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It’s three weeks before the half-iron triathlon, and we’ve been riding our bikes for the past four hours. It’s our first time riding the ambitious course for this ambitious race—just about 45 kilometers ever-so-slightly uphill, for the most part, with a few spots that are dramatically uphill, and then turn around and go all the way back down, ever-so-slightly downhill, with a few spots where a bike pushing on speed is at a real risk of breaking the speed limit for cars. At about the 75th kilometre of the 90km ride, as cars driving shorter distances than we’ve biked are passing us, I’ve begun to truly internalize the fact that we’re really doing this. The training has paid off, and even though this is hard, I’m going to be able to go hard enough on race day to do it. At about the 75th kilometre of the 90km ride, I begin to imagine the 90th kilometre. I imagine pulling in to where we’ve parked the car for the day, right next to the Cultus Lake Adventure Park (the lesser of the two ticketed attractions in that resort municipality), where families will be returning to their cars after someone got sick on the spinning pirate ship; or just, after everyone has exhausted the possibilities of a theme park half the size of its parking lot.

I imagine our return to this parking lot, and I imagine looking at these people having their totally normal end of summer day, and I imagine them looking at us. Two cyclists returning to their parked car—so many places those cyclists could be coming from that are so much more likely than that other lake, 45 kilometers away gently uphill, with its own smaller parking lot. We are preparing to do such an unlikely feat of physical endurance, but we’re parked next to a tiny theme park, on one of the last few weekends of summer. Two cyclists coming back to their car. How would they know—how could they even imagine that we had just done something so desperate, and beautiful, and absurd?

Of course, I am susceptible to this feeling. Prone to wandering public spaces, thinking about how NO ONE KNOWS about my special little secret. A little bit tragic and a little bit superior, like me and my secret cadre of people have access to a plane of reality so many others just don’t, and maybe a little bit like we’re the only ones truly living, our glances laden with seeing, set apart from the rest of the world, and it almost feels like we could raise our hands and stop time, walk around the diorama of the normal, have a conversation with everything paused, drop hands and everyone else starts moving again, none the wiser—but, restraining ourselves from exercising our true power, a glance, a quiet smile, a moment of eye contact in the supermarket. This is a romantic little affect I adopted wholeheartedly from a poem I read once.

This is going to sound a bit intense for a minute but hopefully not in the way you think—stick with me. I used to be, like, really into drugs. Kind of in a weird way—I remember going to dinner with some people I hadn’t seen in a few years, and realizing that not everyone I used to know in college had been on a multi-year psychonautic exploration of the experiential textures of various chemical alterances. I had become unrelatable. It was through a series of interactions like that dinner that I learned to mostly keep quiet about the drugs I was doing in my leisure time, because it was alienating and kind of upsetting to people who weren’t my drugs friends. But I desperately wanted to map out that confusing, spiritual-mental-ontological space, and to learn how to have overwhelming experiences and integrate them safely.
I was kind of a mess, you know, trying to sort out how to be in right relationship with everything and build a queer life on my own terms with my own chosen family, with my values. Wrestling with the big shit, gender and class and working to unspell the whiteness and colonialism that are the inheritances of my settler lineages, and doing my best not to come to the conclusion that the best way forward was to erase myself completely.

So anyway, as I say, I used to be really into drugs in a way that was honestly pretty unrelatable, but now I just do triathlons which is basically the same skill set and takes up the same amount of time, and makes it equally hard to talk to normal people about what I’m doing with my weekend.

A half-iron triathlon is a foolish thing for a human to do, because it consists of a 1900m swim followed by a 90 km bike ride followed by a 21km half-marathon run, and it took me 7 hours and 17 minutes to do one recently which is a really long time to do anything, and training for one is just a huge psychological game as much as it is a physical one. And, like any giant improbable endeavour, there are so many things about it that could be amazing metaphors for other things and I am not going to tell you about any of those other things because the one we are focusing on right now is that the training takes a lot of time during which you are doing increasingly absurd things that it’s hard to explain to any of your non-triathlete friends, and as recently as 4 weeks before the race I really wasn’t sure if I’d be able to bike fast enough to make it—45 kilometers ever-so-slightly uphill, for the most part, with a few spots that were dramatically uphill, and then all the way back down—so, 3 weeks before the race, my partner and I went out and parked, next to the tiny theme park, and rode the route.

The way up was hard. Harder than either of us expected. I kept saying, “We can’t give up on this whole thing until we’ve gotten to the top and we see how much easier it is going to be to come DOWN,” but if I’m being honest I didn’t really believe it until we got to the top and I felt how much easier it was to come down. And so, at about the 75th kilometre of the 90km ride, when I’d begun to truly internalize the fact that we’re really doing this, I began to imagine the 90th kilometre. I imagined pulling in to the parking lot full of people having a totally normal end of summer day, and I imagined them looking at us, and I thought, “No one is going to know that we’ve done something so desperate, and beautiful, and absurd. How could they?”

But then, you know what? We got to the parking lot, and I’m pretty sure no one knew we had just ridden what is definitely a foolish distance to ride a bicycle, but I saw a whole crew of children leaving the tiny theme park, supervised by a single adult (does everyone have their snacks? water? pass him that bar! watch that juice!) and I thought:

I have no idea what it is like to go to this theme park.