on building character. or something.

Let's just say this past weekend was, for lack of a happier term, character-building (as my dear friend Layla, recipient of all my 5 a.m. freak out texts, would put it).

After an unnaturally long and gorgeous summer that lasted well into mid-October, Seattle finally unleashed the fall fury. In other words: The weather was absolutely craptacular all weekend.

I had a three-hour run Saturday, and Coach Mark wanted me to do an out-and-back, completing the second half five minutes faster than the first.

After much bitching and moaning ("Goddammit, cats, why is your life so easy? Why don't you get off your butts and do an Ironman? Why do you poop so much?"), I sucked it up, donned my ridiculously fluorescent water repellent running vest and nailed the workout. And there was actually a lull in the weather for most of my run, with no rain until the end.

Pretty -- in a gloomy, foreboding, Pacific Northwest way.

Then that night, there was a crazy wind storm. And maybe this is just me (actually, this most likely is just me), but every time the wind starts howling, I'm totally convinced it's the end of the world and I feel like I should go to the store and buy all the Spam and toilet paper and start filling my bathtub with water.

But like I said: Just me.

Anyway, so there was a crazy wind storm. And I got up the next day to ride my bike for seven hours. (So clearly the world didn't end.) I decided to stay on the Burke-Gilman and Sammamish River trails because I was afraid of crappy road conditions and getting hit by a car in the bad weather. Also, I thought doing out-and-backs on the trails would be good mental practice for the loops of IMAZ.

Yet even on the trails, the debris was bad. 

Downed tree? I guess I'll turn around here.

And then about 60 miles in, I got caught in a torrential downpour. (Nothing like the feeling of backtire splash seeping down your buttcrack.) At first, I thought: No big deal, I'll be careful, this is nothing. But then the rain came down harder and harder, and the drops actually physically started to sting. 

I took shelter in a public bathroom.

Still, I powered through and finished the ride -- it was a slow, wet slog, and I ended up with only 87 miles when I had been hoping for 95 or more. (And at some point, I must've run over a pile of dog poop, too, because there was poop on my tire and on one of my pedals. I'm going to just keep telling myself this was dog poop and not human poop. And that it was only on my bike and not actually on my body.) And then I did a 30-minute transition run.

"Ironman training is super dumb!"

Hooray for massive volume.