The Land of Oz

G'day, mates!

It's about four days post-Ironman New Zealand, and I've moved on.  As I expressed in my last blog, I finished the race feeling bummed about the outcome, but not entirely discouraged and still happy with the overall experience.  That lasted less than a day, and then I was more in the sad, frustrated, embarrassed and even a little angry phase.  Fortunately, I managed to pull myself out of that fairly quickly.  Now I'm in the "moving on" phase.  There are lots of things to figure out, nutritionally, physically, mentally etc. etc. etc., but that'll be on another day. 

Because now I'm in Australia and probably too hungover and distracted to engage in any sort of deep or even not-so-deep thinking.

Sydney Harbour

One of my good friends from law school, we'll call her LSF (law school friend), flew on over from the States yesterday and we met up in Sydney.   We'll be here a few days, then move north to the Brisbane area for a bit, then she leaves and I continue on to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef.  LSF travels a ton for work and has thus amassed about 800 trillion Starwood points (that's an official count), so we're hopping from fancy schmancy hotel to fancy schmancy hotel, and I am most certainly not complaining.  

Yesterday, after getting settled in, we just walked around Sydney for a while, checking out the neighborhoods, walking across the Harbour bridge, wandering through the Royal Botanic Gardens.  

Those folks climbing the bridge are insane

Interspersed within the sight-seeing was some good drinking and eating.   I'm taking my "recovery"/ mid-season break seriously, and debauchery is not just a likely outcome of this trip (debauchery is, quite frankly, the foundational rock of my friendship with LSF), but an actual goal for me.   There may have been some beers at noon yesterday.  I may have consumed a glass (or two) of red wine while actually laying in bed, which is only the second-least classy thing I've done in the last week.  (The least classy, of course, was during the race, in the late stages of my epic meltdown, when I became so consumed by insane hunger that I actually asked some spectators, who were having a picnic, for food, ("I'm sorry, this is totally rude, but I'm in a really, really bad place and I'm so, so hungry") and ran off with a few crackers and hummus.   True story.)

Opera House

Botanic Gardens

In the evening, we hit up Sydney's Chinatown, which really ought to be called Pan-Asia Town, had Indonesian food for dinner and Taiwanese dessert.   Apparently both Indonesian and Taiwanese desserts often incorporate black beans.  I want to  be adventurous in my dining, but black beans and dessert....I just can't get my mind around that one.  So I went with some mango/ crushed ice concoction, and that suited me just fine.  I could get used to this wining and dining and desserting life.

One thing we're not doing:  talking about triathlon.  I needed a mental break, and it's a nice relief to be traveling with someone who heard about the distances involved in an Ironman and asked the inevitable question:  "wait, you do that all in ONE DAY?"   She also made the very astute observation about the current state of our circle of friends from law school:  "it amazes me, six years out from law school, how so many of our friends are not only no longer practicing law, but are not even working at all."   There's a quote for our law school's recruiting website, right there:)

 

 

This is upside down and also remarkably dramatic