Triathlon - a Ghost Story
With a cameo appearance by a shirt
We're in California for the Oceanside Ironman 70.3, where my wife Brenda is determined to exorcise the ghost of Oceanside past - last year's DNF (did not finish). You can read all the previous triathlon posts here.
This piece may also contain references to song lyrics and the name of an eighties Liverpudlian new wave band. See if you can spot them all.
We planned to take three days to drive down here instead of the usual two and so left a little later than usual on Saturday two weeks ago. Besides, Brenda wanted to put the finishing touches on a shirt she's been making for me with fabric we bought in New Zealand. We stopped for the night in Ashland, Oregon. We woke early, and with no reason to linger, hit the road headed for the border into California, where I-5 becomes The 5.
Mount Shasta, decorated with six white vapor trails, looked pretty in the morning. We were happy to see water in Shasta Lake after last year’s mud. We were making good time, so decided to make a run for Southern California, where we could spend the night with a friend, an unplanned joy. She grew up in East Germany with friends in the Soviet Union and had some tips for surviving and thriving under totalitarianism. The secret? It's community. But if you’re here, you probably knew that.
The following day, we settled into our AirBnB and began our stay. As I touched on last week, I've spent much of the two weeks here on a kind of personal spiritual retreat, while Brenda has been training and connecting with her people, a group, based here, who bring mindfulness to triathlon.
Today is race day. I drop off Brenda in the dark a couple of blocks from the start and drive back to our overnight parking spot next to the sewage treatment plant and around the corner from where we're staying. I have time for a quick bite, then hop on my bike to ride back along the bike path next to the railroad tracks, through parking lots and closed roads, to the swim start.
After years of having to move this race at the last minute to the harbor because of high surf, the organizers decided to make that change permanent, starting this year. The irony is that after two weeks of high surf, today it’s benign, and an ocean start would have been fine. The harbor start leaves the transition and race start and finish areas very crowded, with athletes and spectators separated by a fence and the swimmers exit lane, leaving no way for athletes to hand off last minute items to the Sherpas (me!).
The floating docks in the harbor are often occupied by sea lions. I'm hoping none of them are affected by domoic acid poisoning, which has been sickening sea mammals from Santa Barbara to San Diego.
As spectators have no view of the swim start or finish, I move and sit in the early morning sun for a while to warm up, looking out over the San Luis Rey River and a flock of seagulls to Oceanside Pier, with its end fenced off after last year's fire, then position myself just after the bike start to see her head out.
She has a decent swim for the conditions and given some shoulder issues, finishing ninth in her age group, and picking up another place with a fast transition time. She’s looking good as she rides by. The bike is in Camp Pendleton Marine Base, which is closed to the public, so I won't see her again till the run.
I walk back to my bike and retrace the ride back to the AirBnB where we're staying, which, conveniently, is right on the run course. In fact, there's an aid station right in front, making it a perfect place to exchange a word as she goes by.
Our first trip to Oceanside was four years ago, in January and February 2022, and not for a race. We rented an AirBnB on the beach just a block north of this one. Like this, there are three units stacked one above the other up the bluff face, with the upper one at street level, and the lower one opening to a sandy lot and then steps down to the beach.
In 2022 we stayed in an upper unit. It was airy and spacious, with a deck, views of the beach, the ocean, pelicans, dolphins, surfers, and sunsets, and we were blessed with unseasonably warm, sunny, and calm weather. Each morning, I'd walk on the beach over a mile to the pier one way, or a couple of miles almost to Carlsbad the other; a walking meditation and therapy for a Dark Night of the Soul.
With most of the country now experiencing a Dark Night of the Soul, we wanted to repeat that experience. But it's four years later, and it's spring break, and it's the race, and everything is more expensive, and we're in the bottom unit, paying twice what we'd paid for a top unit before. It's a little cold, a little damp, there are high surf and high wind advisories, and it was too cloudy to see a sunset until the weather calmed down a couple of weeks ago. That sunset, though, watching the sun dropping down in the bay and falling off the world, made it all worthwhile. On every west coast, all around the world, people gather in silent reverie to watch the sun sink into the ocean in a ritual as old as time.
The place is beach cabiney, all two by fours and plywood, with white paint and seashells, and it has thin walls. We've had a succession of spring break families in the middle unit upstairs. The noise volume has varied, but none has been so loud that we've felt a need to add to the constellation of small dents1 in the ceiling, each a perfectly match for the end of the broom handle, and consistent with previous guests having asked the upstairs guests to STFU.
The most noticeable change from four years ago is that much of the beach is gone. The combination of storms and a seawall has, as it does everywhere, causes the sand to wash away, leaving the waves to hit the seawall at all but low tide, when just a narrow strip of sand is exposed.
People have loved the beach to death.
According to the tracker, at bike mile 12.2 Brenda has pulled up to 5th, and is still there at bike mile 25.9.
At bike 38.7 she's slipped back to 7th, although only seconds from 6th. That's still great. It's a very competitive field this year.
At the bike finish, she comes in 7th on the bike and 8th overall, with all riders recording slow times.
It will be about 25 minutes until she's running past me here for the first time.
We haven't eaten a meal out since we left home two weeks ago today. I do most of the cooking at home these days. I make a lot of soups, stews, and curries, as well as sourdough bread, all of which I make in large batches so there's excess I can freeze.
For this trip, I splurged a couple of hundred bucks on a fridge-freezer for the car. It runs when the car runs and will also plug in to a wall socket, although we haven't had to do that yet. The insulation is so good that frozen food stayed frozen over three days even with it set at 34°F. By the time we got here, it had already paid for itself in meals out we didn't need.
Hotel room microwaves kept us going until, once in our AirBnB, we could break out the Instant Pot we brought along and visit the supermarket to restock. Three random guys - two who work at the supermarket, and one collecting signatures outside - told me, "I like your shirt." Yes, that shirt!
The same supermarket had "Hotel California" playing last time I was in there. I have to confess that I glanced up at the ceiling and kept one eye on the door as I checked out.
At least they have wine.
Brenda runs up and comes over to let me know that she's cooked. She tells me that she found the swim disorienting. The bike windy and the road surface beat up, with many crashes and flat tires, which explains the slow bike times all round. She's still smiling, still running. I see her again a half hour later on the way back from the first lap turnaround.
On the tracker at the half-way mark, she's still going steady and holding 8th place, and still again at 10 miles as she passes me on her way to the last turnaround, my cue to head towards the finish on the Strand.
With so little beach left, our morning walks now take in the Strand and the pier. The Strand is a one-way road along the beach, tailor-made for that quintessentially Californian pastime of cruising. Sure, people cruise on Alki in Seattle, and “Down the Shore” in Jersey, but nobody cruises like So Cal. They’re out there in their cars to see and be seen. At this time of day there are a lot of trucks and few low-riders. Perhaps those come out at night.
Over the two weeks we've learned to recognize some Strand regulars. The tidy Asian lady with an e-bike and trailer, combing every trash barrel for cans. The guy cruising with his dogs in an open motorized golf cart. The fishers on the pier and the surfers nearby.
Around a half hour later I watch Brenda cross the finish line, tired but happy, in 7th place out of thirteen starters in her age group. She has exorcised the ghost.
It was a hard race and one of her slowest. Her initial reaction is that she's never doing this one again. The race has other ideas. It's her teacher, and it's not done with her yet.
And California's not done with me.
We'll be back next year.
Thank you, as always, for reading. We'll be on the road for a few more days, with some ideas percolating for the next piece. To make sure you don't miss it, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Do they look like bumps to you? What should we name the constellation?
Congrats, Brenda! Always good to shoo away a ghost. But … no picture of the shirt?
Thank you for this interesting story with those wonderful pictures embedden. 🙏 & 'Hats off!' to your wife for her mettle & sewing your shirt.👍