Transition
Page 42
Well, she thinks, as she takes a deep breath, I’ve dodged a bullet. Again. I’m sore as hell, but there doesn’t seem to be any major damage. Two times in one race. She shakes her head. Unbelievable.
Slowly, she rises to her feet and surveys the scene. It looks like the aftermath of a terrorist attack. At least half a dozen women are still lying on the ground. One of them, like Jillian, is struggling to her feet. A few are sitting or kneeling dazedly. A couple of them, frighteningly, lie unmoving in the positions in which they landed. Bicycles, as well as riders, lie scattered across the road…
Bicycles.
Where’s my bike?
Looking around frantically, Jillian spots the GoldenGirl Racer lying on the ground about ten feet away, its front wheel still spinning slowly. As she takes a step toward it, she once again feels the shooting pain in her right knee. “Oh Jesus,” she mutters to herself. “Take it easy.” She shakes out her leg and puts her weight on it once again. To her relief, it seems to be okay.
Whew. Close one.
The bicycle, however, is clearly not okay. Even before she touches it, she can see that the front tire, still spinning slowly and eerily, is flat. Damn, she thinks, if the back tire’s flat too, I’m sunk. But a quick squeeze determines that the back tire is still inflated, and a quick spin confirms that it has not been bent in the accident.
Well, what the hell, she thinks. Let’s do it. Front tires are easy to change. This won’t take a minute.
Good thing I didn’t give my second spare to Sunshine. I’d be out of the race right now if I had.
What was I thinking?
She sits down in the midst of the wreckage, quickly unclips the front tire from the frame, retrieves her tire iron from the seat pack once more, and pries the tire off the rim in one smooth, practiced motion. She can hear signs of life around her: Some of the other women are struggling to their feet, and one of them, Jillian can see out of the corner of her eye, has already hopped on her bike and sped off, to the amazed cheers of the crowd.
The whining of a motor – Jillian knows even before she glances up to confirm it – signifies that the ESPN truck is backing up to get a better look at the carnage. A little excitement for the folks at home, Jillian thinks. Not quite as deadly as a fiery 200-mile-an-hour crash at the speedway, but gory enough to satisfy the bloodlust of the vampires in the audience for a few minutes.
She reaches for her last spare and glances up at the ESPN truck, which has come to a stop about twenty feet from where she sits in the road. Jeff what’s-his-name still sits crumpled in the corner. Someone on the truck is pointing off to Jillian’s left, and Michelle Stackhouse is gesturing in that direction, talking excitedly into her headset. Someone must be badly hurt over there, Jillian suspects, maybe somebody I know. But she doesn’t turn to look.
Whatever it is that’s attracting the attention of the crew in the truck, Jillian sees that she’s not the only one ignoring it: Leida Andersen kneels calmly in the bed of the truck, cleaning her fingernails with a small pocket-knife. It’s a jarring, discordant note – like What’s wrong with this picture? – and it distracts Jillian from her task for a second. How can she just ignore everything that’s going on? Jillian wonders. She shakes her head. Strange woman. But I’ve got more important things to worry about right now. Like getting this tube on so I can…
But even as she slips the tube onto the rim, something feels wrong. A rough spot on the slick rubber surface, something that just doesn’t feel right, like a blemish on the tube, or…
Or…
She yanks the tube back off the rim and stares at it in utter disbelief. It’s impossible. Her mind simply refuses to accept it. She actually closes her eyes and shakes her head, as if perhaps it’s just a visual trick, an optical illusion. She half expects that when she opens her eyes again it’ll be gone, the tube will be smooth, the impossible will become impossible again.
But when she opens her eyes, it’s still there.
The tube has been cut.
Just two tiny parallel slits, side by side, maybe an eighth of an inch apart. Two tiny slits that render the tube completely and utterly useless – and, for all practical purposes, bring her race to a screeching halt.
Just two, tiny, harmless-looking slits.
Two tiny slits that only could have been made with a small pocketknife.
The realization hits her like a slap in the face. Ignoring the ominous throbbing in her knee, she jumps to her feet and flings the rim aside.
Leida is kneeling in the back of the truck, her hands resting on the tailgate. In her right hand she holds the knife with which she was cleaning her nails just moments ago. Her eyes bore into Jillian’s. Her self-satisfied smirk tells Jillian everything she needs to know.
“You slashed my tire!” Jillian screams, waving the punctured tube in the air. Leida affects an expression of mock surprise. Her mouth opens in astonishment, and her hand – the one without the knife – flies to her chest. Me? she inquires innocently, batting her eyes.
Jillian is livid. We’ll see how much you smirk when I wrap this goddamn tube around your fucking throat, she thinks. And she actually takes a step toward the truck before she realizes the futility of what she’s doing. The camera, attracted by her outburst, is swinging toward her, and in a second her rage will be broadcast on national television. And it will come across as a tantrum, pure and simple. Jill Kendal has some bad luck and blames it somebody else. What a spoiled brat.
I can’t win this fight, Jillian realizes. I can’t prove that the bitch slashed my tire. I know it, and she knows it, but she’ll deny it, and she knows I can’t prove it.
Forget it. The race isn’t over yet.
“How far to the transition area?” she yells, to no one in particular.
“About a mile,” someone says. “A little bit over a mile, I think,” someone else volunteers.
Well, I sure as hell can’t ride this bike a mile without a tire, Jillian thinks. But riding the sonuvabitch isn’t the only way to get it to the transition area.
Quickly retrieving the rim that she had flung down in disgust moments earlier, Jillian snaps it back in place. I don’t know if there’s some obscure rule that says that I have to have both wheels on the bike when it gets to the transition area, she thinks. But I can’t afford to take the chance.
And with one final, burning look at Leida – who is frowning, as if she’s trying to figure out what Jillian is up to – Jillian hoists the scratched yellow frame of the battered Falconi racer on her shoulder and begins to run.
It doesn’t take but a few steps for Jillian to remember that it’s nearly impossible to run in bike shoes, so she lays the bike down, sits down on the ground, yanks off her shoes and socks, throws them into the crowd, stands up, and hoists the bike on her shoulder once again. Then, barefoot, slightly favoring her sore knee, she runs off past the ESPN truck and heads for the transition area.
3.1.17: Dallas
What’s wrong with my knee? Sunshine wonders.
At almost the exact instant that Jillian crashed to the ground for the second time today, Sunshine began to notice a dull pain in her right knee. Later, when she learns about Jillian’s accident, Sunshine will conclude that her knee was throbbing in sympathy with the plight of her friend. But now, blissfully unaware of Jillian’s difficulty, Sunshine doesn’t have a clue as to the cause of her own discomfort.
All she knows is that every time she puts her weight on it – which she’s been doing regularly, more than once a second, for more than three miles – a tiny needle of pain stabs into the right underside of her knee joint. It’s a sensation that she’s never experienced before. In her brief running career, this is the first time that she’s felt any specific physical discomfort.
Should I stop at the next aid station and ask someone what it means? she wonders. Or is this just one of the aches and pains of long-distance running? It probably just comes with the territory, she guesses. Yet another reason why I don’t like running.
I should look at it as an opportunity to do some work on myself, she decides, and that cheers her up. Pain is nothing more than an electrochemical impulse in my brain, and I can choose to interpret that impulse any way I want to.
First, she thinks, I have to isolate the pain. She concentrates on the feeling in her knee, focusing all of her attention on the intricate play of physical sensations that her mind is insisting on interpreting as pain. There, it begins just as my heel hits the ground; it feels like something’s jiggling in my kneecap. And then, as my knee straightens out, I get that little stab, like someone’s sticking a needle into the back of my knee. Jiggle, stab. Jiggle, stab. The same pattern, over and over and over again. Jiggle, stab, jiggle, stab.
Concentrate all your attention on the sensations in your knee, she tells herself. Don’t think about anything else but that. Let all other sensory input – sight, sound, noise – let it all just drift past you. Just notice it. It’s there, but don’t pay any attention to it. Focus all of your attention on your knee.
Jiggle, stab. Jiggle, stab.
Nothing but your knee. When other thoughts drift in, release them, let them drift back out. Don’t think about anything but your knee.
Think of nothing but your knee.
And now, get rid of that thought too. Don’t think of anything at all… don’t think at all… don’t think… don’t…
And then she’s just running. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that she just is. Running is the activity that her body is carrying out, but her body is no longer under her conscious control. She’s on autopilot.
And she no longer feels any pain in her knee – instead, she’s experiencing a sensation in her knee. “Pain” is just an interpretation of the sensation, and she’s no longer interpreting, just experiencing. What she’s feeling is simply what she’s feeling, she’s no longer labeling it “pain” or anything else. It just is.
Slowly, ever so slowly, she begins to let other sensations slip back in.
First, there’s the noise of the crowd – or rather the sporadic noises of the small knots of spectators who are bunched along the sides of the road. Visual images begin to float into her consciousness, and she blinks a few times to bring them into focus. And then suddenly, with a rush, she’s back, totally in the here-and-now. Shutting off the autopilot, she returns her bodily functions to manual control.
But with one big difference: Her knee doesn’t hurt anymore. The same feelings are still there – jiggle, stab, jiggle, stab – but her mind no longer interprets them as pain. They’re just feelings.
She smiles. That was fun. Maybe running isn’t so bad after all, she thinks, if it gives me a chance to work on myself.
Wait until I tell Nathan.
Nathan will be so proud of me!
3.1.18: Dallas
Running with the bike isn’t so bad, Jillian decides. I’m not setting any land-speed records, that’s for sure. But it’s not as draining as I was afraid that it might be. I can keep this up for a mile, no sweat. It’s just lucky I didn’t have that flat ten miles back.
The nerve of that bitch! How could she…
Don’t think about it, Jillian warns herself. There are enough frustrations in this race without having to conjure up any outside distractions.
The biggest frustration, Jillian quickly finds, is having to watch all the other triathletes zoom past her. She’s ridden her bicycle 112 miles – well, 111 miles – starting out in last place, and she nearly worked her way up to the front of the pack. In fact, if she hadn’t had that spill, she might have been the leader going into the run leg – with the possible exception of Sunshine, wherever she is.
But now, as she lopes along with her bicycle perched jauntily on her shoulder, the other triathletes are zipping past her, one at a time and in small groups, gliding easily toward the transition area while Jillian labors along on foot.
By the time I reach the transition area, she thinks, I’ll probably be in last place. Again. A dismal thought. Sure, I can run most of these women down easily. But can I make up enough time to capture third place? Can I recover from the strain of having to carry this damn bicycle on my shoulder? Which is not doing my knee any good, that’s for sure.
Her knee, she realizes, could well determine her chances of making the Olympic team. In all her years of competitive racing, she’s never suffered a debilitating injury. But then again, she’s never had two serious accidents in one race.
And she’s never had to run a mile with a bicycle on her shoulder.
And, there’s no doubt about it, her knee is injured now. What was a dull ache has turned into a persistent throbbing, and it’s rapidly turning from a minor annoyance into a real inconvenience.
I hope I brought some kind of brace or bandage in my race bag, Jillian thinks. Please, God, don’t let me have forgotten it. I always used to carry something with me. When was the last time I saw it? I don’t remember taking it out, it must still be in there. And, hopefully, a fresh pair of socks. They’ve got to be there.
Unless, of course, Leida…
She shakes her head violently to purge the image. Don’t anticipate problems that you don’t have yet, she tells herself. Concentrate on overcoming the ones that you have.
If I can wrap up my knee now, she thinks, I can make it through the race. And then, with some physical therapy, it’ll be fine by… oh Jesus, the Olympic triathlon is in, what, six weeks? Well, it’ll just have to heal in six weeks. It’ll just have to. That’s all there is to it.
And then she’s there.
“And here comes Jill Kendal into the transition area!” the loudspeakers boom, and the crowd goes wild, shouting, hooting, hollering, clapping, stomping, anything they can do to welcome the local girl. “Let’s give her a big hand!” the announcer adds, although he can barely be heard above the din.
I wonder if I can ditch the bike now that I’m in the transition area, she wonders, or do I have to actually put it back in the rack? Better put in the rack, she decides. Hell, after running with the damn thing for all this time, I’m sure as hell not going to take a chance on getting DQed now.
Made it. But don’t dwell on it, there’s no time to spare. It’s time for a fast transition, she thinks, as she slides the bicycle into its slot with a sigh of relief. Let’s go. Move it, move it, move it.
Just sit down on the pavement. Forget the damn towel, it’ll take too long to spread it out. Let’s see: shoes, socks – she frantically throws items out of her race bag – Ace bandage, thank God. Wrap it around my knee – pull it tight, don’t hurry so much that it doesn’t do any good, take in the slack – four, five times around. Fasten the clip. There. That’s done.
Now the socks.
Now the shoes. Hurry! Snap the lace locks into place.
All done. Piece of cake.
Now let’s get the fuck out of here.
She rises to her feet to an enormous shout from the crowd. She flexes her knee once, twice. Feels pretty good, she thinks. I’ll make it. And without further ado, she turns and begins to jog out of the transition area.
Take it slow for the first mile, she tells herself. Work some of the stiffness out of your knee before you run ‘em down. There’s lots of time left.
I’ll get ‘em.
I’ll get ‘em.
In the excitement, she nearly forgets to look for Jago, but there he is, standing glumly in their prearranged location. He doesn’t have enough fingers to hold up to show me how far back I am, she thinks. He couldn’t do it even if he used his toes.
But Jago doesn’t even try. Instead, he just holds out his hands, palms up, and shrugs his shoulders. I’ve never seen him look so defeated, Jillian thinks, and she falters, almost coming to a halt. Wait a minute, she thinks, just because he’s given up doesn’t mean I have to. So she smiles and gives him a thumbs-up sign, exuding confidence. She can see his expression change to surp
rise as she flashes by, and her smile widens.
I may be down, she thinks, but anyone who counts me out is making a serious mistake. No woman alive can run twenty-six miles faster than I can, and a sore knee isn’t going to change that.
Everybody just better get the hell out of my way.
I’ve got a race to run.
3.1.19: Dallas
Michelle frowns. She hates to disagree with Marty, especially live on the air like this, but they are paying her for her expertise, aren’t they?
“I don’t know that I’d call it ‘one of the gutsiest athletic performances ever,’ Marty,” she says, cautiously. “You have to remember that all triathlons are extremely difficult and demanding races. The top triathletes are all gutsy performers, for sure. But running through pain is just part of the job.
“Jill Kendal’s a great champion,” she continues. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to take anything away from her. But I think that any world-class triathlete would try to do what she’s doing under the same conditions. I don’t think that you could rank her performance with Cindi Peet crawling across the finish line at the ‘85 Ironman, for example. Now that was one of the gutsiest athletic performances of all time, Marty. What we’re witnessing here today, hard as it may be to believe, is just another day in the life of a world-class, professional triathlete.”
Michelle holds a hand to her ear to shield out some of the background noise. “I’m sorry, Marty, you’ll have to repeat that. One problem with driving along in front of Jill Kendal is that it’s incredibly noisy. Every time we come to a new group of spectators, they go absolutely crazy when they recognize her. Could you…
“Yes, Marty, her knee does seem to be bothering her a little. She is favoring it slightly, but not much. She’s almost up to the half-way point now, and she’s already passed more than half of the women. But I don’t know if she’ll be able to keep up that pace if her knee keeps bothering her. Once you injure your knee, it doesn’t get any better, Marty, it just keeps getting worse and worse as the race goes on. It could become a real factor.”