magic ice cream koi fish, part 1: DELETED.

Friday after work, I was grabbing groceries at the local indoor farmer's market, which has all kinds of international products, when something caught my eye. In the ice cream aisle. And I was immediately hit by a shockwave of that uber powerful nostalgicky feeling.

I was pretty stressed out from some challenging cases at work that week, on top off capping of the third week with Christmas Puppy. (Hence the ice cream aisle.) And there it was. The shining beacon of red bean with vanilla ice cream inside a crunchy koi fish.

The magical Korean koi fish ice cream sandwich.

Only the most hard-core Wongstar fans will recall, the magical Korean ice cream sandwich of October 2009. This was the ice cream sandwich I ate the night before I broke 10hrs for the first time in an ironman triathlon. I even blogged about it. And damn right there is a picture of me cheesing it for the camera with my magic ice cream koi fish the night before the race...

I almost had a heart attack last night, because I was ready to blog about the magic ice cream koi fish, of course with a link to the original "night before my first sub-10" blog post, when I clicked the link and found: "This user has elected to delete their account and the content is no longer available."

AAAAUGHHHHHHH WHAAAAAAAA-------#@!@#$*&$#!-------AAAAAAAT?!?!?!?!

Maybe I did have a heart attack. Or more like an anxiety attack. How could 4 years of over 300 blog posts chronicling my journey from being a normal 13+ hour ironman girl to an international triathlon superstar be deleted, just like that?! I wasn't about to tell the Sherpa, who is constantly on my case about backing up my files. Yes, I had been meaning to upload/download/whatever all my content and throw it onto an archived blog, but, but, but...

A little bit of hyperventilating, Googling, and emailing commenced. If they really were deleted, posts seemed like they were cached on Google. My Google Reader had pulled a bunch of posts that I had read (yes, I subscribe to my own blog on Google Reader...I like to re-read my adventures). But not all of them. And I have a whole bunch of drafts offline. But just drafts. Most posts were edited and finalized most of the time until they were perfect. I am a writer, and take pride in publishing blog posts free of horrible grammar mistakes.

Last night, seeing my displeasure on my Facebook fan page, the current web chick quickly wrote back to tell me the posts were most likely not deleted and gone forever. This morning my old team manager assured me they are not deleted and are to be put up and viewable again. Some assurance, but my heart is still racing. Or maybe it's the caffeine I'm hyped up on so I can juggle working like a real person with a full-time job, parenting a little puppy, and training to become an Olympic hopeful.

But DELETED. Such finality. My heart aches with the feeling of what once was, because as happy as my new life and exciting as my new sport is, breaking up with triathlon--a 12-year relationship--still hurts. I know I can always go back, but I don't want to.

DELETED.

It's a metaphor for how I feel sometimes. Like a flash of light, the WongSTAR came, she saw, she conquered. Then she walked away. Or rather, she ran out of money, smashed into a van, and mentally crashed.

If the old teamTBB blog were truly gone, then what else was there to remember me by? Some days I'm happy to be out of the limelight, the triathlon circus full of both haters and fans, living a quiet life. Other days I see a magic Korean koi fish ice cream sandwich at the grocery store and yearn for the days a sub-10 ironman was a foregone conclusion, living out of a suitcase and traipsing through foreign countries was a lifestyle, and having no money just meant you'd have no problem hitting "race weight."

Is this why I still blog? So I could feel that I have not disappeared, been DELETED from the memories of former triathlon fans? Is there anyone still out there?

"Is there anyone out there cuz it's getting harder and harder to breathe..." --Maroon 5

burying Wongstar 1.0

Ok, this is it. I turned 30 today. Hello, Dirty 30's! I'm hanging out in an airport...WITHOUT A BIKE BOX, on my way to chill for four days at a beach in Florida, where temps will be in the 70's (both highs AND lows!) while Delaware's impending winter looms and I try to figure out what to do next.

People keep asking what I'm doing next year, regarding races. I don't know. They tell me once I get over this injury, I'll be motivated again. That if I still had the passion and desire, the best is yet to come.

Confession #1: I never ordered the Wongstar fan club stickers. My knee hurts right now and it felt wrong to a) promote "make pain your bitch" and also b) take your money when I don't know if there is anything worthwhile I'll be doing that would require fans or a fan club.

Confession #2: My knee still hurts. (Wait I said that already.) Maybe I've been downplaying it because I'm from the school of "having a good sense of denial to achieve things you're not destined for" but I honestly can't tell if it's getting any better. There's the questions of "will it ever get completely healed?" and "how long until it gets better?"

So in the meantime, I stopped doing things that kept hurting the knee.

I put White Tiger away in the garage. And put all my biking things away.

I stopped running too, since that even flared up the knee. How did I get through a marathon on this? Was it because I took ibuprofen during the race?

And I don't see the point of swimming if it's not followed by biking and running. What, did you ever think I actually swam because I enjoyed it, or even wanted to?

Sometimes I feel like I went through what Buffy the Vampire Slayer did, when she died in season 5 and her friends brought her back in season 6...against her will and back into a new world strange and unfamiliar to her. Sometimes I think too much about my bike accident and how close it was to being fatal. How I swerved into the glass at the last moment, which probably saved me.

How maybe I got the option to return, but the trade-off was to return in a body with a bum knee. My new life is so different from the one the previous Wongstar knew before. I did go through the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.

It's been a strange year. I'm not one to just sit around and get fat. I'm looking for another sport to do, that doesn't hurt the knee. So that's what's next. I just don't know what.

big needles!

Make pain my b!tch, huh? Well I'm sitting in bed with my leg propped up on two big pillows after getting sent home following "the injection" with two bottles of prescription painkillers. This was the blood centrifuging machine...for size reference, check out the magazines in the upper right corner:

"The injection" is in quotes because the needle was so big (in order for the platelets to get through or something) that it required multiple smaller injections of novocaine to numb up the area before the MULTIPLE site injections of PRP. I'm trying not to sound like a super wuss, but I was limping my way through the pharmacy and have strict orders to take the next 3 days completely off training. Then very slowly build back up again.

It's like one of those "it's gonna get worse before it gets better" kinda things. I'm not suppose to take any sorts of anti-inflammatories because the idea is that we WANT inflammation to promote the healing process. Hmmm...so am I not supposed to be following my super healthy anti-inflammatory diet right now? ;)

On the bright side, the MRI report shows my injury is actually a muscle tear of the VMO, with only minor ligamentous involvement. So that's an update on the initially suspected MPFL tear--but the MPFL and VMO tendon combine as I very skillfully described before, so it was hard to differentiate on the ultrasound. This is actually GOOD NEWS because muscles have much better blood supply than ligaments, so my recovery time will be relatively quicker! Not surprisingly, there was still evidence of a bone bruise on my femur 3.5 months post-crash, albeit a minor one that won't be causing much trouble.

My activity is going to be more limited than it's been in the last couple months (ugh did I really do an ironman on this thing?!), but like the doc said, my job is just to heal now! Send happy healing vibes, thanks :)