The footnotes

Nobody gets an asterisk by their name in race results, as an old triathlete friend used to always say. Haven't we all wanted one at some point? Like Oceanside, I'm pretty sure I would've placed in the *women's overall flat-changing category. Or Heart of Dixie (ca. 2005), when a guy clipped my front wheel, and I finished all *bloody and road-rashed. Nationals in 2003? I *ate Mexican the night before. And a couple races in 2011, *pregnant. 

If I don't get a special mention for those, then I'm surely not getting an asterisk for *severely undertrained. After racing last month and then talking about training taking a back seat to the rest of life, I started looking at my logs from this past year. In just two of those weeks since July, I swam, cycled, and ran for at least 7 hours or more. Seven hours, not seventeen. One hour per day was more than I could manage. My old self, who rarely dropped below about 10 hours in the off season, would be appalled. It's not that I haven't done any workouts lasting longer than an hour, either. But something is always making me take at least one day off per week, like my 7th (?) bout of mastitis last week. And the day you start antibiotics just seems to require a day off from exercise. 

Time seems more important now than pre-Hunter. If I'm gone from my little dude more than a couple of hours, I start feeling really selfish. I know Hunter is having a blast with Daddy, but I feel like I need to get back. I get frustrated over things and people taking my precious time from me, like the orthopedic surgeon who decided to waste 2 of my hours and 40 of my dollars one day, not even getting an X-ray of my hips, much less giving me any answers. I could've been running! Or playing with my quickly growing toddler. 

It's hard to make the decision to race when I feel like such a weekend warrior. I want to say, I'm capable of more! Or, you should've seen me when I was actually riding my bike! I used to go to master's swim! But as much as I'd like it sometimes, there are no footnotes attached to the race results. The best I can hope for after a bad race is a strange absence from the race results, like that terrible marathon I did a few years ago in Phoenix that I never officially ran. Because if all races came with footnotes, I would also see some *there were only 20 women in this race, or *we had a perfect tailwind for the last 40 miles, or my favorite, *the run was short. :)

 did i run the phoenix marathon or didn't i?