It was a big weekend. Saturday Herriott Sports Performance hosted a talk by Brian Frank, the owner of Hammer Nutrition. I went in and met Brian briefly, but had to leave before the lecture because one of my oldest friends (as in I’ve known her longer than just about any of my friends) was getting married. Apparently Hammer is coming out with a couple new bar flavors this year, which is good because when I was living with a Hammer athlete I got really tired of Almond Raisin and Chocolate Chip. Don’t get me wrong, the bars are great, but when you’re eating a bar an hour on the bike, you can get sick of pretty much anything.

The wedding was awesome. Emily and Ben had already done the legal part of the marriage, so the ceremony was simple. They turned on some music, walked out in front of everyone, said some nice things to each other, then directed us to enjoy the party. The entire ceremony took about 2 minutes, which is short enough to maintain my attention.

As for the party, it was like a middle school reunion. Many of the people there I haven’t seen in ten years, and it was so long ago I can’t remember much about any of them. It’s a little strange to know everyone’s name at a party, but have no clue what they’ve done with their life. ( “Hey Maggie. Did I ever tell you how much fun I had at your Batmizfa?” ) Regardless (or maybe I should say, ‘as a result of which’), the party was a lot of fun. (Hooray!)

Sunday was Lunafest, a film festival by for about women. I went with my friend Tom, a local cyclist, and we were likely the only men there. It was a great time, though the turnout was probably less than the Luna Chix and the Breast Cancer Fund had hoped for. The films ranged from cute to humorous to weird to meaningful, and ranged from a minute to twenty. My favorite was (of course) called Breaking Boundaries, about Sandra Van Ert, an amazing ski / snowboard racer who redefined age in her competition. The other greats of the show were Family Reunion, about a girl struggling with the decision to come out to her family in Iceland (she’s stressing out when, at his birthday party, her grandfather announces that his friend and roommate is also his loving partner), and a very strange film, the guarantee, about a man who was encouraged to get a nose job in order to further his ballet career. I was not the target audience for these films, but I managed to have a good time anyway.

Oh, and going back to variety, there were Luna Sunrise bars and Luna Tea Cakes outside the festival. The whole line of flavors that Clif and Luna offer are really good, but I definitely recommend trying the Orange Blossom Tea Cakes, which are made in partnership with Luna Bar and The Republic of Tea.

Two things this week have led me to believe that there is another Ben Collins that’s getting himself confused with me. It’s not the race car driver or football player, and I don’t think it’s the computer hacker either (which is who you’ll find on Wikipedia), because both of them are too young to fit the character of my alternative person.

At customs on Thursday I was asked if I ever lived in New york. I answered "yes" and the customs agent gave me a concerned look. We established that I had lived in Manhattan and not White Plains, then he typed for about ten seconds and handed back my passport. I have no idea what that means. Is there another Ben Collins living in New York that managed to get himself on a watch list? Maybe my cell phone is now tapped. I’m sure knowing where I plan to meet for bike rides, whether or not I plan to be home for dinner (the joys of living with parents 🙂 ), and what Dr. Michael McMahon thinks of my workouts is really interesting to some government agent, but unless they think "T2" is some kind of code, it would wasted money.

After this confusion passed without explanation, I traveled home to find a stack of mail that had come while I was gone. There were my tickets to Lunafest, some bills, and – on the bottom – a membership card to the American Association of Retired Persons. Now, it’s true that I have recently quit working as an engineer, and have no immediate plans of starting another full-time job, but I would not consider myself retired. For one thing, in order to retire you must have enough money saved to live off of. This is in stark contrast to the complete lack of money I have saved – having recently graduated from a private school education, and then blown my engineer salary on such luxuries as flying to Hamburg for a triathlon.

The only conclusion I can draw from these two identity confusions is that there must be somebody over the age of 55 named Ben Collins, who is a recently retired international terrorist.

I haven’t done much this week. Mostly relaxing. Until yesterday afternoon I pretty much felt like an airplane crash. The few beach runs I did were nice, but I’m actually looking forward to running on a flat non-sand surface when I get home. See, by the time I got back to transition on Saturday it was all cleaned up. My racing flats as well as my training shoes were gone, so my only option for running this week has been barefoot on the beach. This morning on my barefoot run I had to dodge Moray Eals that had been stranded by the tide all over the sand. They were still alive, just waiting for the tide to come back in.

I’m pretty bored the last couple of days, but definitely not looking forward to the cold weather back in the Pacific Northwest. Now that i feel good, I’m craving a hard long ride. Maybe I’ll hit up a cycling race this weekend. Heat stroke won’t be an issue…

I pretty much vegged out Saturday after getting home from the Hospital. I laid around so much my butt felt bruised from not shifting enough. By the time midnight rolled around, I had been sleeping on and off for about eight hours (not including the time I was unconscious in the ambulance and at the ER), so I went with Danielle Kehoe (a US pro from Colorado) to see what all the noise was about outside. Here’s what we discovered:

1. Thousands of cars lined up blaring music, and many of them had several scantily clad people sitting on top or out windows.  Nobody seemed to care that traffic was not moving at all.
2. there was a car with it’s four ways flashing, hanging from a crane about 50 ft over the street.  It was apparently part of one of the many night clubs with thousands of party goers.
3. An empty lot with a free band, lots of people, and dancing (my legs were not responding to the rhythmic requests of the music)
4. Rocking Chairs = Very Good
5. We saw along the shore a place where two waves would cross and white water would be thrown up in a line about 100m long, such that it looked like a rooster tail. It was cool. 🙂
6. I couldn’t find a way to exit the beach, so we climbed a sea wall into a dance club. Security quickly surrounded us (which I expected), but instead of letting us leave toward the street, they insisted we go back out the beach way. My legs disagreed with this sentiment, and I argued with them for several minutes. Eventually they told me if I didn’t climb back down the sea-wall, they would throw me down. I responded with open-mouthed laughter. Danielle, on the other hand, really thought they would do it, and insisted I climb down before we found out. I just stood my ground, smiled at the guy and said, "seriously? You would throw me down the sea wall? Rather than doing that, why don’t you please just escort us to the street?" The guard rolled his eyes and took us out of the club – no throwing involved.

Sunday was more of the same. Sleeping that is. I went to a lecture with Barb Lindquist and the National Development team, in which we debriefed from the race. It was pretty interesting to hear the race recap from people who remembered the whole thing. Matt Chrabot and Jillian Peterson both won, making for an American sweep. I think that’s awesome. They also both did it with a two person break away, which is not a normal strategy.

The real highlight of my Sunday, however, was when I managed to roll over my own foot with a shopping cart. [if you have an aversion to gore, stop reading] At first I winced and counted to ten, waiting for the pain to subside. It did, but then I felt a squishing in my sandal. Biting my upper lip in anticipation of what I was about to see, I looked down to find that the sole of my shot was puddling with viscous, dark, slippery blood.  [you were warned] I had ripped open my heal (The cart literally found my Achilles heal), and the wound was pouring fluid out. I looked for my dad, and found him in the front of the store, but as soon as I got close he looked straight at me, then walked away, not seeing me at all). I stood there for about 10 minutes waiting for somebody to notice and come help. I didn’t want to make a scene, so I couldn’t yell out, and I didn’t want to track the ever increasing pool of blood around the grocery store. Seriously, I have not bled this much from such a small wound before. It looked like a scene from a horror movie. Eventually, my parents found me, found the stores employees and got me some medical supplies to clean it up with. My mom took my sandal to the bathroom, where she patiently waited for a mother and her son to leave before she used the sink to clean off my shoe. When I left there were about four security guards standing around the smeared pool of blood waiting for an employee to arrive with a mop bucket. The funniest part was when I was cleaned up and walking out, and we ran into the gynecologist that was at the race when I went down. I said, "thanks for helping me out yesterday". To which he responded, "thanks for puking all over me…" Then looking down, "What did you do to your foot?"  It was not my weekend. [if you’re throwing up reading this, just be glad I didn’t have my camera, because I probably would have posted a picture. I’m not sure words can really describe how disgusting the scene was.]

I’m finally in Mexico. I’ve never seen a flight with so many triathletes on board as the flight from LAX into Mazatlan tonight. The best thing? I took Barb Lindquist’s advice and scheduled a shuttle on King David Tours. I got to my hotel over an hour before some of the people on the same flight.

There are pictures posted from last weekend’s South Beach Triathlon. None are particularly good.

I need to either go to bed or find a supermarket. Probably bed. Jesus had to be at work on time (I caused him to be late twice, along with missing an entire day in order to hang out with me, so when he offered to give me a ride to the airport on the condition that I get there over four hours before my flight, I understood). Still, it was a long day. The first flight took an hour longer than expected, and I felt like a real jerk covering my face with a blanket as the woman next to me coughed continuously into a no-so-closed hand.

One cool thing (which will only be cool the first time, and will become very annoying in the future): In Miami they had this big explosive detector that you stand inside, and it blows air at you, then sniffs the air, then says you can proceed to the security check point, as per usual. The line was short, or this may be the very bottleneck TSA needs to justify laying off some of their officers (if the bottleneck is not related to the number of officers, then there’s no need to have so many, right?)

It’s dark, but I think my hotel is on the water. It’s all black out my window, except for the two pools with water slides down below. Tomorrow’s swim may have to involve these.