Mirror, mirror

“Hi!”

I looked up in surprise, expecting to see one of my daughters demanding my attention – but no, they were happily whacking each other with pool noodles several meters away. Instead, I was being addressed by an unknown plump and energetic bundle of purple ruffled bathing suit, green inflatable ring, and half-wet brown curls.  She struggled and splashed all the way across the shallow end to accost me.  Having reached her goal, she thrust her face close to mine, and examined me from a distance that reflected both intense curiosity and juvenile optic focal distances.

“Hi,” she repeated. She didn’t wait for a response, but pressed on.  “Tell me why your eye is like that!  What’s wrong with it?  Tell me the story of your eye!”

My first reaction was delight. I’m a sucker for the honest charm of a kindergarten-aged person who has not yet had her curiosity subsumed by politeness.  Besides, the idea that my right eye has its very own “story” seemed to elevate its status from useless orb to mythic legend.

That was my first thought.  My second thought was, “Ugh… is it really that obvious a whole pool-width away?” 

I try not to be self-conscious about the many, many ways in which I do not meet the American Standard of Beauty – but that’s a tall order.  Magazines, movies, and my flickering computer screen all tout these exacting criteria with maniacal zealotry.  Are your teeth too stained?  Is your hair unmanageable?  Are your thighs too plump? Is your waist too plump?  Are your arms too plump?  Is everything too plump, because, goddammit, we’re really into fat-shaming you?  Are your toes unattractive?  Do you, perchance, have a mismatched, wandering, blind right eye?  

I’m not the only one who’s mightily pissed off about this, of course.  I’ve seen oodles of articles and photos that profess to tear the Western Standard of Beauty off its skinny, glossy pedestal.  I’ve seen websites and Facebook posts featuring photos of women who are older, heavier, saggier, smaller-breasted, or more racially diverse than the standards that we see in magazines and on billboards.   Men don’t really prefer skinny girls!  Everything you see is photo-shopped!  The average woman is a size [some-bigger-number], not a size [some-smaller-number].  Our beauty standards should be broader!  Our beauty standards should include average women!

Glancing at this oh-so-well-intentioned propaganda, I’ve often felt as if I ought to be hollering its message from bell-towers, and maybe shooting off a few fireworks for added emphasis.  Hey! Mainstream media!  If you tell us one more time that we should hate ourselves for how we look, things are gonna get ugly with this Roman candle!  At the very least, I should be “liking” and “sharing”, shouldn’t I?  And yet, somehow, I haven’t been.  All that UpWorthy hasn’t made me feel Up, or Worthy.  And for a long time, I didn’t really know why.

There in the pool, I must have hesitated for a microsecond, because my little interlocutor elaborated, and pointed. “That eye’s smaller.  And lower down or something, maybe. And you keep closing it and not opening it.  I mean, not even opening it at all!”

I laughed.  “Well, it’s blind,” I explained.  “I didn’t even notice that I was keeping it closed, because I can’t see anything from it, anyhow.”  Also, as far as I could tell from the choking fumes, the pool chlorine was dialed up to roughly 50% of the lethal dose for carbon-based life-forms.  My right eye may be blind, but I guess it has some independent-minded self-preservation instincts.  Independent-minded, and asymmetrical.

Asymmetrical?  Is it even possible to be self-conscious about facial asymmetry, of all things?

Well, yeah.  Circa 1991, for a class in biological anthropology, I read a journal article that professed to debunk our ridiculous American standards of beauty – using actual science and cutting-edge cross-cultural research.  Skinny is a local fashion, not a universal standard! This article seemed to be full of hope for a college-aged misfit such as myself.  I was yearning to be told that I did not need to be thin to be acceptable.  I was desperate to learn that I did not need to have shiny blonde tresses, to boast perfect skin and a button nose, or to wear flirty skirts and mascara in order to be potentially desirable.  And, indeed, the article promised to do exactly that.  It reported that broad cross-cultural studies showed that only three qualities of feminine beauty were universal.  What were these standards?  Youthfulness, a waist-to-hip ratio close to 0.70, and facial symmetry. 

Pool Child was not done with me yet.  She needed to know how my specific peculiarity fit into the known peculiarities of her small world.  “That’s different from Lou,” she told me, after I’d explained my congenital cataract in terms understandable by the under-six set.  “Lou’s eyes go different, but not blind.”

“She has trouble getting both eyes to track together?  To look the same way?” I hazarded.

“Lou is a BOY,” the child corrected me, marginally offended by my foolish error.

Ah.  Well, maybe Lou doesn’t need to be so concerned about the beauty-related ramifications of the fact that he’s wall-eyed.  Or cross-eyed.  Or something.  Asymmetrical, anyhow.

Facial asymmetry isn’t exactly a phrase that rolls off the tongue (nor is it the name of a bad garage band.)  It also isn’t a quality I had at age nineteen.  Or could have.  Ever.  Back in the previous millennium, the tough truth was right there in black and white (because journal articles were printed on a substance known as “paper”).  I’d already been agonizing for years about my many, many other flaws.  And now this: facial symmetry.  I remember putting down that stapled, photocopied piece of literature with a feeling of bleak fatalism.  Screw you, world.  Screw you, and your immutable universal standards.

My best friend tried to cheer me up.  He wrapped a tape measure around my not-terribly small waist and my more-than-ample hips, and grinned at me.  A ratio of almost exactly 0.70!  Ergo, I was beautiful!  He hugged me as warmly as any man who has zero interest in the wide-hipped gender can possible hug.

“Lou sometimes only looks with one eye, though, because of seeing two of everything.” Pool Child tells me about Lou at some length.  Lou is a grownup. A grownup boy?  Well, okay.  Aren’t we all?  Lou can see from both eyes, but has trouble with convergence.  I’m betting Lou has no binocular depth perception.  I’m also betting Lou’s facial asymmetry can be spotted a whole pool away.  Hey, Dove Soap, can Lou be beautiful, too?

That’s right, Dove Soap wants “regular” women to feel more beautiful.  Feminist soap!  Empowered soap! Let’s all buy a crapload of Dove beauty products!  Look at all these artful photos of somewhat-but-not-really-diverse women whom we’ve now declared to fit the new, broader standard of “beautiful”!

Why don’t I click?  Why don’t I “like”? 

Well, partly because I’m just too damn cynical for Dove Soap.  Tear-jerkers don’t jerk me.  But I’m not just cynical, I’m also ludicrously logical. Okay, my brain says, what if we broaden our standards?  Where does that get us?  

I’ve heard it argued that the reason why our culture’s beauty standards are unfair, terrible, and misogynistic, and downright villainous is because only 1% of women can attain them (or 3%, or 5.6% -- I’m totally making these numbers up, just like everyone else does.)  But… if we create new beauty standards that are within the reach of, say, 73.8% of American women, is that a victory, or does it just make the other 26.2% (even if they are super-good at doing the math) feel even more turd-like?  No matter how much the beauty standards are broadened, I still haven’t seen the special website dedicated to Wall-Eyed Beauties (although that would also make an excellent name for a garage band).

Logically, then, the only way that we can alleviate the terrible, depressing strain placed upon girls and women (who are so desperate to meet our cultural beauty standards that they are actually willing to believe Dove ads) is to a) convince them that everyone is beautiful; b) convince them that nobody is beautiful; or c) persuade them not to give a shit. 

I’m in favor of all three.

Let me unpack that a little. 

Part a: Everyone is Beautiful

Despite my penchant for accessorizing with bandannas and decorating with duct tape, I am not opposed to beauty.  In fact, I think the world would be a sad and lifeless place without it.  I see beauty every day. Sometimes it stops me in my tracks.  Even setting aside the often ephemeral beauty of non-human things -- autumn sunlight scattering through the birch leaves, the languid and impossibly long stretch of a yawning feline, the distant white-topped crags of Denali against a cerulean sky – there is plenty of human loveliness to marvel at.  It’s the lithe energy of your child in motion, hand outstretched to catch your own.  It’s the delectably naughty twinkle of a shared joke in your lover’s glance.  It’s visual, yes, but the vision is caught in a mood, a moment, a memory.  It’s not something that can be bookended with a set of metrics.  It’s not something that can be used to judge others, or to deem them either acceptable or sub-par.  It’s something we can all attain, and all participate in, in certain transcendent moments, and in the eye of the right beholder.  However, much of the time…

Part b: No One is Beautiful

Human beings aren’t fixed works of art, like crystal candelabras or careful, static, pre-arranged photographic displays of pseudo-diversely “beautiful” women.    Do you prefer ginormous hooters?  Excellent.  Do you like the look of men who appear to have been snorting lines of testosterone?  Sublime.  Are you positive that you only want to date skinny blonde women?  Good luck with that.  But keep in mind that real people, regardless of boob bountifulness or pectoral proportions, look weird if you photograph them with a mouthful of spaghetti or while bent over to tie a shoe.  Real humans get zits, wrinkles, ingrown beard hairs, period-stained underwear, and horrendous cases of the stomach flu.  Everyone poops, and (unless you have a kink so odd that it sends you to the darkest backwaters of the internet) you probably don’t think they look beautiful while doing so.  Which brings me to…

Part c: Who Gives a Flying…

Oh, sure, physical attractiveness is important, in that it factors into what we call, in other species, “mate selection”.  But attraction and desire are ubiquitous – a delightful miasma that surrounds us all. Despite the unremitting, exorbitant, and boring-as-hell efforts of every advertiser under the sun, we still haven’t been fully brainwashed into rejecting all the lovely, sexy, fascinating, imperfect humans around us.  Look!  People are full of life, interest, spark, health, and humor!  People are dating.  People are marrying.  People are sneaking away in to the shrubbery.  (Wait, no – don’t look.)  The whole wide world is telling us that perfection is not necessary for lust, for love, for mutual admiration, for self-confidence, for happiness. 

Pool Girl eventually satisfied her curiosity.  She splashed her way back to where her mom, highly distracted, was playing Bounce the Beach Ball with two other even littler siblings.  In animated tones, with much smiling, pointing, and waving back in my direction, Pool Girl began talking to her mother.  I couldn’t catch everything she said, but from the woman’s look of abject and horrified embarrassment, I got the gist.

Bad Parenting Moment.  Been there, done that.  I smiled.  I waved.  I overflowed with empathy.  The mother smiled back, still mortified, but also relieved.  She was a heavy woman, with thin brown hair straggling wetly against the side of her head.  She was tossing the ball lightly to each of her kids.  They were giggling.  She was giggling.  Pool Girl looked back at me again, and tried to throw me the ball.  It fell short.  I retrieved it and threw it back anyhow.  My own kids, finally noticing that I was playing with someone else, lunged for the ball too – but their swimming skills are negligible at best.  No matter.  They giggled, too.

I looked at my scrawny, pale, awkward, sodden, giggling kids, and at that other mom’s chubby, browner, awkward, sodden, giggling kids.  What did I want for their mutual future?  A set of American Beauty Standards (complete with metrics for waist size, for bust size, for degree of facial symmetry) that was “realistic” enough to encompass all of them?

Um, no. 

What I wanted was for all of them to know that each of them will have moments of true beauty, as reflected in the eyes of some over-the-moon beholders – and that it will be joyful to savor these moments.  But I also wanted them to understand, without even having to think about it, that they will also have many, many more moments when beauty isn’t even on the radar – and doesn’t need to be.   Life is full of gardens to be planted, books to be read, and mountains to be climbed.  It’s full of crazy ideas to be chased -- and crazy kids to be chased, laughing, around an overly chlorinated oblong of tepid water. 

It was nice getting to know you, Pool Girl.  And you were right – my eye really did have a story, after all.

 

[Note: I’m pretty sure that gestating twins and hitting middle age have thrown off my waist to hip ratio a bit, but I don’t really feel like measuring.   Oh, and that thing about symmetry?  Turns out it was wrong, anyhow.  Go figure.  http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/theres-more-to-life-than-facial-symmetry/378807/]

Leaning ... toward baking cookies for the office

Photo courtesy of the Breakup Triathlon

A few days ago, a friend of mine brought my attention to an online story highlighting Susan Stamberg's stellar career with National Public Radio.  The article – perhaps inspired by the recent Lean In buzz -- focused on the question of what advice older women would give to their younger selves.  Reader comments were numerous, but my friend enthused that “by far the best comment” was:  “Dear Self: To be taken seriously, dress better and learn earlier how to act like a pro in meetings. Keep your "business face" on in all communications and don't bake for the office.”

When I saw this, I blanched. If this quote offered any indication of the grading scale by which I am measured, I thought, I am not just doing poorly; I am earning an irredeemable F.

Professionalism is not my strong suit. 

Last Sunday, I was standing around in Spandex shorts and a sports bra, drenched, when I spotted someone I knew.  I greeted her by name, my voice only slightly obscured by the huge chunk of honey-oat bagel I was shoving in my mouth. 

She smiled uncertainly – the polite greeting of someone who has no idea who the heck you are, but is much too nice to say so.

“I’m Nancy,” I reminded her.  Was it the raggedly dripping pigtails on either side of my head that threw her off, or was the bare skin of my torso blinding her with its fish-underbelly whiteness?  “I interviewed you for the ACCAP job last week.”  Then I bit off another large hunk of bagel.

Dignity and I are not closely acquainted.  Not ever, not in any context.  But should I, I wondered, be trying a bit harder in the “professional” realm?

Officially, I’m the Network Coordinator at the Scenarios Network for Alaska and Arctic planning, a climate change research group at the University of Alaska.  Unofficially, the nametag outside my cubicle grants me the title “Head Monkey.”  It was put up about three years ago by a coworker (and friend), as a joke.  It sports a photo of a chimp (which, I of course know as a biologist, is an ape, not a monkey).  It was never taken down. 

I regularly wander around the office in sweatpants, T-shirts left over from college, and bare feet. I make jokes in meetings – and some of them are vaguely risqué.  I sign my emails “N,” call people by their first names regardless of rank, and admit to my collaborative partners at government agencies that my work schedule is dictated by when the school bus comes and goes.  I also (oh, the shame!) wantonly leave apple cake and leftover brownies on the break room table.

Is this really so wrong?  And does it have anything to do with gender?

Well, maybe.  I can’t possibly comment on Lean In, in which Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, exhorts women to strive for the professional pinnacle.  For one thing (note to internet commenters in general – this is kinda a key point with regard to vehement and vituperative editorializing), I haven’t read it.  However, I do know that women are still mired in a wage-gap rut that has barely closed in my lifetime.  ABC news reports that “Women working full-time earned just 80.9 percent of what men earned per week in 2012.”  The Center for American Progress Action Fund puts the figure at 77%.

There's simply no joking about this.  It’s a problem long overdue for a solution, and it pisses me off.  But if I (a PhD-holder and a research professor, for heaven's sake) am not setting myself up to be taken seriously, am I somehow part of the problem?

Ok, I lack dignity, I tell myself defensively, but it doesn’t have anything to do with being a woman.  Besides, I usually have a reason for it.  My semi-nude bagel-consumption was perfectly logical, given that I had just completed a triathlon.  The young woman I’d interviewed – who was, in fact, the top candidate for the job – had done the same.  She was just as damp as I was, and probably just as hungry.  Moreover, there was no clear avenue toward “professionalism” in this soggy context, because I was in the awkward position of not being able to tell her that we were about to offer her the position.  The paperwork hadn’t yet cleared with HR.  (Gods of bureaucracy, I have you in my sights, y’hear?)

Instead, I started a conversation about something I knew she’d relate to.  At her interview, she’d mentioned that she’d been out of the workforce for a short time because she has a two-year-old.  So I talked about small children.  And stomach flu.  That’s right – knowing exactly how much I had in common with this vibrant young scientist, based on her résumé and her interests, I talked about my puking first grader.  And when, a few minutes later, I spotted another post-race coworker in the poolside crowd, we talked about … daycare for her toddler.

I know, I know.  Anyone care for a stereotype with their bagel?  How on earth can I be taken seriously if I don’t know how to “keep my business face on”?  Indeed, many debaters in the wage wars argue that women earn less than men because they choose to do so.  Women pick careers that are less stressful, more flexible, more open to part-time employment, more “female” – so that they can spend more time with family.  On the other hand, others argue that the reason women choose to be the ones to take more time off with kids is because they are being paid less to begin with.  

Either way, was this a choice I made?  And if it was, should I feel defensive about it?  Irascible?  Guilty? What flavor of guilty?

I like chocolate-chip-guilty the best – I always have.  Luckily, when I went back to work on Monday morning, I found that our IT director, wizard of computer hardware and cookies, had left a generous number of the latter in the break room.  He’s a new dad, and working only part time these days, but he still manages to keep up with the software licensing, the network issues, all our terabytes of data storage, and the gooey treats.

As it happened, my boss was home sick that day.  His two little girls had passed on to their daddy the latest horrific chest cold.  Luckily, he got hold of me via email.  Sure, I told him, I could cover the interview he had scheduled with the guy from Switzerland’s public radio.  This sort of thing happens regularly around here, and we always cover for one another.  When the temperature hits forty or fifty below zero, people’s cars get finicky.  There are sudden dental emergencies; sick parents who live on the other side of the map; and ailing dogs.  Once, my boss called me at the last minute to give a presentation for him.  He couldn’t make it in to the office, he explained, because his goat was kidding. 

When the Swiss guy showed up, I was wearing old jeans and a t-shirt, but that was fine, because so was he – and this was a radio interview, after all.  I told him a heck of a lot about climate change science in the far north.  I also told him about the vagaries of living in an environment underlain by thawing discontinuous permafrost.  I described how Jay and I built our cabin.  I described the variety of biomes to be seen in the space of the half-mile walk to the school bus stop.  He asked more questions about those personal aspects of the interview than about anything else.  We called each other by our first names, and I offered him coffee.

Back at my desk, I found an email from our tech lead.  Like me, he’s part of the office’s four-person “management team”.  “A few of us are headed over to HooDoo today after work.  If others would like to join, I'll pitch in for a few pizzas…”  He’d cc’d the entire staff list. 

Well, why not?  If you work in a cool office, then everyone is invited to the local brewing company at the end of the day.

Somewhere between the brewery invitation and the quick dash across the road with the inhabitant of the cubicle next to mine to see if Hotlicks Ice Cream had opened for the season, I decided that the well-meaning advice about how to be taken seriously as a Professional Woman was not so much wrong, as utterly inside-out. 

We don’t need women to dress better.  We don’t need them to “keep their business face on” at the expense of taking time to care for their children -- or their parents, or their dogs, or their goats.  We certainly don’t need them to stop baking chocolate-swirl pound cake with streusel topping.  What we need is for men to do all these things, too.  And at my office, it’s happening.

Yes, it’s important to Get Stuff Done at work.  Yes, sometimes we all need to stop multi-tasking and focus on getting the report written, the documents signed, and the &%$@ paperwork back from HR.  Sometimes it’s even necessary to come in and work a bit of utterly unpaid overtime on the weekend (although if you’re a non-exempt employee you must never, ever admit to this, lest you face dire consequences such as paperwork, and maybe spanking).  Being professional can be important, and I even have a few semi-respectable clothing items to prove it.  But in my opinion, being human is more important than being “professional” – for women and for men.

Being human means having a life that’s complicated, messy, multifaceted, rewarding, funny, and real.  It means juggling the pieces to make them fit as best you can.  When I drop by the office on weekends, I bring along the kids, and let them draw on the one-sided paper supply and make cool stuff out of the cardboard and plastic recycling.  Jay does the same.  No one has ever complained about stray rainbows on the whiteboards.  Being human means passing on our well-worn stroller/bike trailer to the guy down the hall with a new baby, giving the little green pull-wagon and wooden cars to the triathlete with a toddler girl, and donating the itty-bitty moose slippers to whomever snagged them from the break room.  I’m not sure who that was, but there are an awful lot of small people to choose from.  And if the coworker who asks me for breast-feeding advice when we run into each other at the coffee pot is male, I’m not in the least bit surprised.

Of course, even as I paint this rosy picture, I know I’m incredibly lucky.  I work thirty hours per week.  So does Jay.  We use the extra time to hang out with our kids, take part in ludicrous outdoor adventures, and (upon occasion) bake stuff.  We choose to live an inexpensive lifestyle, but we’re also immensely fortunate to have the skills, the degrees, and the jobs required to make this workable.  Most people don’t.

This brings me back to that wage gap, and all the politics and social injustice that go with it – a hydra of a problem if ever there was one.  The United States is woefully backward with regard to affordable childcare, healthcare coverage (particularly for part time workers) and wage gaps not only between males and females, but also between CEOs and workers.  I could rant about this for pages (or for hours, depending on whether you like to take your rants visually or aurally) but that would be, as I’ve been noting in fifty different spots on the spreadsheet-du-jour, “Outside the scope of this project.”

I will add, however, one salient postscript.  In the ABC article I perused, Ariane Hegewisch of the Institute for Women's Policy Research notes that “there may also be some reluctance to hire women for high-powered, lucrative jobs when there is the chance that they may take time off in the future to have children.” 

Our top candidate for that ACCAP job – the mother of the two-year-old – mentioned in the course of the interview that she plans to have another child. 

Well, excellent.  When she does, maybe someone will have an extra car seat or a pair of moose slippers to pass on to her.  It will be easy to find her -- because yesterday the Bureaucracy Gods reached down from on high and gave us the green light.

Welcome, New Person.  I’m the Head Monkey; feel free to ask me whatever you’d like.  There are muffins on the counter.  I hear you enjoy triathlons…

Half Iron, Half Jello

Last summer I competed in a triathlon. I use the word “compete” in the sense of “finished the course without drowning or succumbing to heat stroke.”  When I signed up for it, it was unclear even to me why I would even consider doing such a thing, except that I knew the threat of public humiliation would help motivate me to get into some semblance of good shape.  This was no idle afternoon’s entertainment; the race included 1.2 miles of swimming, a 56-mile bike ride, and a 13.1 mile run. 

Why such peculiar distances?  Well, 13.1 miles is half of a marathon, and 56 miles is half of… 112 miles.  I have no rational explanation, other than the fact that a race twice this long is called an “Ironman” – a name that invariably makes me giggle.  Is an Iron Man one step up from the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz?  Does he have an accent like the Terminator?  Does he channel a British butler, like C3PO?  Or is he just a real whiz at getting dress shirts neatly pressed?

If “Ironman” sounds goofy, “half Ironman” sounds both goofy AND incomplete.  But, I thought, a semi-triathlon seemed appropriate for me, because I often feel like I do everything by halves.  I work 30 hours a week at a job that could easily suck up 60 hours.  I write emails while on teleconferences, I eat breakfast while creating spreadsheets, and I plan meetings while folding laundry.  This would be great if I did a stellar job with all this multi-tasking, but I don’t.  I have Cheerios in my keyboard and a whole bag of stray socks.  I try to bake 30-minute brownies in 15 minutes – but I fail.  I knew there was no way I could do a whole Ironman, but maybe – just maybe – I could fake my way through a half.

My potential triathlon prowess, I had to admit, fell squarely into the half-baked category. I run with a lumbering gait on my iffy Achilles tendons; my bike is designed for touring, not racing -- complete with shock absorbers and a rear rack; and I swim like a cat who has accidentally fallen into the bathtub. 

My training for the event mostly consisted of hauling the kids around – either biking them to and from preschool in their Chariot trailer, or trotting along with them in the jog stroller.  The fact that we often jogged to the playground next to Hotlicks Ice Cream may have negated some of the positive benefits of the exercise.  I did TRY to practice swimming – I really did.  I got a punch card for the gym.  I put on a Speedo, repeatedly.  I slogged up and down the pool, occasionally crashing into whatever poor soul got stuck sharing my lane.  I got bloodshot eyes from the chlorine leaking into my goggles, and I earned pitying glances from the 21-year-old lifeguards, but I didn’t get much faster.

On a sizzlingly hot Saturday in July, I showed up at the start of the race – a Steese Highway pull-off -- with my inappropriate bicycle, my exceedingly cheap wetsuit, my muddy running shoes, and my cheering squad, otherwise known as my family. The kids immediately found a large dirt pile that afforded excellent mountaineering practice.  Meanwhile, I staked out a spot for my stuff in the official transition zone.  I loaded my bike with water bottles and crammed Powerbars in the snack bag.  I applied sunscreen, and snuck glances at the other competitors.  Their buff physiques, slick logoed tri-suits, and shiny, high-tech paraphernalia made it abundantly clear that I was out of my league.  I think even my bicycle felt embarrassed. 

In line for the Port-a-Potty, a woman about my age asked me a logistical question.  “Oh, I have no idea what I’m doing,” I blurted. “Actually, I feel kind of ridiculous.”

It turned out it was her first half-Ironman, too.  “You look official enough,” she reassured me.  She was obviously either very kind or extremely near-sighted.  I was wearing nothing but a 15-year-old highly compressive sports bra and a thrift-store pair of Spandex shorts.  I’m relatively muscular, I suppose, but I’m not even vaguely lithe – and I’ve had twins.  When I was pregnant, my belly expanded to roughly the size of the Hindenburg.  Four years later, my skin is still a couple of sizes too large, and my belly button is irrevocably inside out.

As in almost all triathlons, the swimming portion came first, thus giving me the chance for maximum immediate mortification.  We were tasked with doing five laps around the perimeter of a gravel pit.  Imagine swimming in a shallow, murky, weed-infested pool of water (which, it later became clear, was infested with more than just weeds).  You are encased in a hot, restrictive wetsuit, and you are wearing blurry, leaky goggles.  Now imagine that there are fifty immensely strong people in black neoprene attempting to swim beside, around, over, and on top of you. After the first thirty seconds, I was pretty well convinced that I would not survive. 

Things got marginally better when all of my competitors had passed me and were surging around the other side of the pit, but pretty soon the leaders started catching up with me again.  The water was only about sixty degrees, but I was so hot I was hyperventilating.  I couldn’t see where I was going, and kept getting tangled in the orange flags, or beaching myself in shallow gravel.  After two miserable laps, I stopped and took off my wetsuit.

Taking off a skin-tight neoprene bodysuit is no easy maneuver at the best of times, and I was panting, discombobulated, and waist deep in water, but I managed to extricate myself, and hurl the offending item shoreward, where my long-suffering husband retrieved it.  This sort of move might have disqualified me from a race in the Lower 48, but up here, no one seemed unduly concerned about protocol.  Besides, it was already obvious I wasn’t going to win any prizes.

I wasn’t the last person out of the water – I was the second to last.  However, I didn’t have long for this amazing success to get to my head, because the slowest swimmer was a woman of legendary speed on land, and she passed me about ten seconds into the bike race.

I was last – dead last – and I felt like a wet noodle.  The sun was blazing down from an unrelenting sky, I had water in my lungs, and I was practically naked in public.  The bike portion of the race would send us back and forth on the Steese, two laps to the north, and two laps to the south.  I could see one of the lead racers approaching from the opposite direction, already almost done with the first leg of the bike ride. 

This was not exactly a morale-booster… until he gave me a cheer.  Not a fake cheer, or a patronizing one, but a genuine chunk of audible goodwill.  A few minutes later, the next guy did the same thing.  And the next guy.  I waved back, nonplussed.  Amazingly, those folks with the aero handlebars, solid racing wheels, and 3% body fat had the energy to root for slackers like me.  “Looking good!” they said, with absolute conviction.  “Keep it up!”

I really dislike the taste of Gatorade, especially with overtones of warm plastic bottle, but all of a sudden it tasted like the nectar of the gods.  I slurped half-melted Powerbars.  My legs got going.  The breeze of my own motion cooled me.  The miles flew by.  I did one lap, and then another – and, astonishingly, I caught up with someone.  And then someone else, and then three more someones.  “Looking good!” I said, because the goodwill was infectious, and because they WERE looking good.  They looked like triathletes!  “Keep it up!”

When I rolled back into the transition zone to drop my bike and collect my running shoes, I was feeling pretty good.  Only a half-marathon to go!  No problem!  My legs, however, had other ideas.  Someone seemed to have replaced them with a pair belonging to a rubber chicken.  I staggered uphill like a drunk, and when I left the shelter of the trees, the force of the sun thudded into my skin.   Fairbanks has a climate that is nothing if not ironic.  Don’t like fifty below zero?  Wait a few months!  The temperature was in the mid-eighties… and that was in the shade.  The road was not shaded, and there would be no more cooling breezes.

But the forces of support and camaraderie were doing valiant battle with the sun.  At every lap, my miniature fan club waved at me.  At every water station, stalwart volunteers handed out life-saving Dixie cups, and cheered the fortieth competitor just as much as they’d cheered the first.  One brilliant individual, to whom I will forever be grateful, reached into his cooler and gave me a cupful of ice.  Having lost any vestige of pride approximately seventy miles previously, I immediately dumped it directly into my sports bra.  It gave me peculiarly lumpy cleavage, but it felt like heaven.

Despite my slow dog-trot, I passed several people.  These were the flushed, salty, panting individuals who had been reduced to a limping walk.  By now, the winners had already won.  We were the melting residue on the roadside, and everyone was suffering from the heat.  I saw one guy, who looked about nineteen, leap the barricade and hurtle down a near-cliff to the river far below.  He passed me again twenty minutes later, soaked to the skin and much refreshed.  “Smart idea,” I told him, and he grinned and told me I was doing great.  I didn’t detect any sarcasm.  So what if I was twice his age and had a bra full of ice?  We were in this together.  “Keep it up,” I told him.

Ultimately, I finished the race in six hours and forty-two minutes, good for fourteenth out of twenty-three women.  I also beat six of the twenty-six men.  But the stats didn’t really seem to matter very much.  Everyone was happy to welcome and congratulate the finishers who straggled in at seven hours, and at seven and a half.  And everyone seemed more excited about the potluck barbecue than the scoresheet. 

I was so sweat-salted that I was shedding white flakes.  My mushroom-like belly had burned to a fiery scarlet.  By the next morning, I was walking like a wooden puppet, and my entire body had erupted with the hideous itchy pustules that characterize swimmer’s itch.  “I had a great time,” I insisted, as friends and coworkers eyed me with nervous, queasy sympathy.  They were obviously convinced that I was suffering the delusional after-effects of sunstroke. 

I had to admit that they had a point; if my goal had been to get into great shape, any positive benefits were clearly outweighed by the gimpiness and pox. I might be half Ironman, but the other half was pretty much unmentionable.  And yet… if I was deluded, I was certainly not the only one.  The race organizer warned us all that the popularity of the event had grown so much in recent years that he’d probably have to restrict the number of entrants in 2011. 

I sent in my registration form long before the hives crusted over and the last of the sunburn peeled.