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At 7:13 a.m. on the morning of my thirty-third birthday, I stand knee-deep in water and look out at the orange sunrise over the black lake with a hundred other pink-capped women aged 30-34. Connie stands next to me. We wear black wetsuits and we shiver with cold and nervousness. We pull our goggles down over our eyes, push them hard against our faces to seal. Connie says, "Don't try to talk me into doing another one of these" and I say, "Never again." Then it is 7:14 a.m. and the whistle blows and we are off.

The water is cold and choppy and it is crowded with pink caps. I try to put my face in the water and swim the way I have practiced but I am too worried that I will swim straight into someone, so I make do with a modified crawl, my head sticking up out of the water more than not. A little behind and to my right, someone starts crying out, though I don't hear exactly what they say. I hear someone go to her and yell, "We need a boat over here!" and just the thought of the panic they are in makes me a little queasy.

I press on, but every time I turn my head to the side to breathe, I get a wave in the face, so I do a little breastroke, a little freestyle, a little treading water to see where I am going. The buoy seems very, very far away, and it doesn't feel like I am making much progress. I have lost Connie completely. I reach the buoy, head back towards shore, and am able to get enough space to put my head down and swim the way I want to swim - strong, smooth - more of the way back in. I am hating every second of the swimming, but I am almost done. When my feet touch the slimy cement of the boat launch and I walk out of the water, I rip my pink cap off and smile. I pull my wetsuit down to my waist and run gingerly (bare feet!) on the cobbled path. The clock says 25:something when I run past and go to my transition area.

Connie is just there, too. Wetsuit off. Helmet, bike gloves, long-sleeved wicking shirt, shoes, camelback on. Shot Blocks in pocket. Ankle strap secured. And I'm lifting my bike off the rack and running it toward the Bike Out chute, getting on, and pedaling with Connie a few yards in front of me. We are Moms on Mountain Bikes. We take turns leading each other up and down the hills, talking when we're close enough, getting passed by plenty of people with sweeter, faster bikes. I am pedaling on Fulton into the wind when Jason passes me. "Hi, babe!" he says, and then he's a blur of gray and red and white speeding down the hill. I turn around and the wind is at my back for the horrible hill on the return and the hill is not as bad as it has been before. I eat my Shot Blocks and drink all my water and before I know it, I am cresting the intersection of Cascade and Robinson, turning left onto my very favorite part of the ride, a smooth section completely covered with trees that leads to a curving downhill. I am going fast and I have a huge smile on my face because the hardest part is over.

I coast toward the transition and I hear people cheer and yell my name and someone is telling me to Slow Down and then I'm off my bike and running it back to my rack. Connie gets there a few seconds later, and because we're not fancy, we don't have fancy clip shoes to change, so we just ditch our bikes and helmets, then start to run. My legs feel a little heavy, but we're talking and laughing anyway. Sarah is waiting for us in front of the library, yelling "Woooot! Woooot!" and she jumps in to run with us, full of stories and positivity. We are talking and laughing and telling her how much the swim sucked. Other people ask if we're The Fun Group and we say yes.

More people, more cheering, and the run feels great as we go around the lake. We reach the hill before the rock and I think This is the last hard part! On the downhill we see an old friend, then Sarah drops away and we turn the corner towards the finish. I see Jason, just finished, watching for me and I blow him a kiss. I say, "I can't believe we just did this," and Connie says, "Neither can I" and we cross the mat side by side, two hours and eleven minutes after we started.

I did a triathlon on my thirty-third birthday.

On Limits, and the Pushing Of

Tonight's swim workout (the last one):

300 warm-up

12 minute timed swim at race pace

6 x 100 fast

2 x 75 drill cool-down

Even as I was slicing back and forth in my lane, it was hard for me to believe that I really could

swim this far only ten weeks after those first, few horrible swims. I actually feel comfortable in the water instead of gaspy and panicky. I actually have a rhythm, sometimes, and feel soothed by the underwater quiet. When I finish, I feel tired but strong, not shaky and weak like I did at the beginning of July.

The weather forecast for Saturday doesn't look great: nighttime low of 54 degrees, and a 60% chance of thunderstorms. Thunder and lightening would mean cancellation, and I am going to be fairly devastated if I don't get to do this thing I've been working towards for most of the summer. I'll be disappointed, for sure. I'll probably flail around, trying to find another, similar-distance event in the very near future just so I can check this New Year's Resolution off for 2010.

But no matter the weather at 7:00 a.m. on Saturday, what doesn't change is this: I set a goal, I worked toward it, and along the way I got to spend some bonus time with my best friend, meet a fun new group of people, and stretch and strengthen my body in new ways. I tried something new. I learned that I love the feel of speeding down a hill on a bike, of pushing myself along the road in a new way. I learned that I can swim, and that I can train my body to do something hard simply by practicing it over and over and over. I showed my daughters what it looks like when health and fitness are priorities, and that a mommy is often sweaty and smells bad but is also strong and determined.

I probably swam a mile total tonight, a distance that would have been completely impossible for me ten short weeks ago. I wonder what else I can do.

Click

"Well the sun's not so hot in the sky today

and you know I can feel summertime slipping away . . ."

-James Taylor, "September Grass"

I remember the very first day of March feeling very "March-y" this year: bright sunshine melting the icicles, warm wind, spring smells. Six months later, September 1 felt very "September-y," too: dark, low clouds; drizzly rain; requisite geese flying overhead when I sat on the couch late in the evening. I lit the cinnamon cider candle, had my first pumpkin spice latte of the season, too. I love when the weather corresponds neatly to the calendar (winter, take note).

Last night, our triathlon training group did a simulation of the actual event. We couldn't do it on the course we'll be using, mostly because it's tough to swim in Reed's Lake in the evenings (too many boats) and not idea to ride on Fulton (too busy). So we gathered at a little lake out in Caledonia somewhere and set up our "transition areas" (read: old towel with running shoes, a Camelback, and a packet of Gu next to my mountain bike from 1998) on the front lawn of a generous woman who let us all in to use her bathroom when we had to pee from nervousness.

Connie, Katie, Jason and I crammed ourselves into the wetsuits we'll be renting and followed the group into the lake. I swam half a mile no problem and hope, hope, hope it goes as smoothly on the day of the race. (Peeling myself out of the wetsuit, though, did not go as smoothly. Any tips, swimmers?) Then we headed to the lawn, slammed some Gatorade and Gu, and biked 18 miles through cornfields and to the town of Middleville and back. Off the bikes, we ran just over four miles. It was dark by the time we finished up, fireflies lighting our way on the gravel roads, and we were just plain glad to be DONE. It was all of the guts, none of the glory, but I do feel as prepared as possible for next Saturday. Now, crossing my fingers for good weather.

Today I took the girls to Marie Catrib's for lunch just because it's one of the last times I'll be able to take them both out like this for a long while. We waited and waited for a table, the girls and I doing hand-clapping games and singing the little songs that go with to pass the time, Marie coming around with plates of peaches and cookies to appease our hunger. We ate our meals (PB&J, macaroni and cheese, and the cranberry chicken sandwich on challah, all shared around the table) and then of course we finished with pudding, and my desire to have a large vat of it as part of our post-triathlon celebration was confirmed.

Later, we ventured to Annie's school to meet her new teacher and check out her classroom. Her locker is HUGE - she could fit inside it entirely - and she went about choosing a spot to sit and dutifully placing her binders and composition notebooks (hee!) and pencil box inside an actual desk. (A desk! With a nametag! They did not have desks in kindergarten. This is The Real Deal.) She loved her teacher. She loved seeing her friends. She is so eager to return on Tuesday and get started on first grade. She is counting the days.

I took a few minutes today to scroll through the hundreds of photos we took this summer as we prepare to bid it farewell, and I can't believe how spectacular it was. The weather was awesome, the girls were at an age where they can do most everything with us but the wonder hasn't yet worn off, and we truly made the most of these three months. Looking at the photos, I felt so incredibly blessed and grateful for all the moments: baseball games, sparklers, memorable meals, Lake Michigan, the pool, lemonade stands, camping, fireworks, biking, ice cream . . .

. . . and as much as I love fall, a tiny part of me doesn't want to see it end. I just finished the book Devotion by Dani Shapiro. I folded down the page where she wrote this:

Autumn has always been my favorite season, and even more so since we've moved to a part of the country known for its foliage. As we drove past lakes framed with the fiery mix of color, I had a familiar desire to freeze the moment - to stop time. Stay this way, I silently asked. I wasn't just asking the leaves to hold on to the trees. I was asking Jacob to stay a little boy, for Michael to remain vital and healthy, for myself to stay a while longer in this chapter of my life.

"Mommy?" Jacob piped up from the back seat. "I'm hungry. Is there anything to eat or drink?"

Even this - even my son calling me Mommy - felt bittersweet. When would I be demoted to just plain Mom?

I reached into the back seat and handed Jacob a bag of chips and a milk box. I was longing for the moment I was in, even as I was in it. I was mourning it, as if we were already a yellowed photograph in an album: my family together on a country drive, young, healthy, happy, whole.

I knew better, of course. I knew that trying to capture time - to hold on to anything at all - was not only useless, but a terrible waste. Time was all we had.

I am trying so hard not to do this - not to long for the moment I am in, even as I am in it. I am trying, instead, to savor the moments, to celebrate them, to capture them in words and photos, to plan for more of them the next day, and the next.

There was a moment on Tuesday when the girls and I were at the beach and I was in the middle of them, holding both their hands as we jumped the crashing waves and the sunshine glinted off the water. The girls were squealing and joyous, the water swirled around my knees, and I felt myself smile - not at them, but just at life, at the moment I'd been given. I said, "I wish I had the camera out here with me. We'll have to take a picture with our brain and remember how fun this is." And Jemma let go of my hand for a second, put her fingers up around her eyes, and said, "Click!"

I'm going to send my Annie off to first grade on Tuesday. I'm going to bid this fabulous summer farewell and maybe let myself mourn the passing of time for just one minute. Then I'm going to make a new list on the blackboard by the back door - a Fall List - and plan for more spectacular moments in the days and weeks to come. I'm going to do a triathlon. I'm going to celebrate a birthday with my big, little girl. Click. Click. Click.

Bleak House

Jemma is on day seven (SEVEN!) of the stomach virus, and Annie came down with it, too, so now I'm on day seven (SEVEN!) of wiping butts and washing hands and being trapped within a 50-foot radius of a toilet with my children. The zen-like acceptance of the tethering that I exhibited early this week has given way to bitterness that we are missing out on the last, good bit of summer sunshine and beach days. I feel so sorry for the girls and their sore little bellies, and I feel (less) sorry for myself as we've had to cancel plans and modify schedules to make sure one of us is always near.

Luckily, Jason and I have remained (so far) healthy, so I've been able to scoot out of the house around 6:00 every night (eleven hours a day of nursemaiding being plenty, thankyouverymuch) for various activities. I biked on Monday, swam on Tuesday, saw Brandi Carlile at Meijer Gardens on Wednesday (to cap off three weeks in a row of fantastic outdoor entertainment there), and then there was last night.

Last night, our training group biked and ran the actual triathlon course as a group. We gathered at Manhattan Park at 6:30, got a little pep talk from one of the coaches, and then we were off: 17 miles out and back on Fulton and around the lake, then around the lake again - this time on foot - for 4.9 miles. The air was perfectly cool and crisp - maybe 68 degrees? - and the sun was sinking lower as we passed the football field, where our home team was kicking off its season with a victory in a packed house. It felt pretty great, all in all, and I feel like I got a big mental boost, just knowing that I can put those two pieces together before the big day. We stood around in the parking lot afterwards, feeling victorious and surprised at what we could do, Connie and Katie and I quite pleased with ourselves, to be honest.

Today, it's back to trading shifts of nursemaiding with Jason (I went out for yoga, farmer's market, and an errand this morning; now Jason's off on a long bike ride for the afternoon) and settling into a weekend at home since we've had to cancel our plans to go up north. I'm not sure what we'll do, except to say that the seven days I've been mostly in the house already have caused me to go a little stir-crazy. I can tell this because at one point yesterday I started thinking I might as well wash windows (taking breaks every 20 minutes to assist someone in the bathroom) or plant my fall window boxes, or something that would at least make staying at home feel productive. And you KNOW I don't wash windows, ever. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow, in the 85-degree sunshine, I'll be inside again, wiping butts and cleaning a closet or two.

Half a Mile

I swam half a mile across a lake tonight.

I put on my new bathing suit - the purple Speedo with psychadelic hearts across the chest from the Gazelle clearance rack, the one that Jemma LOVES - and tucked my hair into a swim cap and suctioned my goggles to my face. Then I just walked into the water, thinking, Muck, Muck, Weeds, Ewwww and suddenly I was stroking towards an orange boat on the other shore as the sunlight slanted down from the clouds.

At no point did it feel easy, but neither did I feel at any point that I could not go on one more minute. I did a fair amount of breast stroke amid the freestyle. I counted to ten, then to ten again, then made myself do ten more strokes before another sight of the shore. I was surprisingly unmoved by the murkiness of the water or the weeds floating in my line of sight; in fact, I think I liked it better than the pool. I know! But when a teeny bit of lake water snuck into my goggle, it did not immediately burn my eyeball the way the chlorine does after one blink in the pool. I did not spend a single second thinking about fish or turtles that might want to nibble on my toes. It was just breathe, breathe, breathe to the other side of the lake.

I began swimming on July 7th and today, August 24th, I swam a half mile without stopping. I am pretty happy about that.

Packing a Bag

If the theme of Summer 2010 is "I Don't Want it to End," one sub-theme must be "Packing a Bag." That is what I've been doing multiple times a day to enable all this non-stop fun. Yesterday morning, we headed to the gym at 9:30. I planned to check the girls into the kid's area, run, swim, and then get them out and take them to the outside pool and stay for lunch, which I packed and brought along to avoid spending $10 on PB&J. This required three separate bags (one with ice packs!), four bathing suits (one for each of them, two for me since the one I swim laps in is so hideous and butt-enlarging that I have fantasies of burning it when the triathlon is over), and so many ID cards, goggles, shoes and flip-flops for each person that it was truly annoying to carry it all into the gym.

It went smoothly yesterday and we stayed happily at the gym until 1:00, at which point I had to haul said bags back to my house and unpack them, separating out the things I'll need for workouts later in the week, leaving in the things the girls will need the next time we go to the pool. This scenario, repeated daily since June . . . makes me weak.

Furthermore? The bag-packing and excursions plus the workout clothes laundry plus the two-sports-a-day working out has left me feeling a level of tired that I haven't encountered since being in the first trimester of pregnancy. For example, when I was pregnant with Annie and still teaching at Cranbrook, I used to walk my class down to, say, music, return to my classroom, shut the door, and lie down on the floor for half an hour until it was time to go get them. Then, after school, I would drive home and fall asleep on the couch before Jason got home for dinner, wake up, eat dinner, and go immediately to bed for the night.

Since that amount of during-the-day sleeping clearly isn't an option at this point, I have opted to let a few things go. I have essentially stopped making dinner. Last week there were two nights that I made an effort, but then camping happened, and this week is Just! So! Hot! and, well, I let the girls get that $10 crappy pool food dinner tonight and ended up eating microwave popcorn and Twizzlers when I got home, even though there is a piece of perfectly good fish sitting in my fridge, thawed over the course of the day, waiting to be grilled.

And it's gorgeous outside right now, but all I really want to do is drink a beer and watch the next episode of Mad Men, which Jason and I have been working our way through one DVD at a time while the joys of Modern Family and 30 Rock are unavailable.

So training for the tri continues, and my biggest triumph to date is the fact that, last week at "swim practice," I counted up the 50's and 100's at the end of the workout and it totaled almost 1200 meters! Now, that 1200 meters took me the better portion of an hour, and a little of it was drills, but I am thrilled to be at a point where I really, truly can swim at least 6 or 7 laps without stopping at all, and where I can swim almost 20 with a few breaks between sets.

Speaking of swimming, just writing about swim practice reminds me that, right now, I need to go get my hideous, butt-enlarging suit from its perch hanging to dry in the shower, track down my goggles from wherever Jason left them (oh, because he's decided to do the triathlon, too), and (you guessed it) pack that bag for tomorrow's swim practice, complete with pool punch card, towel, swim cap, conditioner, and change of clothes for date night afterwards. It's my reward for an hour of gliding back and forth, back and forth while water lodges in my ear and my goggles make ugly red marks under my eyes.

After I pack that bag, I have to pack another three, too: Annie and Jemma's overnight bags for grandma and grandpa's on Thursday, and my own, for my upcoming long weekend here with five of my favorite girls. Spa rated #13 in the world??? That's a bag I don't mind packing at all.

Houston, We Have a Problem

Here's the thing. I can run for an hour or more without stopping, easily. I can bike for an hour or more without stopping, easily. I can swim for twenty minutes, tops, and that includes a lot of breaks for hanging on walls and panting.

It's been a week since the triathlon training officially kicked off with a moderately humiliating group swim last Wednesday. Our swim instructor is perky and young. Her name is Anna. "Get in the pool," she said, "and just warm up with an easy 100." Easy. Ha! We did that, we did drills where we just kicked on our side, we did things called Zippers and Catch-ups and 50s of stroking with just one arm all the way down and back. Since then, I've gotten in the pool two other times, once to swim 10 laps, alternating freestyle and breaststroke, once to use a pull buoy to try to work on my arm strength and a kickboard to work on kicking from my hips.

The second time, I got to the lane just as another swimmer was getting there. He was tall and muscled and be-goggled and looked like A Real Swimmer.

"Want to share the lane?" he asked.

"Sure!" I said. I actually wanted to rip my swim cap off and go hide in a corner, but it was a cheerful lie.

"Do you want to split the lane or circle swim?" he asked.

By the grace of God, I had done enough Googling to know what those terms meant. "I'm the slowest ever," I said, "so we should probably split the lane so you don't have to pass me 85 times." I laughed. He didn't laugh. I was mortified.

Afterwards (again: AFTER TWENTY MINUTES), I am shaky and exhausted. I am ravenous. I feel like I could pass out if I get up too quickly. I have to sit down in the gym lobby and pretend to be making a list or looking at something on my phone before I go collect the girls from the kid's area.

I keep asking - begging! - people for help. I instant message people on Facebook (people who swam competitively in college) and ask them for advice. I march out to a friend standing on the pool deck watching his daughter's swim practice (an Ironman, no less) and ask him to be my swim coach. I Google things during quiet time, things like "beginning swim for triathletes," "swimming for exercise" and "adult swimming tips." People think I am exaggerating my feebleness. I'm not.

I know I'm only a single week in to this 10-week training process, but I'm still truly unsure if I can swim 1/2 mile AND THEN do the other two things. It's humbling. It's scary. My right shoulder hurts, the swimming has turned my legs into mush when I try to do my usual runs, and I'm thirsty all the time. The upside so far has been discovering that I love the biking, and I'm seriously considering getting (or borrowing) a road bike to see if I can push myself even faster there. Best-case scenario, I don't come in completely last because I can rock the bike and the run. Worst-case scenario, I take longer than the alloted 35 minutes to complete the swim and I'm disqualified.

Tomorrow night, back in the pool.