Eye yi yi: My rather intense Saturday

Week 3, Day 6 of NYC Marathon Training: 24K mostly half-blind steps and 10 minutes on the Peloton bike

Me before everything went to hell Saturday.

Saturday was the day I volunteered as a race captain for the Verizon New York City Triathlon. I was stationed at the transition area, helping to guide triathletes on tours.

For those who have never done a triathlon, you have a transition area where your bike and the rest of your gear are located. You swim, then get out of your wetsuit (if you are wearing one — for today’s race, triathletes were not allowed to wear them because the water temperature in the Hudson River was 79.5 degrees!), put on your shoes and helmet, get on the bike, ride the bike, and then return, get off the bike, and transition to do the run.

But these volunteer-led tours were really more about explaining the layout of not just the transition area but where the swim finish was, how to get back into the transition area, where to bike in and out, where to start the duathlon (a new addition to the NYC Triathlon race), the relay, or the run, etc.

Anyhow, since Saturday was going to be super-hot, with very little shade, I was very careful with putting on sunscreen.

Make that a little too careful. I made sure to cover my face as well as my body, and put lots of Neutrogena 70 SPF on my face.

Unfortunately, I ended up getting some of that sunscreen in my left eye. Which is bad.

What is worse is that the pain wouldn’t go away, for hours. And nothing worked.

Water didn’t work. Eye drops didn’t work. Eye wash didn’t work. Washing the rest of my sunscreen off my face didn’t work. An icepack around my eye didn’t work.

I did multiple walks to local drugstores, half blind, to get these items, but I was still in pain. (Not to mention that the terrible heat didn’t help!)

I was sitting there at the transition tour table in despair, muttering about needing to go to the emergency room if things didn’t get better, when a fellow race captain started talking to me.

In one of those lucky twists of fate I have had more than once in my life, it turns out he was an eye doctor! Yes, for real!

He then examined my eye and suggested a prescription ointment to make me feel better. He also recommended I get gauze to cover up my eye with.

So he filed a prescription for me, and I went back to the drugstore for the third time that day. The pain was really bad at this point — like a 9 on a scale of 1 to 10!

I looked so bad at this point that when I was walking back to the transition area, a man on the street said I needed to go see a doctor, and suggested one up the street! That was the state I was in!

At this point, I was starting to give up hope I would ever feel better. And the walk back seemed to take forever.

Finally, I arrived back at the transition area, and the volunteer captain/eye doctor put the ointment in my eye, and wrapped up my eye area with gauze and tape. (Fun fact: Blinking helped aggravate my eye. When my eye was covered up, it had to stay closed, and I couldn’t blink, which helped!)

Me after getting my eye taped up. I looked like hell.

Within 20 minutes, I was actually starting to start to feel better! A miracle!

I headed home later that day with my eye covered. I couldn’t put my glasses on because of the covering on my eye. So I was really blind walking around.

Eventually, I made it home. I was even able to do a brief Peloton ride. I ended up going to bed pretty early since I was both physically and mentally exhausted.

Today, my eye feels back to normal. But I don’t know when it would have felt better if I hadn’t run into an eye doctor at my volunteer shift! What an amazing twist of fate.

One thing I was really glad about this morning — that I wasn’t doing the NYC Triathlon this year. It wouldn’t have been a good day, that’s for sure.