Race Report: Georgia Veterans' Triathlon 2010

Meanwhile, back at the Woman’s Triathlon….

The Georgia Veterans’ Triathlon is held, appropriately, in Georgia Veterans’ State Park, in Cordele, Georgia: up the road from Tifton, and down the road from Macon on I-75.

The park is fabulous- we’ve camped there twice, in a huge campsite, and stayed at the Lodge once, in a beautiful room (in which I proceeded to put black marks on the wall with my bike- they came off, thank goodness). The park is on Lake Blackshear, and sports both a regular gold course and a disc golf course (giving me two different opportunities to suck at golf). There’s a great museum with some great military memorabilia, a swimming beach and a couple of great restaurants. So, once you’ve finished your morning workout, and have eaten your post-race sausage dog provided by Stripling’s General Store, and take your nap, there are lots of things to do.

As for the race itself- it’s one of my faves.

The swim is a 500 yard beach start in the very nice warm water of Lake Blackshear. The bike course is rolling and a little technical, following the road that follows the edge of Lake Blackshear. The run covers 3.1 miles of park road (and is sometimes brutally hot).
It’s a well-organized, fairly small, laid back race.

The women started in the last couple of waves, so it was basically a Woman’s Triathlon later on the course. This is a very good thing.

I believe that I’ve discussed the phenomenon in other blog posts. An all-woman triathlon is very different from a co-ed triathlon. . I over-generalize, I know- we do have very assertive and aggressive riders in my gender- but there’s a different vibe there, especially amongst us back-of-the-pack female athletes. Although Cordele is, of course, a co-ed triathlon, our starting position created a Virtual Woman’s Triathlon.

Two classic examples of Woman’s Triathlon behavior from the race:

I Had to Use the Mom Voice.

As a rule, I do not mind young people racing triathlon alongside me. There are some excellent young triathletes out there. The kid that I had to deal with on the bike course, that day, was another story entirely.

Kid was an absolute nuisance on the bike. I caught up to him a couple miles into the bike, on one of the more treacherous turns in the course. He was weaving all over the road; he’d call “on your left,” start to pass, change his mind and nearly ride into another cyclist. When someone tried to pass him, he looked over at them and sped up. He drafted. He blocked.

But when Kid finally started riding to the left of the center line, I had about enough. It was time for the Mom Voice.

“You need to get on the right side of the lane NOW! You are breaking the rules, and you are going to get hit by a car and then you won’t grow up to be a pro triathlete (actually, I pray that you don’t grow up to be a pro triathlete, period).”

The Mom Voice worked- at least, long enough to get around the little monster and get some distance between us.

[At this point in the report, I would really like to climb up on my soapbox and express my views about Kid’s participation in this triathlon. But, for the sake of brevity, I will refrain. Perhaps another time. Soon.]

No, No: You Go On. I’m Not Competing Today.

I was, thankfully, past Kid and on the final couple of miles of the bike course. I was thinking about passing the woman in front of me when, suddenly and inexplicably, she flew over her handlebars and lands, faces first, on the ground.

I unclipped and dropped my bike on the grass.

The poor girl was trying to sit up. There was blood dripping from her chin, and she had somehow woven herself into the bike when she crashed. One of her feet had lodged itself in the spokes of the front wheel, of all places. I wiggled her foot out of her shoe to free her, as there seemed to be no way in hell that I could free her shoe from inside of the spokes. We used the sock to put pressure on the gash in her chin, which was now dripping blood steadily onto the asphalt.

No fewer than 4 other women stopped, jumped off their bikes, and came over to help. Another woman slowed down to talk to us.

“Are any of you girls competing today? ‘Cause, if you are, you can go ahead, and I’ll stay with her.”

We all insisted “no, no, we’re fine. You go ahead and go. We’ll stay with her.”

And we all did, until a passing truck driver offered to carry her and her mangled bike back to transition. One of the girls helped her to the truck; another loaded her bike on to the bed of the truck; another loaded her own bike onto the truck and rode with them.

I got on my bike and rode out onto a now empty course. I wasn’t disappointed about the loss of a lot of time in the race, but I really didn’t want people to think that I was last in because I was an incredibly slow pathetic biker. This is also a very classic Woman’s Triathlon attitude: we are pathologically afraid of finishing last, because everyone will laugh at you and point and you will be completely humiliated and never do another triathlon again, if you ever do one to begin with, because what’s the point in doing a triathlon if that’s going to happen to you? This is why, of course, our beloved Sally Edwards always volunteers to be the Final Finisher in her Woman’s Triathlons.



Surprisingly, I was not dead last that day. I did manage to pass a few people on the run. Everything else ended fine. Kid disappeared before I could throw him (and his parents) in Time Out; the injured triathlete, I heard, needed stitches on her chin, but that was about it.

I had my sausage dog, and my nap, and then played a very bad game of disc golf. And I remembered, even though I don’t race as much as I want to, how awesome this sport is—and how awesome women triathletes are.

Ben's Greatest Hits

Ben says the strangest stuff. He makes these comments at odd moments, in the most unlikely places. He doesn’t realize the impact of what he’s said until everyone in the family stops and stares at him, and then bursts out laughing.

We’ve compiled a list over the years of Ben’s Greatest Hits:

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We are in line at The Dollar Store, buying 50 items that we really don’t need-- but, hey, they’re only a dollar! The usual sibling bickering is occurring behind me as we ring up dollar toys and dollar candy and dollar knick knacks. Libby is exasperated with her brother.

“Mama, why did you have to have another child? And why did it have to be a boy?”

Ben shot back. “So when we move to China and Mommy has to give you away, she’ll at least have one kid left!”


Ben has arrived home after his first day of kindergarten. He is regaling us with all of the events of the day.

“But the best part, “he says, “is that we had these great new cookies at snack time: Fig Mutants!”

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We are arriving home after a trip to Wal Mart. As we pull into the yard, we notice that our beloved dog, Bobo (he died this year and we miss him a lot), is limping. Ben and I get out of the car to assess the situation.

“Ben, I can’t figure it out. Which leg do you think he hurt?”

He looks at Bobo carefully. “His front passenger side one.”

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We are grabbing a bite at Zaxby’s. Ben wants to exchange his honey mustard dressing for ranch dressing to dip his chicken fingers into. He heads up to the counter and returns several minutes later.

“Ben, we already had ranch dressing at the table,” Libby said.

Ben throws his hands into the air. “Now you tell me! After I stood in line for then minutes and had to watch a man mating llamas!”

This made more sense when we turned around and saw the television hanging over the counter. It was tuned to a documentary about llama farming on Animal Planet.
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Stay tuned for Ben’s Greatest Hits Volume 2. Libby will be the co-editor. Although she usually tries to ignore most of what Ben is saying, she comes to me now with something she just heard him say: “Mama, you have to put this one in the blog, too!”

Ben Misses All the Cool Stuff: A Post from Camp Scamp 2010

Can you see the deer down there?

Ben misses all the cool stuff.

I do not know why it was his unlucky fate on this vacation.  It wasn’t that he was doing anything wrong, per se.  It was just that he always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I am sure that he got tired of someone telling him that he “should have been there!  You should have seen…”

… the salamanders. 

Missing the salamanders is an especially unfortunate event, since Ben loves salamanders. He has posters of salamanders; he has read books about salamanders.  But he had grown tired of hiking up the trail to Anna Ruby Falls, then back down the trail from Anna Ruby Falls- about a mile, up and back, on a pretty steep path. To limit his complaining, we let him head back down the trail while Allen, Jenni, Libby and I lingered at the Falls, watching the cascading water, taking pictures, and wondering out loud watching waterfalls and taking pictures of them was fun (my theory is that people are attracted to water because they are trying to find their way back to the primordial soup from which they emerged at the dawn of time- but, hey, that’s just me).

On our way down, Jenni wondered if we could find any salamanders along the path.  She found a good place to hunt:  on a big, wet, slimy rock next to the trail.

We saw little brown heads.   Then we saw more little brown heads, peering out from the rock. And then, like those pictures where you have to make your eyes all out of focus and fuzzy so that, all of a sudden, you can see the 3D picture in the pattern- there they were.  Little salamanders, big salamander, all over the rock.  Our ‘oohs’ and ‘aahhs’ attracted a crowd, which we regretted, since people started coming over and plucking the salamanders off the rock to play with. (People:  leave the poor salamanders alone!  Don’t you remember “look, don’t touch?”)

Ben, who, as I told you, loves salamanders, was far down the trail.  We yelled, but he couldn’t hear us.  He was, needless to say, disappointed. This disappointment resulted in bickering with the other sibling, which resulted in one of the siblings kicking the other, which resulted in Mom hollering. But, of course, the siblings were back to being friends by the time we got back to the campground- which is how these things work in my family.

…the swimming deer.

A couple of days later, we headed out to Tallulah Gorge, near… well, up there in North Georgia somewhere.  This is one impressive hole in the ground, nearly 1000 feet to the bottom. I refused to go within 5 feet of the railing; Libby had to take me by the hand so I could look down the big hole, because I felt like the floor was falling down below me.  But the view was definitely worth getting all woozy over:  there were giant rock cliffs, and a river flowing at the bottom, hundreds of feet down.

Since we had been in the car for over an hour, during which time I assume that he must have consumed a quart of iced tea- Ben had to find the restroom.  Quickly. So he headed back down the path, away from the overlook, in search of the restroom.

Still clinging to Libby’s hand, I hung over the rail with Allen, Jenni, and Libby. Something was swimming in the river, traveling from one bank to the other.

“It’s a person,” one of us guessed.

“No, it’s a dog, I think,” said another one of us. 

When we all looked closer, we realized that it was a deer.  Way down below us, a deer was swimming across the river to the other bank. 

We didn’t know that deer could swim, and we had no idea why a deer would even want to swim across a river like that.  We were fascinated.

The deer finally made it, and hoisted herself up the bank, off to find– whatever interesting thing was on the other side of the river.  And that is, of course, when Ben reappeared.

A pattern was forming:  Ben leaves.  Something interesting happens.  We postulated:  if we keep sending Ben to the bathroom, what else interesting will happen?

We may try that.

Although Ben tends to miss some of the more extraordinary things in life, he often makes extraordinary observations about the more mundane things in life. “How did you miss that?” often becomes “Where did you come up with that?”

How to Tube the ‘Hootch: Another Dispatch from Camp Scamp

Author’s Note:  As I posted the last post, I realized that there are actually people out there who have never ridden an inner tube down the Chattahoochee River.  These people, of course, have been deprived and have obviously led a sheltered life.  I wrote this a couple of years ago, during our last vacation to Helen, Georgia, in the North Georgia Mountains.  Our whole great big family loves to spend the week together up there.  Allen first took the girls there years ago.  They loved it so much that they passed up trips to the beach and to Disney World to spend time up there.  The kids and I have become converts, too.  Our kind of fun up in Helen is to “tube the ‘Hootch:” to ride down the Chattahoochee River in inner tubes, all of the family (just 6 of us when I wrote this- we’ve expanded since then).  Here is my handy guide to tubing the ‘Hootch, in case you ever get up that way.

To tube the ‘Hootch, you put on your bathing suit, grab your push stick and your water shoes, pile everyone into the pickup truck, and drive down the street to the Cool River Tubing Company. You pay your fee- five dollars for the short run or the long run, nine dollars if you want to tube all day.  You line up outside the storage building, and pick up a big plastic inner tube.  You want it to match your outfit- so you choose blue, green, yellow. There are no pink ones, unfortunately- those are used by a competing company.  The kids then have to decide whether to get a kid-sized tube or a grown-up sized tube- of course, they always want the grown up size, even if they’re so small that they’re going to fall out the bottom.  And then you have to choose what kind of bottom you want:  hole or no hole.  Tubes with no holes are for those who want to keep their butt relatively dry and warm; the open tubes are for the daredevils who wish to brave the 70 odd degree water. If you have a tube with no hole, you have to decide how deep you want the seat. A deep seat can make a difference when you’re trying to push yourself down the river and over rocks- too deep a seat makes this a literal pain in the ass. 

You pick up straps to lash inner tubes together by their handles—they come in handy for roping in kids who cannot or will not manage by themselves on the ‘Hootch:  those kids that either goof off and ‘accidentally’ falling into the water, again and again, or who manage to keep getting stuck on rock after rock.  When I get tired of watching either spectacle, I usually grab the offender and strap them to my tube.  It’s more fun that way, anyways:  you have better momentum and an easier time getting over the obstacles.

After collecting your tube, push stick, life jacket, water shoes and straps, you head over to the school bus, give the employees your tube to load into the trailer, and climb on board with a ton of excited kids, old couples, young families, church groups, and one family that most definitely is not from Around Here and has never been tubing in their lives and asks all kinds of nervous questions of the other riders.

 You get trucked up the river a ways, and then dropped off by the side of the river with your tube and your gear.  You plunk your tube into six inches of water at the drop-off site.  You push your tube into deeper water, where there’s a good current. Then you plop into the tube and give yourself a shove, and you are floating down the river, somehow, because the water is not even a foot deep in some places.

On crowded days, like the weekend, there is a log jam of tubes on the river. I sort of imagine them as giant platelets clogging a blood vessel (what do you expect? I’m a pathologist). You get really friendly with your neighbors on the crowded days, as you bump into them, shove off of them, dodge their cigarettes (occasionally) and stick your feet in their faces.

On less crowded days, your family is strung down the river, in no particular order. The only given in this scene is that one of the kids will be at the end of the line of the family, flailing around in the tube because they’re stuck on a rock. 

You get to watch all of the different approaches to tubing: one guy has his head back and is dozing; two young lovers are hooked together and in their own little world; a kid is paddling along, somehow; a mom is herding all of the kids together with the pushstick, or she is floating in the back of her group, as the sweeper. 

You float down the river, past the hotels and restaurants and folks watching you from their tables, entertained by watching you try to push yourself off a boulder.  You try to dodge the fly fishers.

Along the way, there are a couple of trees that people have loaded with their chewing gum.  There is a collection of single flip flops nailed to a tree:  the tree of ‘lost soles’- get it?

There are rocks to maneuver around, and the occasional ‘rapids,’ where the water moves a little faster, and you may occasionally plunge a foot or two.  There’s a very deep spot on the river which serves as a swimming hole, if you’re brave enough to jump into the cold water (I’m not).

And then you’re at the end of the ride, behind Cool River Tubing Company. You jump into the water, hand your tube to the helpers, and climb a set of stairs back to dry land.  You get your land legs again, and head back to your hotel, all drippy wet and planning the next ride. Maybe the long run tomorrow. Maybe the short run again later tonight, if it doesn’t storm. 

Finding Enlightenment in a Fluorescent Green Inner Tube: A Letter from Camp Scamp

Well, I finally got my butt into an inner tube on the Chattahoochee River. Floating down the ‘Hootch in a fluorescent green inner tube, I wasn’t expecting to find enlightenment.  But I did.  I will share with you the insights which I acquired today.

1. Go With The Flow

2. Two Is Better Than One

3. You’ll Get There Eventually- Maybe Not How You Expected To

1.  Go With the Flow.  During the last few weeks at work, interspersed between looking at a million slides under the microscope and doing autopsies (and having the angry family members of said autopsy on the phone yelling at me), I fantasized about the Chattahoochee River.  I imagined the wonderful feeling of my cold butt floating down the ‘Hootch in an inner tube, the warm sun on my face. 

We finally made it to North Georgia, and to the Chattahoochee River.  The big white school bus took us down the road from the Cool River Tubing Company, and dropped us down by the riverbank.  We jumped off the bus, carrying our inner tubes to the middle of the river, and hopped in.

  Alas, my beautiful dream seemed to turn into a nightmare 200 feet down the river.  My tube was stuck on a rock and I couldn’t move.  After a few minutes of this unpleasantness, I took matters into my own hands.  I stood up in the river and tried to move the tube over the rock.  My feet slipped on the slippery river rock and tumbled over; one of my flip flops slipped off and began to float down the river. Someone caught the flip flop for me, and I tried to flip the tube back over. I slipped again. My hat fell off and into the water. I tried to catch my hat while not letting go of the tube-and my other flip flop slipped off. I retrieved my wet hat, righted my tube, and got the one remaining flip flop from the nice family that had retrieved it for me.  I flopped back into the tube, clutching my one flip flop, wearing a soggy hat and cursing loudly.

 The reality of tubing the ‘Hooch was nothing like the fantasy that I had so carefully preserved in my head for all of these weeks.  It sucked.

I heard a voice drift back to me from down the river:  “Just go with the flow.”  Words of wisdom, I thought.  Then I realized that it was Allen’s voice.  This pissed me off, because I hate it when he says something wise that I didn’t think of first. 

Despite the fact that I don’t like it when he’s right- and will usually do the exact opposite of what he suggests, just on principle- I went with the flow.  I stopped fighting.  And when I inevitably got stuck against another rock, I waited.  The water rushing past me freed me.  I didn’t push against the rock; I didn’t stand up and try to walk over the rock.  I just waited for the water to carry me around?    That was my first Universal Truth of the day.  The moment that you stop fighting , that you stop trying to push against an immovable object,  that you stop trying to control everything- that’s when the water picks you up and begins to take you down the river again.

2. Two are Better Than One.  Ben and I seem to be the klutziest, dorkiest tubers in our party.  If there’s a rock to get stuck on- we’ll find it. If there’s a big branch by the side of the river with a snake hanging off of it- we’ll find a way under it.  If there’s a spot in the middle of the river where there’s absolutely no current- we’ll find ourselves in it.

Our antics entertain and/or annoy the hell out of the other members of our party.  You can see them, watching us from down river, looking either amused or completely exasperated.  And it is embarrassing for Ben and me to be the only people on the river who just really can’t tube.  I mean, it’s a simple concept:  you sit in an inner tube, and you float down the river.  Yet… somehow we do a lousy job of it.

So, today, Ben and I strapped our inner tubes to each other with a thick nylon strap that the tubing company provides for such a purpose.  We were going to do this together.  Two crappy tubers should equal one decent tuber, I reckoned.

Certain members of our party believed this to be an idiotic idea:  two bad tubers hooked together would not equal one good tuber- it would equal a total disaster.

But we showed them.  Two are better than one.

An amazing thing happened. When Ben and I, tied together, approached the rocks that conspired to impede our path, Ben would boing into a rock and bounce off; this carried him  back and would slingshot his tube around mine;  he could then pull us both, albeit facing backwards, though the rocks and back down the river.  The Doubters could do nothing but look on with envy.

Safely down the river, Ben lay across the tube on his belly and paddled.  I sat back in my tube and pushed with my push stick.  And we got ourselves down the river, whooping and laughing.  And there was another Universal Truth:  it’s fun to go down the river, through life, by the side of the people that you love, one pulling the other through the rough spots.

3.  You’ll get there-eventually.  It’s going to take you as long as it’s going to take you to get down the river.  You’re going to get down the river when you get down the river, even when you want to get the hell out because it’s lightning.  You’re going to get down the river when you get down the river, even if the rest of the family is waiting for you on the side of the river, tapping their feet, checking their watches (they do that).

You may not get down the river by the straightest route, the fastest route, the easiest route.  You may not get down the river with your hat still dry or with both flip flops still on your feet.

But you’ll get there. And, somehow, it will all be ok:  that’s how you needed to get down the river. You needed to get down the river that way, so that you could think about Life and Universal Truths- and then sit down and write all about it. 

Camp Scamp 2010

It is time once again for Camp Scamp: our yearly foray into the wild, using the Scamp as our base camp.  Last year we headed into the wilderness of Southern Connecticut and New York:  facing giant lobsters and New Yorkers.

This year, we were supposed to attend Camp Scamp Canada 2010.  However, thanks to my not-so-careful reading of Entry Requirements for Canada and, worse yet, Re-entry Requirements for the United States (Passports?  You gotta be kidding!), that adventure ended before it began.

With three days to spare, we revised the Camp Scamp 2010 Schedule of Events. When work gets intense, my favorite escape is imagining my butt in a green inner tube floating down the Chattahoochee River; therefore,  a trip to the North Georgia Mountains seemed in order.  And then?  Head south to visit the family, and then…. Why not?  Drive clear down to the edge of the United States, and show the kids the Southernmost Point in the U.S. - Key West, Florida.  We were gonna have it all:  the cool mountain air and the warm Caribbean breeze.  Camp Scamp 2010 was going to be truly epic. 

Letters from camp are, of course, a summer tradition; I suppose now they’re emails, tweets, Facebook posts, text messages and Skypes from camp. But, at any rate, communications from camp are a key element of the sleepaway camp experience.

(For the definitive example of the genre, I refer you to Allen Sherman’s classic Letter from Camp)

What follows is a series of communiqués from Camp Scamp 2010:  the good, the bad, and the ridiculous.  Our Letters from Camp.