Arrive in Phoenix at ten in the evening on Thursday. My sister is waiting in the baggage claim area to pick me up, a fact that has astounded both my parents several times over the past week. My sister does not do airport transportation. But since my flight lands well past rush hour and her usually painful, knotted back has been feeling better since she moved back to Phoenix last summer, I get a ride.
The flight was insufferably hot. Seated all around me were college kids getting to know one another, loudly. Behind me was a kid who kicked my chair for the first hour and developed a loose, wet, uncovered cough for the final twenty minutes of the flight. I was here for the Soma Triathlon, and the last thing I wanted to do was catch that kid’s cough.
I was also worried about my bike. My coach had packed and shipped it from Long Island on Monday, and according to my sister, the bike had yet to arrive. This was nothing to panic about, but I had a bad feeling about the bike from the moment I booked my flight. It seemed an unnecessary and hazardous complication of signing up to do a race, when there are already so many things that can derail you during a race. As it turned out, my hunch was not far off.
On our way out on Friday afternoon, bike still MIA, we ran into the UPS driver who assured us that there was no 70-pound desk-sized box on his truck. Could there be another driver? He shrugged. “Why not,” he said.
At five, the bike still had not arrived; I called UPS for the third time that day and was told it would definitely be there by six. And when it hadn’t arrived at six, I was told seven, and then I spent another half-hour desperately trying to get a supervisor on the phone. If the bike didn’t arrive by seven, I would most likely not get it until Monday.
At six-thirty, UPS finally found the bike, mishandled in the Phoenix UPS center and never scanned out for delivery. This fact was obvious if you tracked the package online, but it was a fact that eluded more than five UPS customer service representatives I spoke with. If I wanted to get the bike, I would have to drive an hour to the outskirts of Phoenix and pick it up from the center. What choice did I have?
Instead of a relaxing Friday night dinner, we all hauled out to the UPS center to pick up the bike. We sat in rush hour traffic and my sister asked why I had not tracked the package the day before, and why I had not looked online before we left for the day, insinuating it had all been a preventable accident if not for my stupidity. It was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the hurdles I had set up to do one more race. Was I right to come out here? To go through all this to do one more race? Two more days would tell.
