swap it out (REI, you mofos have the best return policy ever). Thankfully, the apathetic customer service rep was fine with me exchanging the nearly year-old trainer, so I grabbed a brand spankin’ new one and brought it home. Jas offered to help me set up Kinetic 2: Electric Boogaloo, but when he unpacked it and began assembling it, he noticed something wrong. Kinetic, you’ve screwed me again. The new trainer came with a screw that was, inexplicably, too short to fit through the one hole it was designed for. You’re kidding me! This shit is worse than Ikea — I expect some discrepancies when I’m buying hard-packed sawdust passing as furniture for a fraction of the cost, but when I’m plunking down hundreds of bucks for a hefty piece of machinery, I (foolishly) figure that all the pieces are manufactured properly. Rather than have an entire department in REI hate my guts, I opted to go to Lowe’s and shell out 15 cents for a replacement screw. Afterwards, Jas was able to get my trainer working properly and I’m once again riding in relative quiet…that is, until it borks again (which, considering my luck, I fully expect it to do). Of course, Jason’s trainer has given him zero problems while I’m on my third one. Oh well, the best I can do is cross my fingers and hope that the Kinetic plays nice so I can ride and watch my crappy action movies and trashy TV in...

Not too long ago I blogged about how I was a mediocrely dressed athlete. My teammates all looked gorgeous in their cutesy petite Lululemon gear while I slummed it up in old race t-shirts and haggard eyes. Since then I’ve Jefferson’d up and moved into a de-luxe apartment in the sky, meaning I’ve acquired some more respectable exercise clothing. Woo hoo! First, my coaches Teresa and Mark bought me a pair of Lululemon shorts for my birthday, thus popping my Lululemon cherry. (Hey, I’m a late bloomer.) Then a teammate of mine, Amanda, gave me another pair of Lululemon shorts she didn’t like. That’s 200% more Lululemon than I had before! Teresa then tricked me into buying a Lululemon tank top by saying she was going to print the TN Multisports logo onto them for Ironman Canada, so I shelled out the big bucks for my first Lululemon top. It all goes downhill from there. I’ve since discovered that while I’m still not a Lululemon shopper (one of my teammates admitted to dropping five hundred dollars there in a single shopping trip, and when I balked at the price, other teammates were like, “Oh yeah, I’ve spent that much in one visit before” without batting an eye. Seriously, underground meth lab. It’s the only explanation), I am a Lululemon sale shopper. I’ve recently bought two tank tops and a short-sleeve performance shirt that were all on sale, plus a pair of running shorts and some socks that were marked down. Jason, on the other hand, has chugged the full-price Kool-aid and plunked down some cold hard cash for two pricey (but nice) t-shirts and some undies. (He did manage to get a pair of loungey shorts on sale, though.) Capping off my wardrobe is a pair of Nike shorts and a run shirt handed down to me by Teresa. (She also hooked me up with roughly 80 pairs of summer shorts because they were too big for her. Yes, a slimmed down me = a big Teresa.) Maybe now I’ll be able to start phasing out my gross old $7 tank tops with the permanent underarm stains. Yee-haw! To give you an idea of how perceptive my female teammates are (and how Lululemon-obsessed they are), when I debuted one of my new Lululemon tank tops at a track workout, I hadn’t made it more than four steps onto the track when several of my run buddies exclaimed, “Hey, new top!” They all noticed immediately and cooed over my fancy new digs. When I got home and told Jason, he laughed and asked if they all formed a circle around me and began chanting, “One of us! One of us! Goo-ble gob-ble, goo-ble gob-ble!” I still can’t bring myself to buy something from Lululemon at full price (seriously, $120 for a sweatshirt?), but I do admit they make some nice crap. Plus, I’ve lost enough weight to feel less like a fat cow when I try on their clothes and more like a chubby...

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...

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...