After my husband left for Alameda, California, I joined a couple of online dating sites. One was Single Parent Mingle. I met lots of people through that site, although I never dated anyone from there. I went to a get together in Chicago, IL and met several of the people I conversed with on a daily basis. It was a lot of fun, but a bit demoralizing too. I remember being at the club where our last get together was held and it closed at 5am. I was sitting there at after 4am and several young 20 somethings began hitting on me. Besides the fact that I couldn’t take such young guys seriously, I realized that they were mainly hitting on me because it was last call. I left the event with a bad taste in my mouth and didn’t attend another one. In fact, although I remain friends with some of the people I met on that site, I stopped visiting the site shortly thereafter. I got pretty disheartened with dating websites relatively quickly. It’s like advertising yourself and if you don’t get any interest it’s easy to internalize that and decide you are not attractive to the opposite sex. Plus, there are lots of predators on dating websites and so it’s a bit scary.
Eventually I met someone on Yahoo.com personals, which is really surprising to me, and yet also not that surprising. I think you are more likely to meet someone local on a site like yahoo. They don’t have a dating website on yahoo anymore…actually I’m not sure they have a yahoo anymore. So, I got a message from a guy on yahoo and when I checked his profile I noticed that he didn’t have any picture. I wrote back and told him that no picture was a huge red flag. Most women would immediately assume that he was married and was trying to hide. I didn’t expect to hear anything back from him, but I got a return message. He told me he’d be happy to explain. He said that he was divorcing his wife and he didn’t put his picture up because, although his son knew he was getting divorced, he didn’t want to feel as if he was rubbing his son’s face in it. We started exchanging emails.
We met for about an hour at a bar near where my daughter had art class and I felt like we got along, but after our meeting we just went back to emailing back and forth. Then I decided to get tickets to the Seahawks playoff game and I asked him if he’d like to go with me. He was excited to go and when we got together he seemed to be interested in me. He put his arm around me right at the beginning of the date and we just seemed to really hit it off. We went out for dinner afterward and then ended up back at his condo. We pretty much became an “item” after that date. I had gained a bit of weight, but I was still relatively thin.
I realize now that I was the one who kept the relationship going. When things seemed to slow down a bit, I was the one who made contact. I also didn’t realize when we first started dating that he was from Kansas and was only in Washington for a couple of years as a short term contractor. But he told me he loved me and I just accepted it despite the evidence to the contrary. He was into bicycling and I hadn’t been on a bicycle for at least twenty years. I bought a bike and began to learn again. I joined the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Team in Training figuring I might as well make my new bike training count, although I also figured that if I had to raise money and appear in public I would be more likely to follow through. But he didn’t have any such compunction as he had no desire to ask people for money. I realized that I would be the one who would have to do what was necessary to complete any of the challenges.
I started dieting again to get as healthy as I could. I was on a liquid diet for the most part and I was riding 70-80 miles a day eventually. The coach for Team in Training said that it was not the time to lose weight, but I was determined to do just that. I would have just shakes or other low cal meals and bike for 40 or 50 miles. I was definitely taking the weight off. Eventually I ended up in Tucson, Arizona in November of 2006 doing a Century race by myself. I had done a bit of training with the team, but most of it had been done individually because my work schedule did not match up with the training schedule. I was pretty proud of the fact that I had done most of the training by myself, but there were also issues that I hadn’t thought of. When I was doing the Century ride in Tucson, my coach was pretty much non-existent. I got a flat tire about halfway through and it was the coach from New York that helped me change the tire. My coach was bicycling on ahead in search of personal glory.
I managed to finish the Century in a bit over five hours. If I hadn’t gotten a flat tire it is likely I would have gotten a silver medal rather than a bronze, but I still enjoyed the ride and I wept when I crossed the finish line because I’d done most of the training myself. I remember that a team member from some California team came and put the medal around my neck and congratulated me because she said someone needed to.
I got back to Washington and went riding with my beau a few more times, but it seemed as if things were never quite the same. Eventually he just started to create distance between us. It was strange that I was much more devastated by my break up with a new relationship than I ever was about the break up with my husband. When we broke up I was determined to keep on losing weight and get in great shape as a kind of “see what you lost” type of attitude. I was training for a triathlon when we split up. But, I was never able to continue on that path and eventually the weight began to creep back on.