Wow. It's been a few years since I last posted and even those posts were copies of what I'd posted to NextDoor. We were in the middle of the pandemic. What a shitty shitty time, eh? But we were also at the start of the Great Vax Hope and what a hopeful time it was. I so loved volunteering, My first stint was staffing a hotel that was filled with the most at-risk unhoused people in the county. I spent a few days there initially and it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. Then once a week for a few months. It got easier, but I still cried to see the situation these delightful, unfortunate, irritating, funny, sweet, oh so sick people found themselves in.
It feels like we've turned the corner, right? In 2021, summer was crazy with everyone whooping it up and going on vacay. 2022 (for us), was 150% focused on getting home to NZ after five long years away from friends and family and our tūrangawaewae (standing place). As amazing as that trip was, it was tough. Not gonna lie. I saw something like 26 different sets of people, we slept in 14 different locations. Constant moving, lots of emotions, acute feelings of lives and loves split across hemispheres, grief at changed relationships and a situation where there will always be loss. Coming home to the US was haaaaaaard. Not only because of what we left behind, but because (for me), of what I came home to. Within a month, my poly relationship had ended rather badly (someone once told me that heartbreak was the inevitable result of my choice of lifestyle; he's wrong. Polyamory doesn't guarantee heartache any more than monogamy guarantees happiness. Instead, heartbreak is the consequence of choosing to love. It's as simple as that.) and all of a sudden a major anchor was gone. What was keeping me here, aside from my partner and furs and the sticks 'n bricks, and the mortgage that goes along with it?
Luckily, I have the van and the ability to work on the road, so over the next year I spent a lot of time traveling around. You will all have seen the pics on FB. What an amazing experience to see parts of the US I've never seen, catch up with old friends, deepen some acquaintanceships into friendships and sit quietly watching the sun rise or set.
2023 was a year of healing for me. I suspect that however wild and crazy and "over the pandemic" we were, it's taken (me at least) until now to feel healed enough to truly be looking forward. I also learned the extraordinarily valuable lesson (well, maybe it was more a course of study) of how to be not just OK with and by myself, but to relish it. After my 10,000 mile, 13 state van journey out west last summer (an adventure I hope wasn't the trip of a lifetime, but if it was, I'm OK with that), I closed out the year with a marathon on five weeks training and decided to come out of Ironman retirement in 2024 to celebrate 20 years since my first triathlon.
Can you believe it? 20 years! I can't. I was talking with friends the other day about my very first triathlon. It was tiny. The bike was only 10 miles! I completed it on a Mongoose mountain bike. But it changed my life. Here's a quote from my 2004 race report:
It's been two years since I started on a journey that I thought was only about weight but became about so much more. It's been seven months since I started a journey that I thought was only about health and fitness but became so much more.
For some reason, I don't have any pictures from that first race. Caught in the transition from analog to digital I imagine, and before we knew better how to store pics. So here's a very happy me after my first Olympic distance tri in 2005, then finish pics from the four Ironmans.
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| 2005 Columbia Triathlon |
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| 2004 IMLP: Terrible pic, but somehow the blurriness captures the feelings of utter joyful disorientation at having completed this epic thing. |
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This is the end of my draft post. I never got around to posting it. My last edit was January 31, 2024. Presumably I was going to tell you all about hubris. Updated post to come ...
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