The Village People

I can't help but notice lately that it really does take a village. Not to raise my kids (though a small team might help) as that woman meant when she said that, but as my injury has threatened to ruin the season, I realize that I do have a little village. The support has come up out of the woodwork.

When I run out of physical therapy prescription, Dr. V, aka Jaco Van Delden, has been known to call my ortho for me so that I can keep coming in. He calls me when he has a cancellation, finds new ways to treat the source of the problem, and makes fun of me when I can't hold the lunge for three minutes and fall over. And then laughs with me as we play leap frog on the Honu course and doesn't even yell at me for flying by in the no pass zone because I just had to beat him in...

Tanya Castro has been in the Boca family for longer than I have, and for most of that time I had no idea what she did for a living - until I needed to try ART. And now I have a chiropractor, too. I am in once or twice a week for ART, and then she adjusts everything I wreck on the bike back to where it should be, and adds some exercises to compliment Jaco's. Sometimes she uses metal knives on the band, but she's nice enough to get away with it.

Poor Coach Paul's job lately is saving me from my impatient self. He says no a lot, to races mostly, and adjusts the weekly sched every time something hurts. When I do a run he doesn't approve of, he goes back and deletes it from my week, just to remind me that it was not OK. And just recently he called me a crack-addict after receiving my list of reasons why I should do the local sprint tri. Raul, my local Boca coach, has to listen to me mope. The couch under the Zoot shoes in his shop is my therapist's office, where I cry and he tells me funny stories and cheers me up. If I keep it up I'm going to have to start donating Kleenex boxes for the end table.

Dawn makes me suits. When Bree first said her cute Splish suits motivate her to swim more, I thought she was a nutcase.. and then my suits starting coming. When the M&M suit arrived on my doorstep at 4pm, I swam my first double day just to go try it out. I wear wonder woman just to make people laugh at the hard evening masters workouts, and the white flames on days when Katherine and I are swimming together just to be dorky twins. Splish makes the swimming more fun.

Stefan's Tuesday morning ocean swim group breaks up the monotony of 5-6 swims/week. He runs a workout at 6:45 am at Kaimana beach that is open to all, just because. No one's paying him to train us, but we go and learn a lot and get fitter anyway. It's a great mix of technique and sprints and open water practice, and the hour plus workout flies by so much faster than a pool day. This is one of my favorite photos from Kona last year, coming down Palani and starting to believe sub-10 is truly in the bag, while Stefan hollers support:

And then there's my friends. I love the tri community, for the constant checking in and offering up of solutions that have worked for them, and to just say hi when I haven't been at the group ride in a while. I love my training friends, Katherine, Ingrid, Maggs.. for wanting me to be back and healthy just as much as I want to be. I love my mom-girlfriends, who don't know what an IT band is but forgive me for playing bitchy fashion-police at Starbucks because they realize that I'm about as sane as I was at 42 weeks pregnant when I can't run. I love the blog friends, because I feel like there is a group of women who could otherwise be very competitive with one another but through the web we've all become friends & support instead. And they tell me to shut the hell up when I whine. And point out that I was DFL at Worlds - oops. I guess you're supposed to tell them you're not coming?

So to the Village People - THANK YOU! I am so lucky to have such good friends. Also, I'm glad you don't dress up in chaps and sexy police officer outfits.

If you've gotten this far you deserve a treat. I have finally worked my way through the piles of school work that come home on the last day. I ran across this in Wyatt's spelling workbook. Please note that this is not the same child who spelled his last name wrong on his spelling test that I posted a while back.. apparently I'm raising a herd of shitty spellers. I asked him to read number 5 aloud - 

and he said "Can I have a large drink?" in that special DUH tone he reserves for when I'm being really freaking dumb. I kind of like the way it goes with number backwards-seven. The note from his teacher at the top said "Great job Wyatt, let's start adding more details!" Yikes. I don't think I want any more details.