Living Apart Together: My 5 City, 8 Home Journey Back to My Husband (And Some Triathlon Stuff)

Dearest Readers and TriGeeks,

My professional journalistic training, which began almost two years ago, has made me hesitant to discuss myself (unless, apparently, I’m discussing myself lying naked under plastic wrap on an ER gurney). Therefore, I apologize for the gaps in posting, but promise there are good reasons why I disappeared. One of them being that I did disappear. In the past two years, I have lived in eight different places in five different cities (including two adjacent cities that should really count as one). During that time, Coachubby, my uber-rad triathlete coach/husband, has lived in 3.5 of those places in three of those cities. Which, if you're doing the math, means I have lived in 4.5 different places in five cities without my husband in search of knowledge and a career. Both of which I attained, one of which I had to reinvent in order to finally, once again, live with Coachubby. Allow me to show my work:

In the fall of 2009, I enrolled at Stanford University, excited to be the dumbest person on a campus stuffed with the world’s geniuses. I filled my role perfectly. In nine months, I wrote stories for Pulitzer prize winners who were somewhat encouraging of my writing skills (perhaps because they were paid to be); took classes about sports branding and marketing at the business school with tomorrow’s leaders; stood up and made an ass of myself in front of those leaders and the CEO of the Atlanta Falcons…and the CEO of Mountain Hardwear; moved out of one house with two roommates and into a studio where I entertained a weekend lover (Coachubby); raced collegiate nationals on broken hamstrings with the triathlon team; and in general, became a respectable reporter. (If you’re counting, that makes three places I lived in so far: the one in Los Angeles before I moved and two at Stanford.)

But I did not graduate.

At least, not in the traditional sense. I did get a diploma, sent to my parents in the mail. I did not get a cap and robe. I did not walk or hear my name called out by someone s’habillé-ed in an even more ridiculous cap and robe. Instead, I headed for Oceanside to live in a minivan with strange men for two weeks. Oh, we had a reason to be driving the Dodge Caravan across the country: we were chasing cyclists. Not just any cyclists. Hallucinating, sunburned ultracyclists who were hell-bent on cycling across the United States in nine days or less. When you look at it that way, driving across our ginourmous country with strangers who were vetted for their photographic, videographic and beer-drinking capabilities is not an odd decision for a 26-year old woman to make. (No, I did not count the minivan as a place of residence; we’re still at three.)

During this scholastic and ultra nonsense, Coachubby moved into a tiny apartment across from a hardware store and above a small vacated space that was once, according to a decaying sign, called “The Gym.” You could call it “The Gym” or “That Place I Did Shrooms Once” as a friend of a friend referred to the rotting structure. I lived there whenever I wasn’t sleeping in minivans or in transition to city number three: Santa Fe, New Mexico. (That makes The Gym residence number 4.)

Après chasing the late Slovenian Jure Robic and his hounds for two weeks, I returned to The Gym where I met a Mexican named Vin who dragged my craigslist finds and fleet of bicycles down the stairs and into a nondescript white van that was supposed to—I hoped and prayed—end up in Santa Fe when Coachubby and I sent for it. Coachubby would move into a big house on a hill with our friends and we would live in a house the only place we could afford to live in a house of our own: New Mexico. I say we, because Coachubby would live there every other Wednesday through Wednesday. His boss was nice like that. So even though I was a lowly intern at the nation’s most magnificent adventure magazine, Outside, I had a house-husband to grill and sweep. Life was awesome. Except for the weeks Coachubby wasn’t there. And the week when Coachubby wasn’t there and a real-life murderer broke out of prison and headed through New Mexico where he burned a couple in their RV. Every scratch and creek was someone coming to get me. It’s quiet in New Mexico. Piercingly, hauntingly quiet.

At home in Santa Fe.

Come December 2010, I believed my dream job was an internship at Outside (or, you know, a job at Outside). But as Coachubby could not fly to New Mexico every other week for eternity and all internships must come to an end so editors don’t have to continuously take gabby, question-slinging interns to coffee at expensive railway cafés, I applied to the next best job I could find: Senior Editor at Competitor (an endurance sports!) magazine in San Diego. It was as close as Coachubby and I had lived in 1.5 years.

And it was a dream. We explored the hotbed of triathlon and decided San Diego would be a most wonderful place to live. If we raised kids here, we said to each other, they would have better values than if we raised them in LA. They would have nice friends because my cousin’s nice and he’s from San Diego. They might have a yard or even a house. Oh, to live together in San Diego! I had a small one-bedroom in Del Mar that I rented in my name alone. I had money! I had a job! I was going to have my dream career as an editor at a magazine whose subject matter I encapsulated to my very core! I flew to Tokyo to write a story about running with a funny British guy. I called coaches and race directors and athletes every day. I tightened up stories and flipped them around and when I wasn’t writing or editing or reporting I was training for Ultraman Canada and riding up Mount Palomar and swimming in the Solana Beach pool.

But Coachubby wasn’t there. Oh, he was there on the weekends. Or I was at the house in LA. (Residence number 6. The Del Mar apartment makes 7.) He rode from dawn to dusk with me, swam with me, test rode Cervélos and Pinarellos and downed Rubio’s burritos with me. It was like a whirlwind date every weekend. (Which, by the way, might be a great way to invigorate a sagging marriage. But I wouldn’t know. I went to Stanford approximately 1.5 years into our marriage, having just turned 26; nothing was sagging.) But the drive, though beautiful, became a chore. Life, with no one to go home to—but knowing I did, actually, have someone to go home to—became redundant. Sad. From the outside, I knew, our relationship was strange. Enviable to some, but strange. But for us, it was fun. Stressful, but fun. We got to check out Palo Alto, San Francisco, and the Santa Cruz Mountains. We got to explore Santa Fe and Taos. We got to meet and befriend all sorts of interesting characters. We trained for Ironman Arizona and the Tahoe-Sierra 100-mile mountain bike race on Santa Fe’s legendary Dale Ball trails, and did the bulk of my Ultraman training on the peaceful, rolling hills north of San Diego and the trails in Del Mar and Torrey Pines. 

And now, we get to decorate a home together. And by home, I mean apartment—I did have to quit my job to move back to Los Angeles to live with Coachubby. Incidentally, writing and editing under a title like Senior Editor must be done from a cubicle facing a void in a repurposed warehouse. Not an antique desk in an apartment building built by the beach in 1937. (The building, not the desk. This, my friends, makes residence number 8.)

We have, after almost two years, been reunited. As several people, including people I’ve written about, have asked me (very seriously): How do you even know you like him?

What’s not to love about a guy who sacrificed everything so you could go back to school, then work for your favorite magazine, then try to make a name for yourself all while carrying extra Gu and cash for unexpected bonks on 14-hour weekend training rides--for your race, not his--up and down mountains named Palomar and Sangre de Cristo that are located in the middle of nowhere?

I was going to end this by saying it was my turn to make a sacrifice for Coachubby. And it was. And I did. However he will be my crew leader aka Erin’s Commander of Awesome, as he prefers to be called, at Ultraman. And for one more week, it will be all about me again. But when I’m done swimming, cycling and running 320 miles around British Columbia, we will return to Los Angeles together to one home. Our home.

So that’s enough about me for now. What have you been up to?

XOXO,

Erin

Stanford Tri Does Collegiate Nationals: Foaming Crotch and Other Puketastic Stories

(Note: All events below are subject to inaccuracy due to Lubbockian Water Illness. John K. did not provide access to his brain, therefore all John K. thoughts are assumptions. But probably true.)

Wednesday, April 14: John K. (full name will not be disclosed so prospective employers will not associate JK with this event) merrily packs up his brand new Cervelo tri bike for collegiate nationals. He tosses his bike assembly and cleaning supplies into his bike box with his tri uniform and other race items.

He is ready to kick butt.

Thursday, April 15: Stanford's tri team meets at 7am to fly to Lubbock, TX, where incontinent clouds have decided to gather, freezing over and flooding the place. After being held over in Las Vegas for an hour--where Stanford tri was not allowed to deplane, and therefore lost no money--the team finally arrived at what could possibly be called hell on earth. "It's never like this here!" exclaims one of the incredibly nice Lubbockians at the front desk of the hotel. "This just started right before you came!"

Fabulous.

John K. enters one of two "men's" rooms with other members of Stanford's tri team. He unpacks his bike bag, eager to see if anything has scratched his new baby in any way. Dawn dish soap has leaked all over his stuff.

It smells infinitely better than the water from the sink. He lets it slide.

Friday, April 16: John K. witnesses the land of a thousand lakes: Lubbock, TX. Except these lakes aren't in lake-ish locations. Instead, many of them have decided to take up residence in the middle of major roadways--roadways that each have at least 3 names, all of which are correct, only one of which is usually noted at a time on a street sign, and is usually not the name mapquest chose to indicate.

As he peers through a Dodge Caravan window--one of three Caravans in Stanford's very intimidating fleet--he tries to make out the bike course while the windshield wipers fight a loosing battle against the torrential rain.

"OK, so this is where you have a headwind," explains Coach Bruce. John K. looks at a lone tree, bent over in submission to the wicked wind. The Dodge slows to make its way through another lake. "This race could be made into just a swim!" thinks John K., a former collegiate swimmer. He is psyched.

John K. later finds out that night that race officials might force him to dismount his bike at lake crossings to wade through in his bike shoes. Should the lakes dissipate, competitors in later waves will also be forced to dismount, and walk to the other side of where the lake used to be.

John K. goes to bed, with visions of whooping Navy in his head, particularly after reading this article about what wussy, reclusive jerks the Navy team seems to be. "We really don't like interacting with the other teams," said Tyler Sharp, captain of the Navy's men's team. Well the other teams don't like you either, Mr. Sharp. John K. is going to whoop you.

Saturday, April 17: John K. wakes up just before the alarm goes off at 5:30am. He looks out the window. It is still raining. "Holy goodness, how did the clouds get so overhydrated?" he thinks. He puts on his Stanford Tri uniform, then 7 other layers, and heads out into the dark cold.

When he arrives at nationals, he realizes that he must wade through a lake to get his bike and gear to the transition area. Then he hears something horrible: the swim has been cut in 1/3! John K. is sad. He is a kick ass swimmer. As are several other men on Stanford's team. His teammate Erin is also sad. She has not been running at all and her only chance of getting ahead of her other teammates is to swim like she stole her wetsuit.

John K. can take the cold. The Stanford ladies decide it's freaking devilishly cold and outfit themselves with Wal-Mart bags. Coach Gina told them the bags would act as a wind-breaker and help keep the heat in on the bike. The ladies look classy with the plastic bags peeking out from under their tri-tops.

Coach Gina is a genius.

John K. finishes the 500 meter swim like he swatted at the water and it parted for him. Then he happily jumps on his new steed and heads out into the wind. It does not rain on him. He tucks in aero even though gale force winds try to toss him from the side. He is astonished to see Stanford's top woman walking her bike--2 flats! Oh no! John K. must win it for everyone now. He soldiers on.

He blasts through T2 and out onto the modified run course--2 laps of the sprint course instead of one out and back. The race director decided to do this to keep runners from having to run through one of the newly formed Lubbockian lakes. But in doing so, he added 1/2 a mile to the run.

John K.'s teammate Erin is pissed. "Is this a single out and back?" she asks Coach Bruce as she nears the end of the first out and back. It feels like she has been running forever. "No, double!" yells Bruce. Erin wants to smash something.

But John K. is having the run of his life. It feels great. And smells unusually clean. The smell seems to be wafting from his crotch. He looks down to see a mountain of foam forming in that region. "Oh my goodness!" he says to himself as he tries to inconspicuously wipe it off and toss it to his side. "I hope nobody saw that!"

Coach Gina saw that. She didn't want to think about what the white foam around John K.'s crotch could possibly be. "Just look at his face and cheer," she said to herself.

The foam will not stop. As soon as John K. wipes away some bubbles, new ones form, amusing his competitors and confusing spectators. John K. is relieved there is no race photographer. Nobody in Lubbock really wanted to go outside today--the only people outside are the crazy, spandex-clad, crotchal-foaming triathletes like John K.

John K. crosses the finish line and is elated. He kicked ass. He prevailed against the worst conditions known to triathletekind. He can now find his transition bag and take off the foaming pants before the rest of his team ever gets to see the foaming crotch phenomenon.

John K. later finds out that Stanford's top female double flatted. And that one of his teammates accidentally placed his bag--complete with ID--in a look-alike Dodge Caravan headed for AZ. And that that teammate must get interrogated by airport security to get on the plane back to San Jose. And that his female double-flatted teammate lost her plane ticket.

And that 1/2 of his team will come down with exploding puke within the next 24 hours, presumably from swimming through Lubbockian swamp water. Or from drinking it from the hotel tap.

But, John K. thinks to himself, it was the awesomest weekend ever. His team placed 8th overall in the nation despite the evil weather, his foaming crotch, and the loss of his team's top female competitor.

His Stanford teammates are the best he could ever have dreamed of, even though he knows they spent all of Saturday night betting how much meat he would consume at a TX bbq.

Plus, he got a supercool race t-shirt. (Ladies' shirt below.)

John K. goes back to the farm happy and fulfilled. And excited that collegiate nationals will never again be held in Lubbock, TX.

Stanford Tri Survives Collegiate Nationals

It was freaking freezing, but we're all still alive and in various stages of thawing out.

Here are some photos, race report to come when my brain thaws:

All smiles before heading back to the hotel après race.

Jamie models the latest in post-race warming tri fashion.

An entire hallway full of disassembled bikes.

The people who somehow got a room between us all love us.

Photos from Collegiate National Triathlon Championship

FLOODING!

Traveling in style.

Yeah pasta!

Team "whiskey tangos." Bike name on front.

Representin' on the back.

Collegiate National Triathlon: FREAKING RAIN

It finally stopped raining in the Bay Area on Wednesday. Cyclists and triathletes were elated. Then 14 members of Stanford's Triathlon team jumped on a flight to Texas where it has nonstop poured since we arrived last evening. The only sunny-looking thing was the Clemson team who walked into the lobby in hot-orange overalls with nothing underneath (except sports bras for the girls). Hot.

(Trainers on a plane! It took a while to explain to TSA that they were not hot-green weapons.)

Lubbock does not have a drainage system which makes this rain adventure even more exciting. We drove through several lakes to get to the race start, which was originally the only lake nearby.

Columbia's tri-team is down the hall from us at the Overton Hotel--a fact I learned while doing a hallway warm-up run. The 10th floor is long enough to make a few laps count as a shake-out pre-race run.

We've also set up "dueling trainers"--2 Kinetic trainers facing each other--in the hall. It smells like bathroom out there. Despite the stench, sweat, and large amount of practically naked college kids milling in the hallway, the hotel manager didn't say a word while we did our trainer rides. In fact, Garrett walked out of his bedroom in his tightie-blackies, and asked the business suit-wearing manager if he had a master key so Garrett could get into the other boys' room.

Triathletes are awkward like that.

Dinner is at 6:30 tonight. Race starts at 9am tomorrow (I'll be going off around 9:30.) Do an anti-rain dance for us!

You can follow me on Twitter for more current Nationals weekend updates: eberesini

Links:

Lubbock weather forecast (right now: rain, high 54 tomorrow)

Race Updates from USAT

Course info

Dueling trainers!

Yep! We're in Texas!

Don't Tell Sportswriter Joan Ryan She Can't

...because she will. In fact, she became a sportswriter because people told her she shouldn't. Take that, haters!

In 1985, 25-year old Joan Ryan walked into the locker room of the Birmingham Stallions, a franchise in the now-defunct United States Football League. Ryan was not looking for a boyfriend. Or trouble. Or a peek at the male athlete anatomy. She was looking for answers from star-player Joe Cribbs so she could file a game story for the Orlando Sentinel on time.

Ryan pushed open the locker room door and walked in, focused on finding Cribbs. Everything stopped as all eyes turned to Ryan, just over 5-feet tall, standing in the entry in a skirt with her notebook in hand.

She turned to a player who was cutting tape off his ankle with a long-handled razor.

“Where’s Joe Cribbs’ locker?” Ryan asked, her face heating up with anxiety.

No response. All she could hear were players’ taunts and jokes made at her expense.

She turned to other players, asking the same question.

No response. Instead, Ryan felt something on her leg. She turned to see the handle of the razor making its way up her calf to the hem of her skirt.

Ryan yelled at the player, and whirled around to see several players—and a man in a red sweater—watching, laughing.

Still fuming about the incident the next day, Ryan went through the Stallions’ media guide and identified the man in the red sweater; he was the Stallions’ president, Jerry Sklar.

“I said to myself, ‘These people really don’t want me to be writing sports,’” Ryan said. “’Theyreally don’t want me here.’ And so that was the moment I decided I really wanted to be a sportswriter.”

***

The third of six kids—three boys, three girls—Ryan was born in the Bronx, New York, then lived in New Jersey until her family moved to South Florida when she was 12.

“I was introverted,” Ryan said, “but I was extremely competitive.”

Her mother worked at Entenmann’s Bakery as a cashier. Her father, Bob, was an air conditioning draftsman, and his daughters’ softball coach.

Bob remembers Ryan loved to read, but she was also “a great line-drive hitter.

When Ryan was about 13 years old, she played a softball game at a family reunion in New Jersey. The teams were Bob’s family versus his wife’s family.

“One of the guys there was a blowhard kind of guy who thought he was pretty good,” Bob said. “Joan was plying the field, and this guy hits a wicked line-drive to left field. Joan sticks up her glove and catches the ball, and this guy couldn’t believe it—his mouth dropped to the ground.”

Ryan said the best advice she ever got was from her father, when he was coaching her in softball.

“He always told my sisters and me, ‘When you step on that field, it doesn’t matter how good you are. You have to convince yourself that you’re the best player on the field,’” Ryan said.

She used this strategy when she began her job as the first woman in the Orlando Sentinel’s sports department in 1982. She would need the confidence—even if she were faking it—to help her overcome the “painful introversion,” Ryan said, that kept her behind the editing desk throughout college and the beginning of her career in journalism.

“I’d be sitting in the press box or ringside with the giants of sports journalism, and I could convince myself for that period of time during the game that I was as good as any of them,” Ryan said.

***

Ryan, one of only two members of her family to attend college, graduated from the University of Florida in 1981 and immediately went to work at the Orlando Sentinel as a copy editor.

“I loved it. It was like getting a window to the world in that I knew what was going on and was the first to find out all this stuff,” she said.

But she realized in order to move up at the Sentinel, she would have to become a reporter. She thought the sports section would be a fun place to work, and wasn’t aware that no other woman had worked there before.

Bit by bit, she said, the sports department gave her small stories while she worked as an editor. Bit by bit, she worked at overcoming her own introversion so she could report more effectively. “I found it’s way more fun outside the office,” she said. “I realized that the notebook was my passport—all of the sudden, with that notebook in my hand, I could ask anybody anything and they’d answer me.”

Jan McAdoo met Ryan while McAdoo was also working for the Sentinel, in the online news department. McAdoo was going through a break up with a boyfriend when a Sentinel colleague suggested she move in with Ryan, who was looking for a roommate.

On Dec. 1, 1983, McAdoo moved in with Ryan. They have remained friends to this day.

McAdoo remembered Ryan’s 1985 struggles with the Stallions, because the locker room episode was highly publicized after Ryan wrote a story about it for the Sentinel.

The publication of the locker room episode “was a turning point for women in sports reporting. She was becoming part of the players’ world, breaching that invisible line of ‘You don’t cross here if you’re a woman.’”

Ryan said that “99.9 percent of the reader responses, both men and women, were ‘You slut! What were you doing in the locker room anyway? If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen!’”

But, McAdoo said, Joan “didn’t get intimidated, she stuck with it.” The buzz surrounding Ryan’s article was “pretty exciting,” she said. The phone in their shared home was “ringing off the hook—she must’ve done 20-30 interviews for radio stations.”

Later that year, Ryan moved to San Francisco to become a full-time sports columnist for the San Francisco Examiner.

***

Barry Tompkins was covering Wimbledon in London as a sportscaster in the mid-1980s when he knew he was going to marry Ryan.

She walked into a London restaurant to meet him, after they had dated on and off for several months whenever he was in San Francisco.

“It was just one of those magic moments,” Tompkins said. “She’s independent and really smart. I just love the way she handles people and treats people—she’s just a really good person.”

It’s this goodness, friends and colleagues say, that makes her an effective reporter.

Ann Killion met Ryan while Killion was working at a public relations firm in San Francisco. Killion, now an award-winning sportswriter herself, counts Ryan as one of her inspirations for getting into the business.

Ryan is “very personable, she’s super-smart. She’s the way all good reporters should be: very detail-oriented. She gets to know people and they like her and that’s why they end up telling her what she wants to know. She has a very personable style,” Killion said.

McAdoo described Ryan’s reporting style a little differently.

“She’s a pain in the ass,” said McAdoo. “She asks the same question 14 different ways. She’s intense, and that’s why she’s so good. She makes people comfortable and is a good listener.”

When Ryan and Tompkins adopted a son in 1990, Ryan knew it was time to plan her exit from the full-time newspaper business.

“I always knew I wanted to be a mom,” Ryan said. “I knew I was giving up something, but I was happy to.”

Ryan traded daily newspaper work for motherhood, and soon found herself reluctantly thrown into the world of book writing.

***

“If I ever decide to write a book again, lock me in a room until I get over it,” Ryan said to Tompkins in the early 1990s, while she was working on a book about women in Olympic figure skating and gymnastics.

A literary agent had approached Ryan following the publication of a series of articles Ryan wrote for the Examiner about young women in Olympic sports.

Ryan said she was coerced into writing a book proposal—she did not really want to write a book. Once she started getting rejections, however, she decided she really wanted to write the book.

The book, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters, came out in 2005 to critical acclaim. Sports Illustrated named it one of the Top 100 Sports Books of All Time.

“I lived in fear that I had made some factual error” in the book, Ryan said, since she had not played either sport. One of her proudest accomplishments as a journalist, Ryan said, is there weren’t any factual errors in the book.

When Ryan covered gymnastics at the 1996 Olympics for the San Francisco Chronicle, she found out people on the gymnastics circuit referred to her exposé of elite gymnastics as “the book.”

“I was like the devil in gymnastics circles,” Ryan said. But she knew she was right to publish the book, because former gymnasts would come up to her during her book tour and say, “Finally, somebody told our story.”

***

“I haven’t written sports for over 10 years,” Ryan says while she sips a cappuccino in a quiet back room at Perry’s on Union Street in San Francisco, one of her and Tompkin’s favorite restaurants. Her hot pink nails and cropped red hair blaze against her black ensemble.

It has been 15 years since she published Little Girls, and 12 years since she published Shooting from the Outside, a book she co-authored with Stanford women’s basketball coach, Tara VanDerveer.

But Ryan never stopped writing. She recently published a book about her family’s struggles after her son suffered massive head trauma from a skateboarding accident.

And sports have never been cut completely out of her life.

“Somehow we always go back to what we’re good at, and what we’re comfortable with,” said McAdoo. For Ryan, that is sports.

Ryan currently works for the San Francisco Giants as a media consultant, and if the rumors are true, she will soon start working on a book about baseball.

“I always consider her a sportswriter first,” said McAdoo. “When I think of Joan, I think of sports.”

Gunshot Detection Technology Triggers Controversy

Everything you ever wanted to know about Big Brother watching you...or at least your discharges...

Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

A computer screen lights up with red dots showing where shots were just fired in East Palo Alto, Calif. A police dispatcher sees where the incident occurred and listens to the sound of the shots to rule out false alarms, like backfiring motorcycles or firecrackers. Then the dispatcher calls squad cars to the scene.

This is ShotSpotter’s acoustic gunshot detection and location technology in action. ShotSpotter’s main competitor, Safety Dynamics, invented a system that works differently, but with the same goal: to alert public safety officials to the location of a crime involving firearms within seconds of the discharge.

The systems themselves, however, have created political and cultural controversy among law enforcement officials and members of the public, who believe the cost of the systems outweighs the benefit, that the systems’ existence raises privacy concerns, and that the systems’ accuracy is questionable.

COST

Founded in 1995 in Mountain View, Calif., ShotSpotter bases its technology on acoustic data similar to that used by geologists to locate earthquakes. A minimum of three acoustic sensors is placed on poles and rooftops in a high-crime area. When a shot goes off, the sensors send data to a computer that determines through triangulation, or how loud the shot sounded to each sensor, where the shot came from. The ShotSpotter system costs $300,000 per square mile covered, plus a flat annual maintenance, update, and retraining fee of 15 percent of the purchase price.

“That kind of money could be better spent on hiring more police officers,” said Dr. Tom Nolan, associate professor of criminal justice at Boston University, and 27-year veteran of the Boston Police Department.

CLICK HERE to read more.

Stanford Degree + RAAM + Outside = Best Year Ever

Two phone conversations:

#1

Wed, the 10th.

RAAM Media Guy: Erin?

Me: Woah, I just picked up my phone to turn it off of silent and realized I was getting a call.

RMG: Um, ok.

Me: Sorry. Hi!

RMG: Hi, this is the RAAM Media Guy.

Me: It's great to hear from you!

RMG: So I want to get an idea of what kind of equipment you have.

Me: I have a Canon mini-DV camera that I got for my 16th birthday. It's cool.

RMG: Um, ok.

Me: And I have a sweet Canon DSLR.

RMG: Ok, so let me go over this. I think you would make a great writer for our team.

Me: Ok!

Moral of the story: Old camcorders do not impress real videographers. And I'm going to be covering RAAM as a writer in June. Woo hoo! (Unfortunately, I will have to miss my graduation to do so. Uber bummer.)

Conversation #2:

Today, 3:15 pm

I dial Outside Magazine for the 9th time in one day, trying to return a call before I go into a 3-hour class. Finally, someone answers. I have already left 2 messages on Outside Guy's machine, and surely his modern phone told him I'd called the other 7 times. I should probably be more embarrassed about that than I am.

Me: Outside Guy! It's Erin!

OG: Hi!

Me: So I thought I'd try to catch you before going to class.

OG: So, are you still interested in the internship?

Me: Hell yes.

OG: We'd like to have you.

Me: AHHHHHHHHH! WOO HOO!!!!!! You just made my month. I have to go to class now. Bye.

OG: Bye.

And so, after becoming a sleep-deprived non-racing RAAM participant, I will move to Santa Fe for 6 months--hopefully the warm, pretty months--to do whatever it is Outside interns do. And sleep outside. Because that is the only place I can afford. My dad and coachubby are super thrilled that I will be an intern...again...5 years after I finished being an undergrad.

Woo hoo!!!!!!

Chris O’Riordan’s Triple Play

College baseball. Minor leagues. Then what?

Click here to read the latest sports story from yours truly.

And a video, too!

Rant on Rating Journalism

In what seemed like a thinly veiled effort to boost user numbers for start-up site Newstrust.net, my classmates and I were asked to sign up for an account at this site, then rate three news stories on the same topic. (I chose the earthquake in Chile.)

I believe rating news is one activity where the truth will not necessarily emerge from the collective knowledge of average citizens, which seems to be the point of Newstrust. Also, I don't think this knowledge could even be gleaned, as I don't believe each story reviewed will ever get more than a handful of reviews, because, as it always is with news, what was news yesterday and worthy of rating is old news today, and not as interesting a read.

This inherent news problem makes the goal of having the cream rise to the top, or however the saying goes, impossible as the average rating of a certain story will only reflect the polarized, subjective views of a few people.

Even as a person going through training to be a better journalist, I wouldn't suggest my ratings of certain stories as particularly helpful or even necessarily reflective of an unobtainable "true" rating determined by mashing together ratings of several people.

A few problems I had with the site:

1. If you're rating a story that has already been rated, it's not too far fetched to imagine you might be influenced by the rating presented when determining your own.

2. Search results for stories rated on the site are terrible--it'll be difficult to find a story on a topic you'd like to know more about by searching for it on NewsTrust.

3. The banner that allows users to rate stories only appears on the page where the original rater posted the URL. If you click to "read more," and the story opens on another page, the NewsTrust banner disappears and you can't rate the story from there.

It's a noble goal to want to make people more media literate. And forcing people to think about what they've read and why they feel it was or was not informative is a good way to do that. But I think the people that are going to take the time to do that are probably not the people who most need to be taught about media literacy.

It's a great idea--the act of rating a news story should help a reader become more media savvy. However I do not think anything of great significance will be revealed in the collective ratings themselves, as the stories being rated are constantly shifting according to the daily news cycle, and will therefore never have enough ratings to reflect some kind of collective knowledge about what is good or bad journalism.

And thus, I end my journalism rant.

Brought to you by Dead Tired, an after effect of competing in your first triathlon of the season...even if you only did 2/3 of it...and it was a sprint...

More on the Treeathlon to come!

Mourning Athleticism Lost

I just received an email from Planet Ultra informing me that the Camino Real Double Century went well this year.

And it made me a little sad.

OK, a lot sad.

That means it's been over a year since I did my first double century with my favorite ultracycling buddies Robyn and coachubby. That means that at this time last year, I could swing my right leg over the Silver Bullet, clip in, and ride for 18 hours straight. Up mountains, down mountains, up mountains again. Just out there, enjoying my buddies' company. Or, you know, huddling together in a ditch on the side of the road in the freezing rain. That's fun, too.

And so, this evening, I mourn for my long lost ultrafitness, which has been obliterated by training weeks so short they don't even count as training, revenge of the hambutt, and a fondness for frosted bite-size chocolate mini wheats.

At least my brain is getting toned.

Proof? It hurts.

Info Management for Type-A Triathletes: A Free Stanford Education

Between training, work, family and stuff, it's easy for a Type-A triathlete to go into a panic trying to manage everything.

A class assignment led me to create a netvibes page. It's like iGoogle, but fancier. You can put everything you spend hours trolling the internet for in one handy-dandy place.

Want to pretend you're in my Digital Journalism class with Howard Rheingold? Well, you can. For real. Here's our class syllabus. Do the assignment for class #6 and you, too, can have a nifty netvibes page in no time.

Ahhh. Now doesn't that feel better?

Here's a screenshot of mine:

For my reading pleasure, I have feeds of the following things:

• NYT most-emailed list (did anyone find something fun to read?)
• winter olympics news feed from google (who's kicking ass?)
• Stanford's weather forecast (should I ride my trainer or outside today?)
• Outside's blog (what crazy stuff did Colton Harris-Moore get himself into recently?)
• Bicycling magazine features (should my next bike have electronic shifters?)
• Slowtwitch (how fast do I have to get to be featured on Slowtwitch?)
• Le Monde--a la une (because I like to think I'm French. And I need to practice la langue. La une is the front page feed)
• Media Shift's blog (will there be any journalism jobs in June?)
• all things paris from Twitter (see Le Monde)
• Funny or Die blog (I like funny)
• TMZ (I like funny)
• my Twitter feed (journalists are e-stalkers. twitter is an essential stalking tool. now I and 2.4 million other people know what Lance had dinner with his girlfriend Anna Hansen last night)

Hilly Stanford Run Directions (10+ Miles)

Once upon a time, when I could run freely without protest from my sciatic nerve, I used to do this run all of the time, throwing in multiple dish loops to make it take 2 hours. If you're ever around Stanford, you must at least do the dish loop part--it's a rite of passage. On a clear day, you can see from San Francisco, across the bay, and to the mountains south of San Jose. Pretty sweet stuff.

View Xtreme Dish Run in a larger map

P.S. If you've ever beaten an unruly and genuinely pissed-off sciatic nerve, please let me know how, without actually beating it. Or ripping it out with your bare hands. I'm told it's a required body part, unlike an appendix.

And Now for Something Completely Different- Day Laborers

I've been in school for a few months now, learning how to become a kick-ass journalist. In my (and my 15 classmates) quest to do so, I had to cover a "beat," old school.

What is a beat (n.) when it's not violence (v.) or a vegetable (beet)?

When reporters are assigned a beat, they cover a certain issue or organization over time. That way, they get to know a lot about it and write more in-depth about that thing. (They also get stuck never writing anything too negative about anything on the beat so they don't burn their sources. The beat-o-sphere is small.) Triathlon could be a beat, but not for school. (Darn.)

So, I was on the immigration beat in Mountain View this quarter. I spent a lot of time at the Day Worker Center getting to know people as best I could with a mashup of Fritalian (I learned French and Italian, but not Spanish. Not good for covering CA's immigration.) and English.

On Monday, I spent time with Isaias, one of a million immigrants trying to find work in CA.

Here is his story:

And for extra credit, here's a story on the Day Worker Center's Director, Maria Marroquin.

I haven't just been riding my bike in the Santa Cruz mountains, although I can see how a girl could make a quarter of doing only that.

Collegiate Cycling Guilt

One hour ago, I was presented with boxes full of Stanford cycling gear to rummage through.

I was in spandexified heaven.

Now I'm mired in guilt. Money was not required to partake in the spandex binge--immediately. When I am slammed with the request to pay for the fun things I took with the school's name splashed all over it, as well as with cycling team dues, the party's over. (And then add, in a few weeks, triathlon spandex temptations, and triathlon team dues...oy ve.)

And thus I am faced with a paradox: I miss making money, but I wouldn't be in spandex-induced guilt if I weren't here, not making money.

But no self-respecting triathlete would miss the chance to fly her respective school's colors whenever mounting her noble, two-wheeled steeds, would she? WOULD SHE?

I didn't think so.

Comments that justify outrageous purchases for which I don't have the funds are warmly welcomed.

Being the White, Blonde Minority

I moved onto Stanford University's campus two weeks before classes started (today), and over a week before the undergrads overran the place.

In the spirit of "back to school", I went to "speed friending", an activity set up by grad student activity coordinators. Hundreds of new grad students met in a room filled with chairs in rows facing each other. Every three minutes, a whistle was blown, the person in front of me moved over, and was replaced with the person to his left.

I met about 10 people before the session came to a close, then we all met in a less formal social environment in the quad outside, where alcohol was being served to lessen the pain of smiling for hours on end, and repeating "core facts" about ourselves over and over again: Where do you live on campus? What are you studying? How long is your program?

I made two very important social observations early on: I was in probably a 3% white minority, a 1% female minority, and I was the only blonde.

What conclusions can I draw from these observations? Almost everyone I met was an engineer. That was to be expected as it's the largest graduate division on campus. But only one of them was a female, only a handful were white, and none of them were blonde.

The only other white females I met, actually (save for one), were in my communications program.

Does this mean that white people suck at engineering? Or that they all simply weren't brilliant enough to get into a top engineering grad school? Or does it simply mean that of all of the new engineers, a group of people stereotyped as socially awkward, the Indian and Asians and dudes are the most social? Is it true that bleach kills brain cells, and therefore a statistically insignificant number of blondes have been admitted to any Stanford graduate program this year?

It was an interesting phenomenon to be the minority for once. I didn't mind, but I did feel like I stuck out, particularly having just moved from Southern California, where 99% of the beachfront population is blond and white. (All percentages in this observational post have been entirely made up by the author.)

Having just read Schrag's Paradise Lost, about how California's social infrastructure had gotten so immensely clusterf***ed by the time he published the book in 1998, I was accutely aware that at some point, whites are going to be the minority, not just in California, but in the entire United States. I didn't think the change would manifest itself while I was still in my twenties. Is Stanford a forward-thinking microcosm of what California is to become?

By the time the undergrads arrived on campus, my status as an endangered species as a white blonde chick were annhilated. And what does that imply? That the majority of smart kids worthy of full-scholarship PhD study are not white, but the majority of paying students at this private university are?

Oh, what a social experiment University is!

I Have Found Cycling Mecca

If you told me there was a place where bike lanes were abundant, cyclists were out at all hours of the day, in all shapes and sizes, and on all kinds of bikes, cars were scarce, and roads were closed to cars on Sundays for my cycling pleasure, I would have laughed and asked what kind of happy medicine the doctor put you on.

But this place exists!

It is Stanford and the surrounding hills.

I might say I miss the 30 miles I had to ride in LA to get to some monster climbs, as it allowed for an enforced warm-up/ cool down period, but I might be lying. Big time. I kind of liked the sadistic 7.5 mile Page Mill Rd. climb that began a measly 10 minutes into my ride on Saturday.

To add to the weekend heart-rate spike, I met up with some of Stanford's rad triathlon team on Sunday for a swim around the wharf in Santa Cruz. WHAT!? You're thinking. You, Erin, who stopped swimming in the ocean very much at all after that dude got eaten by a shark near San Diego, are now swimming in the ocean where Great White sharks are known to be lurking?

Yes, I did. And I ripped a ginormous hole in my 3.5 year old wetsuit in the process. I figured having my torso slightly sticking out helped distinguish my rubbery body from that of the hundreds of blubbery sea lions playing around the wharf and drafting off of us.

I also sprinted the entire way.

Last one out is a rotten carcass.

:)

Xterra Lake Tahoe coming up! There are a lot of differences to be noted now that the race is no longer the USA Championships, but most of them are good.

Also coming up: Collegiate triathlon. Did you know there's an age limit on Grad student triathletes? USAT has capped the age of competition in collegiate nationals at 28. What do you think about this? (And praise the Lord I'm not there yet for a while!)

Moving Today!

I'm moving up to school this afternoon. Not sure when I'll have internet access next.

Wish me cool roommates and easy bike storage solutions!

Triathlete Diva Takes on Stanford

I am super thrilled to announce that 2 years of Ironman training, in addition to this year's Race Across Oregon training, have not zapped all of my brain cells. At least they hadn't by last October when I applied to graduate schools; I'll be studying at Stanford in the fall.

Let us pray that the actual event of Race Across Oregon does not fry whatever brain cells I have left before classes start in September.

Woo hoo!

P.S. As Stanford has a triathlon team, I have every intention of rocking the collegiate tri scene next year, an exciting opportunity I never had as an undergrad.

Woo hoo!

XOXO,
Tri "I'm not as blonde as I look" Diva