Hillary Biscay

12 June 10: Birthday Weekend!

Posted on 12. Jun, 2010 by hillarybiscay in Blog | 4 Comments

We had a bit of early-birthday last night courtesy of Mini Biscuit, who FedExed a vegan and gluten free chocolate cake with matching vanilla frosting from a fancy shmancy LA bakery. The early arrival was convenient since I was cooking up a dinner of Corbin’s Black Bean-Sweet Potato-Quinoa Power Chili (see her blog for the recipe–it is the GCM’s lucky dinner since I made it for him before Bonn and Lake Placid last year) for my lovely neighbor and Team Granger.

Speaking of birthdays, let’s be honest: the “birthday set” has been overdone. As with many long workouts, I look for any excuse to do it: my birthday, anyone’s birthday, a friend’s wedding, an impending trip to Vegas, just because someone asks me to do it . . . It’s still plenty of fun, but hardly special.

Given that I am not permitted to run at the moment, my options for a special birthday workout were limited. Luckily, however, since I have the pleasure of celebrating my birthday in Kona, I have a convenient option for a new twist on the birthday swim. Kona is, after all, the home of the Hawaii Ultraman World Championships (a double-ironman-plus-distance race around the big island over three days. The race begins with a 10-kilometer ocean swim from the pier in Kailua (where the Ironman swim takes place) to Keahou Bay. It will probably come as no surprise that I have great interest in this event; this interest and the idea of a point-to-point 10-kilometer birthday swim combined to make my birthday morning activity an obvious choice.

This week has been full of lots of yards in the pool, so this will be a perfect return to the ocean here in Kona. I am hoping to see turtles, dolphins, and all kinds of tropical fish. The underwater camera will be coming along for the ride in my bikini!

The German, however, is not quite as excited about this adventure. Clearly he had absolutely no role in the planning thereof, nor did he have any say in the matter. You know that the GCM is a bit less enthusiastic about swimming than I am. Tonight we drove along the coast to suss out landmarks on our swim route, and after we had been driving down Ali’i for a good while, he started exclaiming (insert German accent here) “ohgodohgodohgod . . .” every couple minutes. Ten kilometers does seem like a long way when not broken down into intervals of less than ninety seconds.

The other thing I have found to be true about Germans–if I may generalize for a minute here–is that they did not grow up swimming in the ocean. So Germans tend to think that when they travel far from shore in the ocean, they will be eaten by sharks. Belinda is coming to pick us up when we finish, and the GCM asked her to bring “plasters (that’s Aussie for band-aids) for the bites.” I told him that if we meet with a hungry shark, plasters aren’t going to cut it.

Birthday fun begins 7AM tomorrow!

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