The Salad Bonk

Gosh.  It's been quite a week.  I finally got over the flu, skied the best powder of the entire season, then found myself firmly in the bottom of the academic Valley of S*** .  Does any of this PhD nonsense even matter?  Condition is a ridiculous word to describe a wetland and it always reminds me of "Big Lebowski" (watch the video if you'd like to understand my angst - how can I make wetland condition seem that cool?).  There have been some tears at unhelpful times, which has me flashing  back to another ridiculous time I cried due to nothing but low blood sugar. 

The Time I Cried About Salad

January 2012 was busy.  I was transitioning from intern to graduate student.  I submitted my first paper for peer review.  My brother got married in San Diego.  The holidays happened.  Amidst all the stuff going on, it was critical that I fit in a climbing trip with my friends to Red Rocks, a massive climbing area outside Las Vegas.  The climbing in Red Rocks is great, even though its right outside a city I don't like to visit, but there are over 1700 routes at Red Rocks (the guidebook is about 400 pages long) so even choosing a crag was difficult. 

Red Rocks is great.  I should give in another chance.  

 During Day 1 at the Sandstone Quarry crag our four person climbing group was having a hard time.  Brent had been really sick prior to coming, sick enough I wasn't sure he'd make it.  Karina's fingertips came off on her first route (literally peeled off), then she stepped on a bee and we knocked her out with a heaping dose of Benadryl.  Emma was climbing like a champ, but had fit this trip in between working a real job and visiting friends in Vegas.  I was a disaster, tired from driving and working and family time; definitely in need of an introvert day.  The first and only route I tried to lead climb was a 5.9 sport route, well within my climbing ability.  However, I had no idea what slab climbing was until I was stuck on a slab shaking and confused.  I bailed, cried, and entered a shame spiral that would consume me the next day.

Seriously, what do you even do here?

The next day, very humbled, we chose to climb in the Willow Springs Area, a fun but tragically shady crag.  Going back through my pictures, it's clear there was a lot of fun to be had. 

Calm before the storm - enjoying the hammock on Day 2

Smiling and climbing

One of my favorite pictures, taken shortly before the Salad Bonk.  

The climbing was interesting and challenging, but I was cold and lost my Nutella somewhere in the bottom of my climbing pack.  By the end of the day I was barely hanging onto my sanity, I actually started crying watching Brent figure out a difficult route because I was convinced he would fall and die (I guess I had lost grip on my sanity by then).  I desperately wanted to feel the sunshine and eat something.  A new friend, Allison, joined us part way through the day and since she knew the area we let her lead us to dinner in the city.  The closest burger place was closed (the beginning of the tragedy), so one of us told Allison, "Follow your heart to a place for us to eat dinner."  And as she followed her heart through the twisty, turny Vegas roads I panicked.  Every time we passed an open restaurant that looked like it was serving something warm and meaty the weight of the tears in my eyes got heavier.  One thousand stop lights later we pulled into the parking lot of a Sweet Tomatoes and I died.  "This is where my heart led me," Allison said with humor I couldn't appreciate.  I was skeptical, because I don't think of tomatoes as a meal, but didn't completely reject the notion until I walked in and saw it was a salad place. 

Salad was the most devastating meal imaginable.  I was so cold and hungry, lettuce would just hasten my depth by actually making me colder and hungrier.  What is even in salad?  Just fiber, right?  After two days of showing no leadership in any of the decisions we made, I became the commander of dinner, declared my hatred of salad, and marched us over to the Appleby's for something like steak.  That move was sheer desperation, I know the food doesn't come quickly at places like that and I think those types of chain restaurants reek of awkward first dates.  The hostess told us it would be at least 30 minutes before we could sit down and I burst into tears.  As we wandered back to the Sweet Tomatoes I sobbed to my very confused friends, "I. Just. Hate. Salad."  Literal sobbing with copious crocodile tears, tomato face (the color my skin turns when I cry), and noises. 

The crying didn't stop inside the Sweet Tomatoes.  The salad bar attendants were confused at the adult woman sobbing like a toddler while I angrily threw spinach and croutons at my plate.  My friends were in a terrible bind: they were hungry too and had no way to console someone crying about salad (and they were caught in public with this baby-like adult person).  Every salad option made me cry more.  The UN brings hearty beans and grains to starving 3rd world countries, not radishes, blue cheese crumbles, and eight types of cold salad dressing.  Salad is stupid.  I was sure that moment was the saddest I had ever been in my life and that I would never be happy again because of the salad.  I cried all the way to my seat.  I ate that salad like any small, irrational child approaches a meal they don't like - begrudgingly and with tears of injustice falling down my face.  I just hate salad. 

I wish I could say this is all an exaggeration.  It is not.  I was miserable and crying about salad in public while my friends tried to enjoy their food.  I felt all alone in the world and desperately morose.  And hungry.

What a Salad Bonk looks and feels like.  

Then the glucose from my food made it into my blood stream and my whole life got infinitely better.  I was inside a restaurant with salad, soups and pasta.  There was even hot cocoa and the heating was on.  I was fine.  But also terrible because I had cried at a new friend about salad.  The relief brought by my rebounding blood sugar was accompanied by shame that I had been so upset about salad. 

The next day we went climbing at Calico Basin.  The sun was shining and there was abundant, challenging climbing.  It was a great way to end a stressful trip. 

Killing it at Calico Basin - clockwise from top left: Emma, me, Karina, Brent

There's an important lesson in this disaster: eat stuff when you are doing things outdoors.  Plummeting blood sugar sends the brain into survival mode - desperate for food, not willing to sacrifice any energy on maintaining rationality.  This phenomenon is known as bonking and  happens to climbers as well as endurance athletes.  Bonking is completely and easily preventable.  Eat food all day long, more on cold days when the body works harder to thermoregulate.   

   

So very grateful for my climbing friends, here at the end of our Red Rocks trip.

We still laugh about the Salad Bonk.  Well, I laugh.  My friends might still be uncomfortable about the whole thing, but they're willing to climb with me, so I'm OK with it.  I've met Allison a few times since then and she's been forgiving about the whole episode (I'd have never hung about with a salad crier again, but I'm working on being more forgiving).  In fact, I'm grateful we had her to ferry us through Vegas.  I still panic when there is a salad bar option with any meal and have flash backs to how angry the spinach made me (I love spinach, so the flashbacks are confusing), but I can usually recognize that salad is not the worst (unless there are water chestnuts).  

March 2016 - our lives have changed quite a bit since 2012, but we still climb a bit and I love it.