#514

As you may know, I participated in a sprint triathlon this past weekend--a try-athlon in my estimation.

For all my worrying about my knees, it was my ankle that most loudly objected to this endeavor.  It started complaining about two weeks ago, just after I posted about the race.  I could still bike and swim without aggravating it, but even walking caused pain and swelling for a time.  This meant I could not train for the run, at all. 

Have you figured out yet that I'm a type-A in disguise?  (And are you laughing now because it's wholly undisguised and I just don't know it?).  Either way, it won't surprise you that I do not like to go places unprepared.  Showing up for this race, without knowing if my body could last the run, or if my ankle could even hold up for a walk, caused me a bit of consternation. 

Still, I wanted to try, and I'm glad I did.

I thought the swim was good, but frustrating.  I got into traffic that forced me to stop and stand up in the middle of the pool on two occasions.  I may have said, "Are you kidding me?" when a lumbering man cut me off, but I hope I just imagined that because: how unsportsmanlike!  I eventually got to the end and heaved myself out of the water feeling relieved.  I'd been nervous about the crowded lanes, not sure I had the proper sensory equipment for swimming in a school.

Once on the bike, I relaxed.  This part was easy for me, so I tried to coast through it and save my energy for the dreaded final leg. 

When it at last arrived, I laced up my shoes thinking, "It'll be fine.  I'll just walk fast!"  Then I looked at the line of volunteers who directed the way in front of me.  They stood cheering and pointing, ready for me to sprint out of the gate.   Was I really going to walk past them in the very first moments? 

I couldn't do it. 

Instead, I tried to run in a way that suggested I did this all the time.  I tried to give the impression that I would keep up this unreasonable pace for the duration, and not quit it the minute I rounded the corner.

Which I did.

The long and short of it? I ran three miles!!  In all honestly, my "run" is so slow, I think I may have finished faster if I'd fast-walked the course in its entirety.  I hadn't anticipated the spectators, however, and because I don't care what anyone thinks of me (really, not at all), I felt compelled to keep up the illusion of a run, regardless of how slow it might be. 

So I have to ask, is it customary for runners to offer words of encouragement to one another as they pass on the trail?  Is this some kind of runner-culture-thing that I've missed out on all these years?  I'm thinking of the Jeep culture that surprised me after I bought one back in the coolio days of my twenties.  Jeep drivers give each other a way casual salute when they pass each other on the road.  Did you know that?  It gave me a great sense of community as a driver, suggesting to me that any of these fellow Jeep owners would offer late night road assistance if I needed it, without the threat of abduction or ax murder. 

If no such runner-culture exists, then I must have been looking particularly in need of encouragement, because I got A LOT of it.  One person told me, "Looking good! Keep it up!" as I traversed the first downhill right out of the start.  I thought, "For heaven's sake, I hope I'm looking good, I haven't gone 10 paces yet!" 

The thing is, we really only say "looking good" to people who, well...don't.  Right?  It's a way of appreciating the fact that someone is trying to look good--and I did say it would be a try-athlon after all.

One possible explanation: tired or not, my face gets really red when I exercise. Even if I feel great, this redness suggests I verge on some kind of coronary emergency.   We can blame my tendency to get overly flushed for one of the most tragic haircuts in the history of mankind when my mother, fearing I would collapse from heat stroke at the tender age of three, cut my toddler curls into a "pixie" cut that she thought would keep me more cool.   Check it out:

me and my grandfather.  I think I look cute and happy,

but apparently, I'm feeling overheated

 a year or so later, hair butchered, but feeling much refreshed

(and what's up with that short dress!!)

Despite my probably purplish hue, the ankle held, and I honestly felt OK as long as I kept to my snail's pace.  But the look of it must have really deteriorated because by the time I got to the final 100 yards (where I had begun to feel like a world champion because YES! I could see I was actually going to make it!!) someone clapped for me and said, "Just keep moving forward! That's all you have to do! Keep moving forward!" 

Was there a doubt about whether I could keep moving forward?

Here's the thing.  If it had been a swim/bike event, I would have pushed myself harder in both.  I would have striven for speed! mastery! victory! Adding the run, however, turned all my focus to one simple goal: finish. 

I think there's something to be said for going out and doing your best at something even when your best kind of sucks.  It's humbling and gratifying to show your weaknesses, because in the moment when you think everyone will laugh, they just might stand up and applaud.

That's an experience worth having.  In fact, when I crossed the finish line and everyone cheered, it made me want to cry just a teeny bit (I am prone to dramatic and unnecessary tears at sporting events). 

And then it was done!  Exhausted and happy, I resolved to do it again next year (but perhaps not write about it quite so much!).  Then I went home where I collapsed and slept so hard on the couch that my race number, which had been written in permanent marker on my leg, imprinted itself on the used-to-be-cream upholstery.

Something to remember the day by, perhaps?

Egad.

(and no, Steve hasn't noticed yet)

dye-ing to stay young

me on a portuguese cliff in 1996
29 yrs old

When I got home from this two week vacation, I developed my pictures in great anticipation (an all-manual Canon A-1, circa 1970, does not a real-time digital image make).

Anyway...I saw this picture and recoiled.   Not because I'm wearing Steve's sweater and it looks like an over-sized and amorphous black hole from which my neck spontaneously emerges, not because my teeth look like I painted them in with white-out, and not because it looks like I'm standing in an oil-spill (the light isn't quite so bad in the analog version).  No, I recoiled because I thought I looked old. 

Despite using gobs and gobs of sun screen on this trip, I had despaired over soaking up too much southern European sun.  Days in the water, on the beach and hiking along dramatic seaside cliffs had left me browner than brown.  Between that, and the half-grown-out highlighting job that had crisped up to a sun-whitened frizz on one side of my head, I thought I looked like a leathery old tanning-bed lady who had tried to turn 55 years of age into 25 by bleaching out my hair.

Wew - that is really harsh--and not just on me.  Let's get some context.  I was, after all, 29--staring 30 down the throat and sitting on the cusp of the inevitable degeneration of things like skin and breasts. Although I can hardly see it now, I looked at this picture and for the first time in my life, recognized something resembling age in my own face.  If you add to it that I was just 2 weeks pregnant with Gareth and awash in both new hormones and new ideas about identity that included my fast-waning youthfulness (in a 20-something's sense of the term), then perhaps you can see where I was coming from. 

Thinking that my hair no longer matched my face, I decided that I had gotten "too old" for highlights.

How ironic is that? 

Now, at the age of 45, I'm feeling pressure that perhaps I've gotten "too old" not to highlight (or color) my hair. 

Hair dye has become so pervasive that you can hardly find a person outside the old folks home who sports any amount of silver.  I have found varying statistics, but it seems that somewhere between 50-75% of women color their hair in some way. 

The lack of gray-haired folk moving amongst us has changed the meaning of gray, don't you think?  Gray doesn't mean you're 50 anymore.  Gray means you're 80.  That's a lot of pressure on a 40-something who's sporting a dish-water brand of no-color such as mine.

Despite that pressure, however, I do not want to color my hair.

For the record, I'm not gray yet--or if I am, you can't tell in my sea of blah.  So why not brighten it up?

Well:

First, when do you stop? I don't want to wake up in my 60s and recoil at a picture of myself because I feel, as I did at 29, that my face doesn't match my hair anymore.  No disrespect to older people, but there's a point at which died hair begins to look like some kind of helmet on the head--one that can make a person look even older rather than younger, if you know what I mean. 

Second, gray hair hides thinning hair, doesn't it?  When you get old, you start baring quite a bit more scalp.  Nothing like a frock of thinning but dark brown curls to set off the white scalp glowing beneath.  Silver tresses would mask that, wouldn't they?

Third, will you even live to see your gray?  You know I'm no fan of chemicals--especially toxic ones.  I don't feel remotely confident that hair dyes aren't super bad for our health.  This blog post offers a nice concise list of chemicals to look out for if you're concerned too.  No matter how much we might want to hold on to our youthful color, "dying" of cancer doesn't seem like a good way to avoid gray.   According to the National Cancer Institute , most studies of hair dye chemicals and cancer are "conflicting."  That doesn't surprise me. Nor does it comfort me.  It takes a lot of money to conduct a reputable study, and the cosmetic industry can't be in a rush to fund such investigations.  Still, in the world I want to live in, you have to prove that products are safe, not the other way around.  So if you haven't proved it won't hurt me yet, I don't want it. 

And finally, if I dyed my hair, I'd miss my transition to gray.  I know I would find myself suddenly sixty wondering how gray I'd gotten, wondering when I should grow out the color, wondering who exactly I'd become while I was busy slapping toxic chemicals on my head for all those years.

Perhaps that sounds ridiculous, but gray signals another life change to me--like puberty, except sort of the opposite. 

Which gets us to the crux of all of this, right?  AGE.  For a population so averse to being old, it's no surprise we don't want to look old.  Then we have the double whammy that we're women who are getting and looking old.  Nothing spells the end of beauty like a head of silver threads, right? And in our culture, the end of beauty equals, well, the end. 

Except I don't buy that.

I won't pretend that some aspects of aging really suck.  I have a cracked root in a tooth that will require extraction any day.  If I swim too hard, I wreck something in my shoulder that takes months to heal. My toes ache (?!), and my perfect eyesight has suddenly and oh so disappointingly, let me down.

You get the idea. 

I suppose all those complaints have changed my vision in other ways too because I see such different things in that picture than I did 16 years ago. While I agree with my old self that my hair looks kind of ridiculous, I disagree that it matters, and I certainly object to the idea that I look old.  In fact, I think I look young.  And with that, I also look a little naive.  I had not yet felt the pain of childbirth, the wonder of parenthood, or the exhilaration of passing my Ph.D oral exams.  I had not yet discovered the sound of my voice in my research, in front of a classroom, or on the Internet.   I remained a stranger to real loss. 

I would never trade my victories, discoveries or scars for the naturally blond hair I had as a teen.  Still, I know plenty of people (most people?) would say we can have both. 

I'm not here to say other people shouldn't color their hair.  Most people that I know do so, and I would never spend one second of any day judging them. 

I just want to voice an alternative. 

We can embrace a different kind of beauty--one you won't find on the front of Vogue or Cosmo.  This beauty grows out of wisdom, and wisdom comes to us through experience, laughter and pain.  We can't have that beauty without living and aging--without graying.  That is the beauty I want to see in the mirror as I grow older.  That way, if I'm lucky enough to see the years go by, I can embrace what time has given me instead of dreading to see what it has taken away.

my beloved "greggie"
wise and beautiful
she was about 80 years old when i snapped this