Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where it takes 72 days to replace lost red blood cells after a spur-of-the-monent blood donation. It actually takes this long for everyone, not just those living in Altitude-Problem land. This is just new news to some. Okay, mostly me, apparently. It really doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out. High Altitude = less oxygen available, hence more red blood cells to carry oxygen to one's vital organs at, say, a bike race or a 5k mad-dash obstacle course. Without these red blood cells, the racer has effectively lessened their aclimatization from 10,000 feet to a much lower altitude. Low altitude = more oxygen available, hence less of a need for red blood cells. I do not feel like googling it at the moment to verify this fun fact, but I have heard that people who have spent their lives at sea-level have signifcantly less blood flowing through their veins than those living at 9,000 feet.

And why do I now possess this bit of information, you ask? Well, since you ask...

I was bored at MD Anderson. I wondered into the blood donation center as a way to pass the time, sat down, answered about a hundred questions, ate a salad to bump up my dwindling blood sugar, and bared my veins, which, I might add, are a phlebotomist's dream come true, all big and purple under the thin skin of my inner elbow. Phlebotomist's eyes gleam as they unwrap their big needles and hold up their tourniquets. Came out 15 minutes later minus a pint of my super-oxygenated go juice, all packed full of energy down at sea level, plus a yellow smily-face bandage and a XL tee shirt.

And then I came home. I had actually forgotten that the last race of the season, a time trial, was only a week after the next-to-last race, which I had to miss. Then, when I realized it, I did not think I would be able to make it home in time. I still was not thinking about the race when we stopped for a late snack in Woodward, Oklahoma, less than 24 hours before the race. After two weeks of a mostly raw, vegan, healthy diet, there were no other options, so I got a roast beef gyro and relished every bite- until the last bite was swallowed and all I could think about was the dead food now working it's way through my system, and sure enough, it was not a half-hour later I began to feel the effects. I know some of you will scoff at this, but after two years of eating high-quality food, with the occasional foray into less than high quality food, I have become hyper sensitive to the difference diet can make in a body's performance. I already know that light, raw food the week before a race will give me the best results. Meat and dairy will make me feel like my bike weighs a hundred pounds, like the air is pushing me down, like my legs just can't do it and I must slow down because humans were not made to work this hard without throwing up or having a heart attack.

Losing a pint of blood + eating meat = bad race.

We got home to my parents house around 1:00 a.m. that morning, 13 1/2 hours after leaving Houston, and I stumbled to bed, deciding that when I woke up, I would drive the rest of the way back to Colorado. I jerked awake from a dream at 5:00 a.m., took a shower, and hit the road in pea-soup fog. The fog did not lift entirely for three hours, during which I drove slowly, searching the white blanket around me for deer on the road, roadsigns to tell me where I was, headlights and highway lines materializing into my isolated world and as quickly, leaving it. The 5 hour trip took 6 hours.

Two days on the road + sleep deprivation = bad race.

I got home and stopped at the office to see B, then, since it was Wednesday, the day fish tacos are the lunch special at the Mexican Grill down the street, we went out for lunch. I drank a little water with my lunch. It was not until I was home again, looking around at my messy house and piles of laundry, that it actually sank in that I was paid up, non-refundably, for a race that started in three hours.

Fried food and fiber 6 hours before a race = bad race.

I immediately chugged a 12 oz bottle of water and Emergen-C, an electrolyle and vitamin powder, and hit the couch, and was almost immediately asleep. B came home at 5 to find me just waking up. He asked me what time my race was, and I absently told him, 6:24:30. I dragged my heavy limbs off the couch and began looking for my team race jersey, my bike shorts, my team logo socks, my helmet, my gloves. I lubed my chain. I found clothes to change into after the race. I sprayed hairspray in my hair and tousled it and put on mascara. I loaded my bike. I called for Andy, and asked B if he was ready to go. He looked for Andy's leash. We loaded B's bike. I searched for my watch and my yellow lenses for my sunglasses. I found my watch and looked at it, and for a moment, accepted that it was 5:55. Then I whirled around and looked, shocked, at B as the realization sunk in. "We have to go, NOW!"

Dehydration + sheer panic = bad race.

On a good day, it takes 25 minutes to drive to Breckenridge. It was not a good day. The shortcut road was closed. We had to take the interstate, and drive through two towns with about six stoplights apiece, many of which we hit on red. There was road construction and a 30mph speed limit. We screeched to a stop at the start line a full five minutes after my scheduled start time, and I was a panicky bundle of nerves as I sprinted to the registration table and signed in, fixed my race plate to my handlebars, sprinted to the start line, took a precious half-minute to duck behind a bush because nothing makes you have to pee like panic and adrenaline. They fit me in after all the other contestants had gone because it was a time trial with 30 second interval starts and they could not throw everyone else's times off by fitting me in whenever I decided to show up, and if we had been another two minutes later, everyone would have been gone and the race officials packed up and headed for the finish line, ten miles away. As I pulled into the start gate, my dry mouth remembered my water bottle, back in the car, and the Clif shot in my back jersey pocket. I ripped off the top of the gel with my teeth and squeezed the thick goop into my mouth, forcing my dry throat to swallow it, no time for water, clipped into my left pedal, and heard, "GO"! And I went. I pedalled hard, wheezing and forcing my feet down and up, trying to calm my jangling nerves, my fingers cold and shaking. As hard as I was riding, it felt like I should have been flying up the paved hill to the start of the singletrack, but when I looked down at my legs, they were moving slugglishly, the pavement not flying but crawling under my tires. I hit the singletrack, and after ten days off my bike, I was unsure of myself, lacked confidence through the rock gardens and jumping up onto bridges and I got off my bike three times when a pedal hit an obstacle.

Not having time to warm up + waiting until you get to the starting gate to climb on your bike for the first time in 10 days = bad race.

On the downhill, I berated myself every time I feathered my brakes, sure that, without my being able to judge the speed of those around me, I was going slower than all of them, but every time I pedalled up an incline, my breath became ragged and I just could not force anymore power down through my legs. When I finally popped out of the trees onto the jeep road, then around the curve to the finish line, I felt like falling over, I was shaky and exhausted, my stomach was upset, my mouth was dry and filled with dust. B was there, and he told me that the girl I had to beat to get third place overall had a flat tire, and I began to hope. Since it was an individually timed event, we all had to wait until results were posted several hours later to see how we had finished, and I squinted up at the print-out on the wall and felt like crying. There I was, DFL (Dead-freaking last). While everyone else had finished sub-53 minutes, including the girl who flatted, my time was 1hr, 1 minute. I plopped down next to Bobby and sipped my free beer and wanted to go home. He was puzzled. He had timed me at 50 minutes, and it took my girlfriend wondering if they had used my actual start time or my scheduled start time to make me brave enough to go tap a race official on the shoulder and ask. After a bit of a debacle, they found their mistake, but my time was still 30 seconds short of what I needed to get third place overall and next-to-last on the final results.

Having an epic fail on the last race of the season = bad entire season.

Okay, that is your race story for the day. I hope it made you laugh a little. I am trying. I do find it funny (tragically so) that when all is said and done, it was not the Sandbagger, it was not the mechanically-challenged old bike or the slipping chain, it was not the mud or the rain or a crash that cost me that pretty medal and a few seconds on the tall, three-level silver boxes in front of a hundred mountain bikers for an overall podium finish, it was me. I was sabotaged by my own worst enemy.

On other fronts, I am blogging to procrastinate having to clean this house. I am also hungry, but getting food would require me to heave my self over to the kitchen to find food, and in my hypoglycemic haze, it feels better just to sit here. Now that race season is over, I am free to detox, to eat only mostly-raw, vegan food in an effort to find that lightness of movement and clear mind and ready energy that only comes after one has gone through the crash of coming off of ice cream, sugar cookies, peanut butter, graham crackers, egg white protein, seafood, all of my vices that provided temporary fixes or long-lasting endurance, but with side effects of weight gain and exclusion of the good stuff. You try racing after having eaten nothing but a few raw almonds and carrots for breakfast. Eventually, I will be back to where I was before I fell off the diet wagon into the box of Tollhouse cookies and coffee ice cream, ready to run and bike without heavy fuel, but it takes two weeks, and I was never more than two weeks between races all summer.

The cancer front has stalled. All of the results from all of my mom's scans of systems not breast-related are in, and clear. As far as they can tell, and they can tell with about 89% accuracy, her lypmh nodes are clear, Her bone scans are clear. All systems are go. It seems to be localized in her left breast. We left Houston because their labs were not through analyzing the slides from her biopsy, and would not be done for another week, and a week at home, even with 28 hours in the car, still beat paying $30-$60 a night to sweat in Houston's oppressive August heat with nothing to do but wait. We got six hours down the road before her oncologist's nurse called back to say that a mammogram done three days before on her right breast was suspicious, and she would need to come back in as soon as possible for a biopsy, without the results of which, we could not see the doctor to discuss treatment options a week later, as was the plan. We kept driving toward home.

She will have to go back down for the biopsy on Friday, then home again until her oncologist's next available opening, which will be on the 10th of September. So until then, cancer gets back-burnered. In the meantime, there is a family reunion in Kansas, and many other things that need to be taken care of.

Long story short, for inquiring minds that want to know, is that her girls have a good chance of coming off, but the chances are also good that only her girls will have to give anything to cancer. Radiation, chemotherapy, all the cancer treatments will not be necessary if it has indeed not spread anywhere else.

And now, with nothing else to write, this blogger has a salad to eat, an entire wardrobe to cycle through the washing machine, a house to clean, and a dog to exercise.