I swam and ran in the Splash n Dash on Tuesday. It was a bear. For all the other participants, with their 4 percent body fat and skintight lycra outfits, it was probably just your average Tuesday workout. But it was the first multi-sport race for me since September and the first since I was knocked on my ass by Pneumonia at the beginning of the year.

Leading up to the race, besides the size of my man boobs, my anxiety centered around not coming in last. I had looked at previous times for the race and found that my expected splits (28 minutes for the swim and 24 minutes for the run) put me pretty gosh darned close to the bottom of the filed “I probably won’t come in last,” I told people, “but it’s a very real possiblity .”

The drive up MoPAC was slow going after leaving work 15 minutes early. I somehow managed to calm myself down while listening to the jazz mix my girlfriend made for me. “This is for fun,” I said outloud, inching up the freeway towards PURE Austin Quarry Lake, the site of the race. “No one cares what place you come in. Just do your best. Who cares what anybody thinks.”

It worked.

I got to the site, signed up, picked up my swim cap, and headed over to the set up area and swim start, which was down a little outcropping of land that lead to a small dock on the lake’s shore.

Surrounded by lycra and silicon covered heads with eyes staring out of goggles with lenses tinted every color of the rainbow, I was surprisingly calm. I was able to talk to Shelly a little bit before getting into the water. I looked around at my competitors and accepted the fact that 95 percent of them would be done with the race before me.

There was a painfully long introduction by the race organizers, who thanked every volunteer and warned beginner swimmers to get the heck out of the water, but in the nicest way possible. The horn went off and all was set in motion, arms flailing forcefully and legs kicking behind them, the men’s wave took off. I hung on to the dock as everybody set out on their swims. No need for them to run me over, I waited until there was no one behind me and started swimming in the warm water, choppy from the wake of my competitors.

Although I was pretty close to one guy approaching the first buoy, the rest of the field was well on its way to leaving me in the dust. By the second buoy I had already floated on my back to catch my breath and the leaders of the women’s swim wave, which started 3 minutes behind us, were passing me.

“I lead the women’s race until the 2^nd buoy,” I said to myself, envisioning how I would describe the race to friends when they asked.

And that’s how the swim went. Every now and again I would float on my back, catch my breath, and keep on trucking. More and more women passed me, but a few were right at my side, then their feet just ahead of me. I swam with them from that point in, trying not to think about how they were really 3 mintues in front of me, not next to me.

“Keep your head down.” I imagined the T3 coaches screaming in my ears the whole time. “Look up at the sky when you breathe.”

The swim felt strong. Not in the “I’m going to win” strong, but in the “I’m pulling some water here” strong, instead of the usual fake fishyness with which I did these things.

I looked at my watch as I stood up on the rocky sandy shore and was shocked to see I had done the swim in 19 minutes, 8 or so minutes faster than I’d anticipated.

“This might not be so bad afterall,” I thought to myself, walking up to where my towel and running shoes were and suddenly giddy knowing I would not come in last.

I said hello to Shelly, who was on the sidelines taking pictures of me toweling off. I tried to hide my man boobs as she laughed at me.

I set out for the run and my upper body felt like slabs of meat that had haphazardly been slapped together. The blood in my chest, arms and back was gushing from the swim and the first 1k lap sucked. I felt like I was carrying heavy weight up top. The 2^nd lap was a little better. The images of flying pink elephants seemed to have gotten better and the conversation I had with Jesus and former Mets first basement Keith Hernandez just before the water stop was not as long or invovled.

Finally, the third lap and I felt much better. I felt like I was actually sort of running, despite the rocky gravel trail. I figured out to run on the side of the trail where there was more traction on the packed earth where the gravel had been pushed aside.

I passed one or two people and was slowly but surely gaining on a guy ahead of me. It was wonderful knowing that anyone I was running with was either on my lap or a lap behind me, so it actualy felt like a race.

Unfortunately, not long after the dude in front of me stopped to catch his breath on the back stretch, I did the same. Then, about 50 meters before the last water stop, I got a really bad stitch in my side. It felt like someone had stuck a barbeque skewer into my sides and into my lung. I walk jogged the rest of the way.

I finished in 44 minutes, which was about 10 minutes faster than I expected. The run was 23:22 or so and I’m pretty happy with that, given where I am in my training.

10 Year High School Reunion

I went to my high school reunion the Friday after Thanksgiving, and it was the single weirdest event of my life. It’s one thing to run into someone on the street that you haven’t seen in 10 years. It’s a completely different experience altogether to reunite with 50 people you haven’t seen in a decade within the span of a few hours. “It’s almost as if you need two nights,” said Tony Spencer, one of our class’s many clowns. “You need one night to get over the weirdness and another to actually have fun.”

As teenagers, we spent time together in homeroom, at our lockers, in study halls, and as teammates. And now here we all were seated in the banquet hall of the Endwell Greens Golf Club in Endwell, NY, ready to be served chicken and beef dinners.

Most of these people I hadn’t even thought about once since 1994. I had kept in touch with a few, but the rest were complete mysteries to me. I looked around the room and it seemed as if my classmates had stepped into a time machine at graduation and stepped out that night.

The time machine left sizeable side effects: wedding bands, husbands and wives, and wallets full of pictures of children. On others it left double chins, love handles, and in one case, unrecognizable weight gain. Yet, in others it added fashionable haircuts, stylish wardrobes, and a palpable sophistication and worldliness.

Our homecoming queen, Janelle Lalor, for example, was unrecognizable from the girl next door I remembered in high school. She was always pretty and friendly, but she was also a bit of a dork. Now she had hair that made her look like a model and a body which had shed its geekiness through road races and triathlons. In short, she had become a total babe.

The good feelings didn’t last, however. As the tuxedo-clad DJ started winding down the music, everyone started making after-party plans. Most of us decided to head to the Galley, a local watering hole less than five minutes away. It was in the Galley where the signature drama reminiscent of four years at Seton Catholic Central High School would rear its ugly head.

The first indication I got of traveling back in time to the early 1990’s was when the girl I had been joking around with all night started hitting on another former classmate. Now that I had comfortably returned to girl-repellant status, I decided to sit back, relax, and watch the drunken embarrassment ensue. The culmination of that drunkenness was when Penelope Cruz came up to Rahm Emmanuel and said something about him having said something nasty to her. She then left the bar, with her entourage of friends scrambling to gather their things and follow closely behind, as unsure as the rest of us about what had just happened.

Sometime before that, I found out later, Rahm mentioned to Penelope that he’d heard about her two failed engagements. Penelope, as one would imagine, didn’t take this type of conversation very well. It should be mentioned that Penelope is best friends with Lyla Garity, Rahm’s ex-girlfriend who didn’t go to the reunion. Rahm, I found out later, is known through Lyla’s circle of friends as “the guy who ruined Lyla’s life.” I’d be happy to provide a flow chart to anyone having trouble following.

Meanwhile, many of my former classmates were becoming sloppy, silly, embaressments of themselves. So what had started out as a slightly awkward trip through memories of high school ended in a drunken display of the here and now. Ahhh, Seton Catholic Central, how we loved thee.

Affixed to the outside of one of the first floor windows of the house I grew up in is a Radio Shack-bought barometer. That barometer’s digital readout holds the revered spot on the center of the mantle above the fireplace of the living room. In the dead of winter in upstate New York, when the difference between -5 and -10 degrees Fahrenheit is negligible, the average person would be content just knowing it’s “damn cold.” My parents, born and raised in Barranquilla, Colombia, however, aren’t happy until they know the wind chill, barometric pressure, and current location of the jet stream.

The average yearly temperature of Barranquilla, according to Weatherbase.com, is 83 degrees. The average temperate of Binghamton, New York, on the other hand,is 46 degrees. But that number is misleading, since the barometer can dip as low as -10 during the months of January and February, when the average temperature is 23. I think the drastic difference in temperatures between the two places is why the weather, especially during the winter, is such a constant topic of discussion in the Gieseken family.

Winter is the arch enemy that lingers in the shadows, even during the summer months. My mother, who was a speech therapist before I was born, is essentially a stay-at-home meteorologist. The Weather Channel is her best friend, rain or shine, hail or snow. This woman, who cooks, cleans, and looks after my Dad and two cats, is the authority on the weather in the Northeastern part of the United States. She can track cold fronts better than the National Weather Service.

Growing up, my sister and I would eat breakfast and get ready for school with Good Morning America playing on the television. The news and feature segments, however, were just filler between weather reports. We would huddle around these debriefings like soldiers readying for conflict, with my mom making note of every snowflake or wind-chill degree below zero.

While Mom acted as the director for meteorological intelligence, my Dad would provide the weapons for war. I’m convinced that the people at L.L. Bean have a commissioned oil painting of my Dad sitting in a hooded fleece sweatshirt hanging somewhere at their Freeport, Maine headquarters. For as long as I can remember, Gore-tex isn’t just a material to keep us dry, it is a way of life. Shoes, boots, jackets, and coats weren’t worth their weight in salt if they weren’t fortified with Gore-tex.

When I went away to college to Syracuse, an hour north and a few feet more snow per winter than even Binghamton, my Dad sent me off with Gore-Tex gloves and boots, , thermal socks, scarves, and two sets of long underwear. Our friends at L.L. Bean provided me with a winter parka guaranteed to keep me warm to negative 30 below Fahrenheit. I referred to it as “the mattress,” because its layers of down feathers made it about six inches thick. Lay it on the ground and a family of four could sleep comfortably.

Even now, at the independent age of 28, I can feel my Dad’s presence whenever I buy outerwear. I currently own two pairs of shoes and a running jacket, none of which contain a thread of Gore-tex, and I have never worn any of these things without that fact flashing across my mind. When I call home, every conversation begins with the question, “What’s the temperature where you are?” The call usually ends with my mom prepping me on the week’s upcoming weather, and that I should do my laundry.

People sometimes ask me if I’d like to have a family and how many children I’d like to have. “I’d like as many children as my future wife is willing to give birth to,” I usually answer. Then I describe to them a black and white picture I once saw of an elderly Joe Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy family, sitting in a wheel chair surrounded by a dozen or so adoring grandchildren. I think this desire to have a big family comes from living far away from most of my immediate relatives, who all lived in Colombia for most of my life.

Growing up, I’d be jealous of my American-born friends when they would talk about family reunions or trips to a relative’s house that lived in a nearby state. A similar reunion with my family would involve passports, visas, thousands of miles of travel, and thousands of dollars in airline tickets.

I have cousins that I have met on only a handful of occasions. Each meeting was like a snapshot in the timeline of our lives. I remember visiting Colombia at the age of ten or so and playing with my cousin Jose Carlos. We would get along as if we’d grown up together. When Jose Carlos came to visit when we were both about 22 and he was spending a semester at Clemson, I was disappointed because our relationship had changed so much.

Although we were first cousins and as close as you can get in blood ties, I remember playing ping-pong in the basement of my parent’s house and feeling like I was talking to a stranger. We got along fine, but not with the easy laughter of our earlier meetings. We had both changed so much, but unlike cousins that see each other all the time, we did not grow together, recognizing the changes incrementally over the years.

My uncle Alex, my mom’s only brother, is someone with whom I have always been compared. I was a baby the last time he saw me. My mom tells me that we are very much alike, both artistic and laid back. Like him I started out college as an architecture student but changed disciplines after two years. I love it when my mom tells the story of how Uncle Alex drew me sleeping in my crib and used the drawing in an ad he designed for the local newspaper.

My sister has a nose that was a mystery to us all for a long time. It was unlike mine or my parent’s. The closest we’d come to finding a match was my Aunt Mari’s nose in New Jersey, but that felt like a stretch. The case was finally closed when we visited some of my father’s relatives in Soledad, Colombia. We felt as though we’d discovered the Rosetta Stone of my sister’s face when we noticed the same nose on a second cousin. I think my mom sighed in relief, now knowing for certain that my sister hadn’t been switched at birth in the delivery room.

I am thankful because many relatives have begun to move up to the U.S. and Canada from Colombia over the past two or three years. I am excited because we can now begin to build some of those relationships that have been put on hold because of distance. I can only hope for a picture of me someday, sitting in a chair surrounded by dozens of grandchildren and my cousins’ grandchildren. They can watch each other grow up, teasing and supporting each other along the course of their lives, the way it should be.

A Lifelong Battle With My Hair

Gravity is a strange thing. It can keep the Earth in an orbit around the sun and all of us from floating off into space, but it lacks the power to make my hair lay down flat. I’ve been fighting a battle with my hair as long as I can remember. It’s thick and dark, and tends to stick up when short. The amount of Brylcreem I put in it on a daily basis makes me think twice before standing within ten feet of an open flame.

The way I see it, there seem to be two types of Latino hair. (I’ll acknowledge all the blond Latinos in the world, but for the sake of my discussion, will pretend they don’t exist). There’s the dark and wavy hair like Mr. Rourke’s on Fantasy Island. My dad has this hair. Growing up I’d wonder exactly why it was I didn’t inherit the smooth waves, although I have inherited the early graying gene. (When I graduated high school, my barber told me I already had more gray hair than his father did when he died.)

Then there’s the thick, coarse hair I was blessed with. When untreated, it either stands, if short, or puffs, if long. Before I discovered the wonders of Brylcreem, a greasy men’s hair product surely placed on earth by God himself, I would walk around with my hair “untreated” and standing up all over with its powerful anti-gravity characteristics.

My junior high school classmate Carl Fishback often joked that Inch High Private Eye, a cartoon character who had his own show that played every day after school, lived in my hair. During a seventh grade science class discussion of acids and bases, my teacher, Mr. Kocik, came over to where I was sitting and pretended to bounce his hands off my hair saying, “Boing!!!!” when he described my head as what happens when the balance between acids and bases in shampoo is upset. Needless to say, I was mortified.

It wasn’t too long after this episode that I began to use Brylcreem, which gives hair a constant appearance of looking wet. Until very recently, it came in a hard plastic tube. Sometimes I wonder how many of these tubes I have gone through since I began using the product. I’ve tried other gels and mooses, but nothing quite does it like Brylcreem. The company motto is “A Little Dab ‘il Do Ya,” which I find misleading since I usually have to apply a handful.

Although it keeps my hair from puffing out or standing up, Brylcreem is not without its drawbacks. It causes a very unnatural shine that has not gone unnoticed by classmates and coworkers through the years. The biggest downside is probably it’s tendency to run down my face when I sweat, leaving a thin, disgusting coat of grease that never easy to wash off.

Baila Me

Dancing is a big part of Latino life. Even growing up in the predominantly white environs of upstate New York, my parents danced everywhere and anywhere possible. I didn’t learn to appreciate how cool this was until college, which coincided with the beginning of the recent Latino explosion.

It’s an unrecognized but wholly consistent tradition that music be played on holidays in our house. Whether it’s Christmas or New Year’s Eve, there’s a constant soundtrack, even through my Uncle Desi’s usual Thanksgiving speech, of Joe Arroyo, Tito Puente, and many other artists from Colombia and the rest of Latin America. The sounds from the stereo in the living room ring throughout the house, carrying over into the dining room.

Two years ago we sat in the living room after Thanksgiving dinner listening to an Agustin Lara CD, which was the current selection in the 5-CD changer. Don’t get me wrong, I love his music, but his lulling baritone and my full stomach were putting me to sleep. I ran upstairs and grabbed a Latin dance CD I had put together the night before using songs downloaded from the Internet. Among others, it included Thalia, Carlos Vives, Shakira, and Ricky Martin.

I put in the CD, turned up the speakers, and proudly watched as everyone in the house got up from their seats and broke into dance as Chayanne belted out “Salome.” My Mom and Dad, along with my sister, cousin, aunt and uncle all joined in the fray. This was nothing new, and my family is constantly breaking out into spontaneous dance, but I was finally of the age to appreciate the love of music that my family has. I looked on and felt proud of myself for putting together such a good dance mix. Even my 83 year-old grandmother requested a burned copy.

The spontaneous nature of my parents and their dancing erupted in full bloom another time I was home from college for summer break. I was in the living room listening to a band called “Rusted Root.” They were an alternative, hippy band who wore flower-power clothing and untidy facial hair, just the type of band my Dad would normally disapprove of. But they were also highly rhythmic with a strong emphasis on a tribal-sounding drum beat.

My Dad got home from work and walked in just as the song “Military Machine began. He immediately whipped off his suit coat, grabbed my Mom, and started to dance to the music as if possessed. I looked on in awestruck amusement. Usually my Dad will walk in on me listening to American music, ask me who the artist is, and simply respond with the word “porqueria”, which is Spanish for “garbage.” I watched my Dad lose himself in the sounds of Rusted Root and would not have been anymore amazed than if Christ himself had walked into the kitchen and started rolling empanada