unexpected tri injury -- black widow bite!

[long and rambly]
Saturday after my race I noticed a rather nasty angry red spot on my inner thigh, right near where my shorts grippers end...thought "hm, these shorts have never chafed me before and I didn't feel chafed...wierd." Got out of the shower and the red spot had gotten very knotlike, spread to a rash the size of my hand that was swollen and wierd looking, and there were white pus-filled (sorry, I know that's gross but there's no other way to put it) fangmarks in the middle of the hard knot. Ah, I think, I've been bitten by something. No biggie, it's the south, you get insect stings all the time (although I've never seen one quite like this).

So the SO and I jump on our comfy bikes and hit the road for a 4 mile ride -- it's a mile to the tri shop and a place for lunch, so we figure why drive? And we took a detour to make it a few extra easy miles. Very short ride. I've done 2 tris before this one and never had muscle cramps or anything after, just a little nausea but no trouble getting on with the rest of my day. A quarter mile into the ride my calf starts cramping, by a half mile it won't work out and my SO says she can see it spasming. I make it 3 miles via detour to the shop, thinking, well I must've screwed up my hydration but damn I feel sick and bad...maybe I pushed too hard? I didn't FEEL like I had pushed all that hard on the race -- in fact, I felt great except for a bit of a cramp on the bike.

Ate lunch and had a beer, felt marginally better but still really crappy, dizzy, lightheaded (felt this way before the beer, thank you), and various muscles just seizing up at random. But since it was post-race, I figured if i went to the immediate med they'd say, well, idiot, you just did a triathlon...do you expect to feel stellar? Took a nap during which my whole left side seized up. Then Sunday night I started getting sick. Bad sick. Worst abdominal pain I've ever felt, and it lasted and lasted and lasted. It's coming from my lower back which is all fubar'd and feels weak and painful and spazzy.

Turns out my symptoms and bite pattern match exactly the black widow. I couldn't figure out where I would've encountered anything that bit me, and I really couldn't figure out how I didn't feel it. Well, you don't feel black widow bites, or if you do it's very minor (and I could easily have mistaken it for my shorts grippers pinching or pulling out a hair). I used the portajohn in the pitch dark before a lot of people had gotten to the race, so I was one of the first in the lovely dark "outhouse" that was parked near the woods that had been left there undisturbed at least over night, if not longer.

So. There's my long and harrowing tale. And you know the upshot?? I am no longer afraid of black widows or brown recluses because they don't actually kill healthy adults (barring the odd severe allergic reaction, which I thankfully don't suffer from). It's inconvenient to be in so much pain, but now I know I didn't do it to myself during the race. I'm so happy that I didn't hurt myself in some mysterious way tri'ing that I want to dance -- I have been replaying the race over and over trying to figure out where I could've hurt my back so badly. Conversely, if it wasn't that, I was wondering if I had kidney stones because that's where the pain comes from, when it's not manifesting in my abdoment.

I got a 5k PR and a PB race time with black widow neurotoxin racing thru my body. Now I can blame not going sub-1:30 on the spider! Woot!