a moment missed

last weekend i pulled a lance armstrong...

i don't mean doping, lying or manipulation or any of the things that he has been scapegoated and witch-hunted about....i mean his behavior at the finish line of the galveston 70.3 during his big tri come back in 2012.

 i watched the video, like lots of other lance-boys, eager for a chance to see my hero in action; he had had a pissy race, was cruising to the line getting high fives, and got passed by someone hateful with six inches to go...and..., what i am talking about is this; his daughter was waiting there at the line, holding his finisher's metal to put around his neck, and he just limped by her as she called out to him repeatedly, apparently too pissed off and in the haze of his own narcissistic fury to even hear her.

here it is:

lance being an ass

welcome back.

that is the one thing that bothered me about lance.

but, alas, i am a hypocrite, of the worst kind, i did almost exactly the same thing last weekend to my daughter.  it was a moment missed...and i am haunted by it. thing is; i am not a pro, i podiumed, no-one passed me in the last 12 inches (and i feel like belting that guy so i can imagine how lance must have felt),  and no-one was watching or cared about my race, so, in most respects, i think my narcissistic fatherly failure was worse than his. and i am still allowed to compete in triathlon.

the scene was the 32nd running of the k-town long course triathlon. i was there to get some redemption. the year prior, i had fallen into somewhat of a training hole and just did not do my best and ended up finishing just off my AG podium. this year, i was full of hopes to kill it; in fact, i had visualized the final sprint during countless painful tempo sets on the treadmill, in cold, misty dawn moments on the roads around near my house, during 2k repeats through humid billows of fire-like july air. killing it on the run in k-town had become my mantra.

well, when the day came, i just did not kill it. it killed me. i was flat. tired. and had a bad day on the bike and run. in spite of that, i still managed a spot better than the year before, and a podium medal...but it was somewhat empty as i knew i just didn't race to my potential.

by the time i reached the finish line, i already knew that this was just another training day, and i wasn't too bummed, but apparently, still wrapped up in my own shit. a bit tooooo much.

finish chutes always get my adrenaline going. they always buy me 10-20 seconds per kilometer, no matter what kind of day i've had. i am usually pretty deep in the pain box as i enter a finish chute.
finish chutes are like crack or mainlining. painful. ecstatic. transcendent. the focus of attention, yet solitary.

in this case, i was just glad to be finished. i am not sure exactly what i was thinking as the line approached, but i was genuinely happy to see my wife and kids there. (a special treat, because they are not often at the line to see me). so...i don't know exactly what was in my head, was i thinking about looking good for my final sprint? was i a bit pissed? was i thinking that maybe i still had a podium performance and number 4 was just behind me? (i could have looked behind me to check).

i don't really know quite why or how...but i gave my daughter a high five and sprinted past her wide eyed 5 year old self, to the lonely finish line. big. fucking. deal.

multisport canada are a nice race series. pretty laid back. it is ok to run across the line with your kid in tow. you will not get a dq. i am pretty sure i knew that....

i later found out that Jolene was crying out to me..."dad, i want to run with you"...that she had been talking about it for 1/2 an hour while they waited for my sorry ass to show up. and i was too caught up in my own head, too much absorbed in whatever kind've self-obsessed shit that i was dealing with,  that i just did not hear her, did not think about it, did not have the presence of mind to  reach across, grab her little  hand, and run to the finish line of a race with my daughter.

that is a major moment missed. i am an asshole for missing it.

please lord, bhudda, krishna, frontal cortex..., don't let me miss something like that again.....