Bees, Fat, and Bikes

A quarter of my front lawn is a low-water garden that has sagebrush, sage, prickly-pear cactus, agave, yarrow, and lavender. Once it flowered, that garden became more alive than any other patch I'd worked on. Tiny wasps, honey bees, and the occasional butterfly grazed on the sage, yarrow and lavender. The most frequent visitors were the bees.

I knew the beehive was nearby. I didn't know where it was until, too my dismay, I saw the neighbor's gardener spraying poison into the hollow of a tree in the strip next to the road. One the gardener had gone, I went to investigate. A pile of bee corpses lay in among the grass at the base of the tree.

This week, with the bees gone, the garden seemed static. It seemed lonely. The tiny wasps still came to feed on the yarrow, but, it wasn't the same.

I check out the garden early in the morning as I head out for my daily run or swim. Training for my supposed triathlon continues, and I'm beginning to see some improvements. Friday, I did a somewhat convincing three mile loop around the neighborhood, which was quite an achievement for me. My once-injured right ankle didn't cramp up, and I didn't feel so self-conscious that I cut the run short.

I have no concerns about the 18 mile bike ride in the Malibu Triathlon, and now I'm beginning to believe that the 4 mile run will turn out fine. Whether the half-mile swim is something I can be ready to do by September is still up in the air.

The hardest part of the training has been eating food. I need new muscle to survive the event, but, I'm paranoid about gaining fat. It is hard to ignore that feeling and keep shoving food down me gob. I must convince myself that, for now, I need to concentrate on what the body can do, and not how it looks.