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 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...

Despite blogging candidly about my crotch and readily peeing myself in public, I’m actually a somewhat modest person, especially when it comes to nudity. In high school P.E. I would marvel at the girls who’d casually stroll around the locker room buck naked while I awkwardly tried to shimmy my clothes on from under a poncho-sized shirt I’d stolen from one of my older brothers. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against nudity; I just prefer to keep my shit covered up to everyone who’s not my doctor or my boyfriend because the general public doesn’t need to see my intimate bits. Nowadays I’ve gotten pretty skilled at slipping out of a wet swimsuit or soggy exercise clothes and into a dry outfit without exposing a nip or a pube or a crack. I know other women are comfortable flaunting their goods and I don’t fault them for it; I just keep my head down and mind my own business, focusing on getting in and out of the locker room as innocuously as possible… …unless someone takes it upon herself to strike up a conversation with me while her chesticles are out and her unkempt pubes are exposed to the elements. That’s when things get a little awkward. Because you know what? If you’re naked and you’re talking to me, I’m gonna stare at your netherparts. How can I not? You’re freaking naked, for crying out loud, and you’re talking to me about the weather and how Ballard has a really good farmer’s market while I try not to gawk at your bare boobies. It’s human nature to stare at something that’s out of the ordinary, and a nude person chatting me up while she’s applying lotion to her ashy elbows qualifies as being a bit on the “abnormal” side of things. Take this most recent encounter. Yesterday I went to the Y to do a swim workout. I plodded towards the showers for a pre-swim rinse off and noticed a woman who was about my age engaged in a post-workout cleanse. (Random aside: the Y’s shower room has a row of exposed shower heads as well as a set of private shower stalls on the opposite side of the room. Why, if you get to choose between a set of public showers and one of the private stalls that each have a curtain and a little bench, would you willingly opt for an exposed shower? Is it a voyeurism thing? Or do you just have no fucks to give? Because I personally would rather suds up my butthole in relative privacy vs. doing it in front of a bunch of people.) She was naked, obviously, gettin’ her scrub on. I quickly glanced at her when I entered the room before looking away because I didn’t want to stare at her ridiculously huge knockers. (I mean seriously, these beasts were like wrecking balls with nipples attached.) I fumbled with a nearby shower faucet and began my quick rinse. And then: Titty McHugeBoobs: “Where do you swim outside?” Oh god. No. Don’t do this. Me, staring at the farthest corner of the room: “Hmm?” Maybe she wasn’t talking to me. Maybe she was…talking to herself? I dunno. I just hoped she wasn’t trying to get a very clothed me to talk to a very nude her. Titty McHugeBoobs: “Where do you swim outside?” Damnit. I shot a brief glance back at her and my eyes tractor-beamed back to her gigantic fun bags before I forced them to pull their gaze up towards her face. She was staring at me while sudsing her crotch. (It sounds erotic but it was...

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...

Every once in a while I make a return to yoga as if I’m trying it out for the first time and have forgotten how much I “nothing” it. It’s like forgetting how crappy candy corn is for 11 months out of the year, only to rediscover it in October and remember how waxy it tastes. Nonetheless, I thought I’d give hot yoga a try because I’m doing two tropical destination half Ironman races next season and figured the humid yoga room could potentially help a bit with acclimation. I’ve done hot yoga a couple times. It’s not bad, but since I’m naturally a sweaty person, I’m literally the only one in the room whose shins are sweating because I’m perspiring so much. I end up in my shame corner soaking wet while these yoga goddesses in booty shorts, sports bras, and 12-packs are contorting their bodies into pretzels without even a strand of hair getting frizzy. It’s lame. This time around I bought a Living Social (or Groupon, or whatever the daily deal site was) special for a hot yoga place in Capitol Hill and my friend Lauren and I met up to try it out. We showed up and filled out the “I won’t sue the facility if I sweat myself to death” forms, then dropped our stuff off in the locker room before stepping into the hot yoga room. The first thing I noticed (and smelled) was that the space was carpeted. Uh what? This is a 90-minute yoga session in which the room is heated to over 90 degrees and someone thought it’d be smart to carpet the floors? It stank like musty feet and stale armpit sweat. I was not thrilled. Lauren and I set up shop in the back of the room. I spread out my brand new yoga mat that I bought off Amazon.com because apparently forest green is an unpopular mat color (pink, on the other hand, would have cost me a monthly car payment). The sinewy instructor entered and started the group off with a ridiculously long series of breaths and shouts. Everyone began to moan as if they were zombies, and I instinctively looked for the nearest ax or blunt object in case I needed to peg someone in the head and make my sweaty escape. After the B.S. breathing, we began contorting and stretching and yoga-ing. The instructor kept firing off instructions one after another without pausing, making me wonder if she doubles as an auctioneer on the weekends. She’d bark at me and Lauren every so often whenever we didn’t contort to her liking, and she kept calling Lauren “Laura,” which got more and more awkward the longer we were in class. Pretty soon I was drenched with sweat. I couldn’t see because whenever I’d bend over, all of the perspiration on my face would dump into my eyes. My towel was all spongy so it offered little reprieve. I sighed and kept telling myself that somehow this would help me survive the hot and humid runs in Costa Rica and Hawaii. At one point I looked down and saw that I was so saturated with sweaty nastiness that the scab on my knee (which I got from scraping it on the bottom of the pool during the previous week’s swim class, another reason why swim class is dumb) had hydrated itself and fallen off. It was now perched on my yoga mat in a soggy little ball. My reaction: I was literally sous vide-ing myself to the point where parts of me were falling off. It was like shredding a slow cooked piece of pork. Four...