This is the California Report

When do you feel truly grown up? I own a house and have a sensible job and a comfortable lifestyle, but I can’t help feeling underneath that it’s all some kind of mistake. I still feel like I’m fifteen and am waiting to be found out. There is one true flag of adulthood though – driving a rental car in a foreign country. I am not sure why this is. Especially with a Hertz gold card. I have to resist the urge to giggle when I see my name lit up importantly on the car pickup board (even if they give me a car where I can just about see over the dash). Gold Member!*
I had big plans for this summer in Galway – weekend breaks in Europe, races entered, tickets for the Arts Festival, concerts with my choir and my singing class. The maybe less enticing prospect of spending hours (and hours) battling on my bike up the Hell of the West into Maam Cross in gale force winds and lashing rain in preparation for Ironman Sweden. So when I was packed up by work to head out to sunny California for three months, taking me right through the summer, I had surprisingly mixed feelings.

It’s an Irish – or perhaps a northern European trait, discussing the weather. Every day, the Irish transplants here smile and shake their heads incredulously and say, ‘God; isn’t it a lovely sunny day!’ My mother (who will never set foot on US soil) texted me wistfully: ‘The weather must be lovely.’ The locals roll their eyes. Every day is lovely – why discuss it? The first trip took me out on a recce to the Bay Area for two weeks in April. While travel for work may sound glamorous, the reality is different. California is, of course, glorious and I loved my adopted home over two summers in the Twin Cities, but the reality is also that you are transported away from all your normal support systems and small comforts that are knit into the fabric of daily life – friends and family being the main ones. The Saturday Irish Times, cups of coffee with gossip, exchange of news, dinner with good friends, company for workouts. I am also a media junkie, and online news is no substitute for the real thing. One of my pet obsessions is news radio, and I found myself substituting endless hours of Newstalk coverage with Minnesota Public Radio last summer. When I finally found the Californian NPR (National Public Radio) channel after a dissatisfying week of scrolling through anodyne pop stations, it was like tracking down an old friend in a foreign country (as I suppose I had). The distinctive, nasally tones of Ira Glass in ‘This American Life’. Peter Segal with his signature drawl: “From WBEZ Chicago, this is Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!’ I was happy. I nestled into the pleather seats of my huge rental car and relaxed into news, satire, documentaries. When I heard them say “This is the California Report”, I knew that I was home….kind of.

Ironman training plans are thrown a bit on their head with the travel. Especially for this trip; a new work project, hotel living and jet lag are not conducive to big training weeks. I started checking out options anyway to get a long ride in over the weekend in California. As it happened, my friend Helen and a few more colleagues from our US office were doing a sprint triathlon only about 20 miles from work, and there was a half Ironman on the same day. Seemed like fate.
As I will be in California right up until Ironman, I signed up with the local triathlon club (Silicon Valley Tri Club) so that I could figure out company for long rides without ending up on US-101 to Los Angeles. In a fit of inspiration (and feeling extremely juvenile – hello, pen friends!) I e-mailed the club to tell them to look out for the Galway Triathlon top at the race on Saturday.
On the day before the race, I was still crashed with jetlag and wondering why I hadn’t taken the other option for the weekend (which was to join some work colleagues on a trip to Napa wine tasting). My decision making is often rash but this was clearly an outrageous error of judgement, only barely held up by the distant dangling carrot of Sweden.
I made a slow traffic-jammed trip to Morgan Hill for packet pickup on Friday evening (with wall-to-wall coverage of the Boston bomber chasedown now that I had found my radio station), and used my fading Irish body clock to crash into bed at 9pm. I slept restlessly, dreaming of open water swims and waking hourly before my 4:30am alarm call.
I was a bit concerned about turning up for work in the new office the following Monday stonewalled with an A-1 Triathlon Hangover. The plan was therefore definitely Not-A-Race, but a training run, so I deliberately didn’t pay any attention to the race details so that I couldn’t spend time fussing over it. Which (as you would expect) turned out to be a bit of a mistake, since I spent the day wondering where, exactly, I was going.
Firstly, the swim, in a reservoir (a pretty natural lake) was around an island in the middle of the lake. Once I’d clarified exactly where we were going, the water temperature was perfect and I had a lovely relaxed swim. I had a vague idea the bike route was a loop, which was totally wrong. There were a myriad of u-turns, left turns, right turns….I was well and truly flummoxed. The bike was a bit hillier and trickier than I expected, with a good head wind in some sections. I ignored heart rate and speed, and tried to go on feel, aiming a bit lower than half IM effort.  As I settled in, I started to enjoy cycling in a totally new place, whizzing past lots of vineyards I could have been drinking in.

Loop one of the run course – 30degC in April!

My heart sank as I rode back in the last section of the bike course, realizing that we were running back out on one of the hillier sections of the bike route – twice. The weather was unseasonably hot for north California in April, topping out at close to 30°C on the run course. I hadn’t been expecting that and it added to the workload, but I was psychologically conditioned for it from running in Minnesota the previous summer (if not conditioned physically from our warm Irish spring), so I drank and poured over a lot of water and took salt. There were a few nasty steep hills on the run which had to be navigated twice, and which took a hard toll on the legs. While I didn’t max out on effort, inevitably my pace started to creep up on the run as I tried to reel in any women I could see ahead of me. One of the water station helpers spotted my Galway top, made the connection and cheered me on.

Race Booty…

I finished comfortably, feeling like there was plenty in the tank. Not an especially fast time, but on a tough course and intended as a training run, so I was happy not to feel crushed by the effort. I was surprised afterwards to find that I had won my age group** and happily picked up a bottle of red wine and a box of Clif bars*** as my prize. After my big podium moment (I’d like to thank my Mammy…) a few more people from the SVTC recognised me and called me over, and I ended up chatting to them about Ironman training and getting advice about long rides in the area. 

So I’m settling in.  I have not yet put a dent in the Mission Cruiser (aka the rental car); while I haven’t been brave enough to go on a bike ride myself, I have been out with the triathlon club (no sweep but I just need to be faster than one other person)…and while I’m still not sure if I’m grownup, they’re accepting my credit card in Whole Foods and letting me buy booze, so that’s good enough for now.  This is the California Report.

 *Didn’t Shirley Bassey sing about that? Almost.
** Out of possibly not too many people but if you’re not in etc.
***Seems like a most sensible combination. The Acme Triathlon First Aid Kit.