Guess the Events in My Triathalon

I was greeted downstairs this morning by the sight of Tracy doing the dishes without a shirt on. Walking around the house half naked is my job, so I asked what on Earth compelled him to steal my mojo. It was only 9 am, but turns out he’d already ridden his bike all the way to the coffee roasters to buy beans. This week the temps will be in the mid to upper 90s, so he figured he’d ride in the morning to beat the heat instead of waiting until he was out of beans and had no choice. He was hot when he’d gotten home, hence the halfway-naked dish washing. 

That’s not to brag about what a bad-ass Tracy is (although he is). It’s to sell the point that we ride our bikes everywhere now, all the danged time. Partly because we can—all but a big grocery store is close by—and because we enjoy it and it’s good for us. We’re also sick of a vehicle, sick to death of it. Driving, riding, parking, traffic—even in the Midwest. For Tracy, above all, he’s sick of the price of diesel. He says it costs more to start the truck than it does to buy a beer at a music festival, and seeing as how I spent $13 for a beer at Phish, his comparison is probably conservative. 

Back to the point of this post, though. Everywhere I go this summer is at least a biathalon because I’ve biked to get there, and my “there” is most likely my version of an athletic event. Now, I’ve never even run a marathon, so I’m grossly exaggerating. But, my watch did ask me recently if I were training for a triathlon, in which case it would pick that as my workout to record instead of so many danged individual events. I didn’t know my watch could do that! So, my own version of triathlon, here I come.

🚴‍♂️

The main part of my daily wackadoodle workoutathon is biking, and in my style—and Madison’s—my bike is weird. I wrote previously, once when I was near Dallas/Ft. Worth, that my twin-tattoo friend Karen basically gave me her son’s old mountain bike he’d had when he was a kid, and we sawed off my seat pole part and swapped out tires, etc., and my new frankenbike was born.  

Here, we’ve zip-tied a basket on the back, added a bell and some lights and a kickstand. No lights along the tire spokes or plastic sparkley boas wound around the frame, as I see on so many bikes here in Madison, but give me time.

My contribution to freaky fashion is the day-glow orange vest I stole from Tracy. He got it at Goodwill so he could go birding where there was hunting, but I go biking where there are cars much more often, so I get it and now don it on every bike ride. (I think I’m wearing it inside out in this pic I took from my phone holder, that we also added to the bike to streetify it.)

The other events in addition to biking? You’ll know what they are when you see what I have strapped on my back.

🛶

Kayaking is by far my toughest triathalon event, but that’s because of the boat wrangling part before and after the actual paddling.

I’ve always sucked at padlocks (I’m almost as bad as them as I am at tape), and we have our boats locked to the racks where we rent a spot from the city. 

Tracy knew about the existence of rental boat racks in all the waterfront parks, but he never mentioned it because he’d assumed the wait period would be years or decades for one near us. Ever the optimist, I called the parks department and got on the list for three nearby parks. Damned if a spot opened this first summer in not only the best park for us, but a low-tier rack in that park, to boot. I still have to overcome the wrangling and lock segments of the event, but at least I don’t have to get my boat on and off a top rack while trying to avoid wrecking the boats below me.

Thanks to Tracy’s gift to me eons ago of a case for my paddle, that’s the item I have strapped to my back as I ride to the rack. I’ve got my life vest and all other accoutrements in my bike basket—it’s an easy system, once I figured it out and practiced a few times. 

I can get in and out of the water by myself easily there, too, because our rack is on the Yahara River, that connects the two larger lakes here. If there’s a bit of wind and I don’t feel comfortable getting out on the lake, I can paddle back and forth on the river at an easy pace. 

Most days my favorite parts about paddling are not the wildlife I see at the edges of the river and lake, but the people I meet. There’s always a couple or trio of young people paddle boarding together, wearing fun bathing suits and sunglasses (no life vests), music playing from the pile of stuff at the tip of one paddle board, a dog sitting on the tip of the other. We always exchange waves, and sometimes they compliment me on my pink kayak. 

Today I paddled by this guy who’d strung his hammock by the river and was picking away on his green ukulele, which beautifully matched his green hammock.  Oh so Madison!

On no-wind days, when it’s hot and most Midwesterners are inside (I have a lot to say about that, another topic entirely), I have the river and lake to my happy self. No kidding. No girly paddle boarders, no fishers, no swimmers, no water skiers or pontoon partiers. One day like this in the future, I might paddle all the way across Lake Monona.  

🎸

I don’t paddle and play ukulele at the same time (man, that would be fun), but I do swing my uke onto my back and ride my bike to a nearby church, where I meet the Pineapple Players for our weekly strum-along.

They are nice people, but we don’t have the same basis for our music tastes. You know how some people are stuck in an earlier decade, music-wise? I just love me some Neil Young to play on the ukulele, preferably his early, Crazy Horse stuff. I admit that was the 1970s, before even my teen years. Maybe I got the itch for Neil from my older sister. Well, these older folks all seem to be stuck in whatever era their parents were listening to music, like the 1940s, no joke. Their music is old. It doesn’t help our music divide that I’ve never been to camp, never sang in a church, don’t like musicals, basically share no common basis for music with them. Ukulele players don’t let actual music knowledge stop us from playing, though! (That’s supposed to be funny.)

The thing on my back for this leg of the triathlon is, of course, my ukulele. I have a soft case that fits my tenor uke well, and it has shoulder straps. The trick is that I have to wear it upside down, with the neck and head down at an angle beside my bike seat, so that the body hits the back of my neck with space for my bike helmet to move around real fast to look for cars.

The upside to that arrangement is that I can get my orange vest on over my uke, which makes me look all huge and deformed–another reason for drivers to notice me!

🎶

If you’ve read any of my summer posts so far, you know we’ve been hearing live music outdoors a lot this summer, I’d say two to six days a week. 

There’s the Friday night bluegrass jam on the terrace of the fancy Edgewater Hotel, where it’s true the band gets to look out at the lake, but the dancers get the moon behind the band, and sometimes a rainbow, always the capital dome. To get there, Tracy and I bike through the isthmus, through downtown, and through the “mansion” area of UW Madison. It’s all lovely! Especially in the dusk on the way home. 

There’s a monthly party at a park that we enjoy, plus a varying monthly neighborhood festival that’s at least two days long, and the concert tickets we actually pay for. We saw Phish this month and will see Charlie Crockett next month. 

I remember Tracy getting irritated at me this past spring when I pushed for us to buy season tickets to hear music at a dairy farm outside of Madison: like so many small farms across the country, they try to increase revenue by adding music tourism to what they offer. Tracy could not get me to remember that there is plenty of free music close by, all summer long with zero need to buy tickets to an event that, to add insult to injury, we’d have to drive to.  Now I know! 

Last week, we saw live music nine out of ten days.  I think this week there are three days we’re not seeing music, which adds up to something silly, like seeing bands 12 out of 16 days in a row? Whatever, it’s wonderful; this is the Madison I fell in love with previous summers when we visited.  

What I carry on my back when I’m riding bikes to hear music is, occasionally, a beach chair. It’s the kind with straps that go over both shoulders, so the trick is getting on and off your bike without falling over, chair and bike and legs, everything, in a tangled mess. I’ve avoided this, so far, which I find amazing, seeing as how those chairs are bigger than me.

🏋️🏻‍♀️

I take a couple of excerise classes that I’m still trying to figure out how to take best advantage of. I signed up for classes for people aged 50 and up because what do I know? It turns out that means—it seems—people who really need help working out. A lot of help. I’ve been upping the ante as much as I can, like doing jumping jacks when the instructor tells us to wave our arms over our heads. When she has us doing a set number of pushups (from our knees; I’m not an actual bad-ass), I cram in as many as I can while everyone else counts slowly. God, I must seem insufferable. 

Of course, I, the overachiever, bike to and from exercise class. For this leg, I used up odds and ends of yarn to knit a bag to hold my yoga mat, because my basket is full of stuff like gym shoes. To get this backpack/strappy thing to work, I roll a robe belt up in the yoga mat, then thread that through the tie-off hole at the bottom of the bag, shove the rolled-up mat into the bag like this, then I tie the belt to a strap I borrowed from another bag. It sounds convoluted, but it works well!

👀

This is my favorite workout of all. No bike needed! I like to walk along the lake, to the river, and wander at the edges. I stop at a bench and sit and look out over the water.  Often there’s a muskrat tooling along with its snout in the air. With light shining right on shallow water where the river feeds into the lake, I can watch fish swim in schools. There’s always someone playing basketball at the hoop near the lakeside and people lying on blankets and in hammocks. On weekdays it’s not many people, but enough to catch my interest for a few seconds, to shift my focus. 

Sometimes I see people biking by with little dogs on their backs, in backpacks. Always I see people with children on their bikes, in doohickeys they’ve rigged between their handlebars and the front tire, or on these super-cool-looking seats behind them that can hold childseats from cars as well as loose children sitting still.  I’ve seen a guy on a reclined bike that he had rigged a frame to so he could strap his paddle board up top and ride to the lake.  I’ve seen another guy ride with his dog in a dog crate on a barrow-type thing behind him.  That’s what Banjo would need, because there’s no way she would stay in any unlocked type of container on a bike! (It was hard enough to get her to stay on the golf cart I had briefly after ACL surgery in south Texas.)

A few days ago I saw two men sitting on rocks by the river’s edge, their bikes and guitar cases leaning against a nearby tree. They were sitting with their feet in the water, playing classical guitar together. I stopped on the other side of the narrow river and sat in the shade and listened. They traded who played the lead, and both sounded so laid back and happy to be playing together. I don’t know how long they’d been playing, but they stopped after I’d been listening for a half an hour.

The sunshine bounced off the moving water between us, ducks and gulls called all around us, and a father and two kids floated by, with nothing but their bodies and voices and the water and the lovely day between us all.  

No bike needed for that event, and nothing on my back, either. Just a brain relaxed enough to observe the day to whatever degree it feels like.