Tacking

I'm working with a strong wind to starboard, tacking to gain ground. Even when I sit still the movement is too much for me. I need more: time, rest, space. The stolen hours are never enough. I miss Australia, the sunburnt country, and I want time to stop. The future is imminent: the work I've worked to have, the home I've waited to find, all of it so big and real that I want to throw up a billowing spinnaker against the brilliance of the light.

Triathlons are over for this summer. It will be rowing now, back in skinny boats with long oars and that spectacular sensation of flight when the keel stands balanced and runs out beneath you while your wake runs on in rivers. Let it run, they say. Soft hands. Breathe. It is meditation. It is God come down.

winding down

Today is my last day at the current firm. No triathlons are scheduled for the immediate future because we're flying off tomorrow for several weeks in Japan and Australia, visiting old friends. I may do a few late-season races when we get back, but the training is on the back burner at the moment.

In very good news, I got an MRI and MRA to see if there's any abnormality in my brain that's causing the bad headaches I get when I swim hard. You guessed it: they examined my head and found nothing. There's a history of stroke and brain aneurysm in my family, so I bolt to the nearest neurologist when I get a pain in my head. Luckily this time it's just a headache, nothing more. The MRI machine is the closest to a medieval torture device I ever hope to get. They stuck me up to my waist in it for 25 minutes and I imagined I was surfing - it made sense with all the vibration and noise. I rode the waves at Torquay and JanJuc the whole time, bobbing in that infinite, dark southern ocean, so far away nothing could touch me. It would have been too scary otherwise.