Category: Training and General Outdoors Stuff

“You Do You,” or the Xterra Ogden Triathlon

Hooooboy. It has been *such* a long time since I’ve written a race report. The last one I did was for another triathlon. I think it was two, three years ago.

I was relatively fit then. I know this because I did a 10K the day before I did the sprint tri, and I felt fine starting the race and ending it. This time…not so much. I last ran three miles in July. I last rode my bike more than 10 miles in…I dunno. May? May? Seriously, yes. I was still doing a reasonable amount of swimming on a daily basis when I got into the car with Jim and my bicycle September 14, but I wasn’t going to Utah to race.

Here is the lovely Utah landscape and some mountains I did not think I was going to be running up or down or anything like that a few weekends ago.

I packed my sneakers, my bike stuff, and some run stuff, because a friend of mine was going to meet us there. Our husbands would race, but I had decided it was going to be a weekend of doing the _other_ things I like to do: reading, writing, finally getting back to my watercolors, pootling, just pootling on the bike and in the hills, maybe. I did spend the first morning at our shared condo doing those things, while everyone was out getting registered, but then when they got back home, the first thing my friend said was, “I registered.”

Oh! My heart sank. Oh, how lonely I felt just then, how quickly and sharply I remembered the previous year, when I drove Jim’s parents around the course while Jim and our friend Donna raced. Oh, I recalled the jealousy from watching them flop on the couch after their post-race showers, looking very slightly sunburned, tired enough to take forever to crack open their beers.

Here is the shirt I should have worn all weekend so no one (especially myself) bothered me about racing.

People, there ain’t nothin’ like race day–and there ain’t nothin’ like post-race either, when you stumble across the finish line and know that, whatever it is you eat or do the next couple of days, you earned it.

I took another couple hours to think about it, but after we’d taken a quick recon ride on the race course, I was pretty well convinced. So I got big numbers plastered on me and ate a nervous pasta-ish meal and then we all went home and got ready for the race.

Here is the proof that I did something very stupid the day before a race: I registered.

Folks, I know how to swim, bike, and run. I’m reasonably skilled on a mountain bike, and I really enjoy being out on it. Running is a necessary evil that I used to enjoy. But nothing can make up for months of lying relatively idle for a few months straight.

Well. This is where you say to yourself, Surely this is one of those stories where she surprises herself with her fitness, and there is joy and angels’ choirs and something like a halfway decent time, right? This is where she digs deep, a story of inspiration and blahbbity blibbity lip flap etcetera, right? No. No. Sorry. This is not one of those stories.

You see, untrained muscles are just that: Untrained. That whole “muscle memory” thing? That’s not about your muscles remembering how to be strong. That’s just about them remembering what it was like when they were strong. This muscle memory, by the way, makes you incredibly frustrated with yourself, and your muscles incredibly frustrated with you, when you have to hobble along next to your bike because both quads have cramped up. And then, imagine their further frustration when your muscle memory also says, “Oh! We know how to fix this cramp! Just pull your ankle up to your butt and–WHAT WHAT O HEY NOW WHAT IS THAT AGONIZING CRAMP ON THE BACKS OF OUR LEGS NOW WHAT WHAT OWTCH.”

Here are the bananas I should have eaten because they might have saved my legs from cramping. Okay, not. Anyway.

You begin to see the problems. Suffice it to say that, by mile 10 or so of the 12-mile bike, I was knelt on the ground by my bike; ass on ankles, helmet on the gear ring, focusing on breathing. (Somewhere in the back of my brain was the line from “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” where he’s muttering to himself, “The penitent man shall kneel; the penitent man shall kneel.” Oh, yes, I was penitent, all right.) People looked at me concernedly. Other competitors asked if I was okay. Passersby asked if I was okay. It was one of those.

All right. Fast forward past the run, to the finish line. (Let’s just say that on the way to the finish line I was passed by an amputee doing a course that was twice as long as mine was; a seventy-year-old, some kids, and a great many more people, and that doesn’t count the people who got out of the water way faster than I did. Also, I finished a good two hours behind the prior finisher in my age group. Mmmhmmmm.) Flop flap across the line, lie on the grass, pant moan etcetera. Did not even have the energy for normal post-race beer.

Now, when I told this story to a bunch of college students last week, I used it to illustrate a cardinal writing rule of mine. I said the rule was “You do you.” And I still stand by that. We should all be doing our own thing; we shouldn’t be writing shit because the market says we should write about wizards or whatever; because our moms say writing legal briefs is more lucrative than writing poetry. Neither the market nor our mamas is lying, but if our hearts do not want to write legal briefs or books about wizards, we will not be happy and our work really will be for shit.

Also, just because your friends are doing a triathlon, you should not also do a triathlon.

But–I was happy out there on the course. I did not enjoy the cramping, but I enjoyed the ride itself. I did not enjoy the shambling shuffle that passed for my run, but I liked being in the woods and sticking to the dirt and feeling competent on the course.

The swim…I did not like the swim at all. The swim can bite me.

But oh! Triathlon. Oh! The outdoors. Oh! The muscle memory of being tired, smug, happy, with a cold beer in your paws, crab-like from shifting some gears that will not shift, and clutching at Gu packets. Even my gigantic age spot cannot keep me from loving this.

Yeah. “You do you” apparently means that not even the flat-out fact that I am not ready for a triathlon can keep me off the course. I kept on saying, “You know better than this,” and you know what? I did not care. So I am going to have to get back on the bike and back in the water and back out on the hills. It may take awhile.

But it is time. Because apparently I’m going to do a triathlon no matter what my brain says is smart, so I might as well be ready. I guess that’s just me, as me.

Here is the position in which I hope to never finish a race again: The beer, she is missing.

Smugness is ugly. And useless.

There’s a BMW spot out there that chaps my hide every time I hear it. The guy’s voice is rich, and vaguely cultured, but also incredibly self-satisfied. It talks about how BMW has been “first” in bla bla bla etcetera etcetera.

It goes on like this for an excruciating 35 seconds. Clearly it is catering to the kind of person who wants to have the number-one thing in his or her garage, to look at and pat every once in awhile. “My precious,” so on. You get the drift.

This is on my mind because last week, I went to shadow the assessment course for the ShelterBox Response Team, and I think I finally figured out why this kind of advertising irritates me so much. (Those of you who don’t know, ShelterBox is a disaster-relief agency. I’m a member of the volunteer team that goes in to assess needs and deliver our bespoke disaster-relief goods, and our candidates go through a rigorous testing process before we can deploy them to disaster areas, for obvious reasons.)

The testing is hard, but one of the candidates this weekend nailed it when we were all sitting around chatting after the course had ended. I asked what he thought. He considered for awhile, and then said, “A lot of the pressure was internal, and not from external sources.”

People. I have never wanted to slow-clap so badly in my life, and not in an ironic way, either. When push comes to shove, we don’t really care where you got your degrees, or even what you got them in. We don’t really care what you did in your past life. We don’t even care what you do for your career currently. (Unless, obviously, it affects your availability to deploy for us.) We care about who you are, at your very core, and about the stuff you’re made of.

In short, it’s about what’s under the hood, and not about the stupid bling you have all over your walls. For BMW, and advertisers like them, it should be about building a better car, or product, just like we’re out to build the best ShelterBox Response Team we can possibly build.

I’m so honored to have been a shadow for the course this past week. We trainers can learn a lot about ourselves over the course of the four days we have the candidates, so it’s a doubly-rewarding experience, even despite the sweltering heat, danger plants, bugs, and navigational mistakes. (*cough*.) I hope everyone out there gets an experience like this once in their lives.

What’s Your Birthright?

We’ve been in California now for a little over a year. I grew up here, moved away for 17 years, and then came back to fulfill what I see my as my filial duty: both of my parents are getting older, and I’d like to get to know them better.

The days run into one another here. The seasons are never changing, especially now that we’re in a terrible drought. (MILITARY SHOWERS, PEOPLE! Just an aside.) We’ve gotten to the point where we chart what month it was by who is visiting, since there’s no weather to provide a memory aid. But there are some days that stand out more than others.

One day, in the summer, for instance. Late in the evening, verging on night, with the sun low across the foothills behind our home. Jim and I are struggling up the hill on our mountain bikes–well, I’m struggling, he’s not–and I’m executing a military move up the hill (veering, left, right, left, right) because that seems like the best way to get ‘er done, when finally, the hill, and the false hill behind it, ends, and we’re at the ridge we’ve climbed so many times before, only this time, something is different.

The sun has just reached the edge of Johnson’s Pasture, on my right, which sweeps away in what can only be described as a textured golden-red sea of sorts, and the “city” of Claremont lies to my left, looking verdant and plush, and my legs have gone loose and free, having conveniently forgotten about the agonizing climb, and a memory triggers somewhere in the reptilian part of my brain, which is the only part that works when I’m exercising, I guess. I’m searching for it, trying to figure out why this feels so damn familiar, and I figure it out just as an overwhelming urge takes me: It’s a scene from a f***ing REI catalog.

Claremont Wildnerness Park

An Open Letter to the Nike+ announcer lady

Hello there.

I feel I need to tell you something. I loathe your voice. It isn’t because I do not value what you are saying. It is because you Like to Hear Yourself Talk.

I picture you a Grace-Kelly-like ice queen; frosty; sure of yourself. “You have run .01 miles,” you say. And then, because you are so deeply enamored with the sound of your voice, you go on. “Pace, 10 minutes, 12 seconds per mile.” You say this smugly, as if you know that this is miserably slow. A little later, you will say, “You have run .02 miles,” and then you will say something ridiculous: “You are halfway to your goal of 1.8 miles.”

You see? Now I know you are just talking for the sake of talking, because you are just spewing nonsense. Seriously, who runs for 1.8 miles? And who the f*** wants to know their total distance every .01 miles? Crazy people, that’s who!

You were really bad this morning: you spent so much time talking to hear yourself talk that you made me miss a critical clue that the detective in my book on tape had discovered. There is no good way of rewinding while I am trying to jog, operate you, and operate my e-audio-book (???) all at the same time. So I still don’t know what the clue is, or even whether it matters, although I kind of think it does: You sounded extra smug.

It’s not that no one likes you. You seem to have all these friends. All these professional athletes keep on popping up to wish me well, or say things like, “Keep it up!” or “That’s the way to do it!” Who ARE these people? Tell ’em to go away. I don’t need their kudos. They tell me their names, but I am too busy trying to hear my detective hero while they are telling me. What he is telling me is so much more important that their “Attaboys” (Seriously? Are you off your nut???)

I have proof of this: See? When I go to this little “settings” place? It says I’ve turned you off.

It’s true. I have. And yet, like a bad houseguest, you keep on turning up. Really, how hard can it be to just go away?

I know, part of this is my fault. I seem to be unable to delete you. I like some parts of you. I like your little maps, your points tally, the fact that you show me when I have pulled ahead of this friend, and even when you tell me I have fallen behind. I even like your idiotic little badges, which as far as I can tell mean nothing. But part of me likes to collect these meaningless trifles, I guess.

Anyway. Every relationship has its ups and downs. I like you most of the time. I just hate it when you–or your friends–talk to me. Okay?

Love

Yi Shun

The People in My Neighborhood: MFAland

I love sport. I love doing it, training for it. I love introducing friends to it.

I love race day. I love the pre-race energy; I love the random camaraderie that springs up on the course. (People ask how you’re doing; people help each other with transition areas; people give each other race food or water when a hard bonk happens.)

I love most of all watching people I know and care about cross the finish line.

—

I love writing. I love the process. I am learning about the craft. I love the hours when I am in the moment and banging out something I care about.

I love encouraging people to find their voices. I love watching a writer use his voice effectively, when he finally finds it. I love seeing people I know and care about publish the work they’ve worked over and over until this phrase, or that, linchpins the whole thing together.

—

This past February a Whidbey MFA graduate posted that there was a triathlon the day before residency, and would some of us like to do it with her? Several of us signed up. Hell, we thought, we don’t have a football team, why not do a triathlon together?

So we did it.

—

I didn’t come to MFAland to make friends. I came because something was or is inherently broken in my writing, and because I needed motivation. I know all too well that when your critique partners become your friends, or when you ask friends to be your critique group, you might run into problems.

But as I watched people I know and now love cross the finish line, and as we celebrated a classmate’s first-ever publication last semester, and as I goggled at the numbers of fellow MFA students and staff who were not racing but who came to cheer and feed us beer and cheese after, and as we mourned the death of a classmate’s brother and another classmate’s close friend, something clicked: You cannot embark on things you love, and invite people in, and not make friends.

happy MFA The People in My Neighborhood Whidbey

This is Your Brain on a 5K

On Saturday I did a “virtual 5k.” It was to raise money for the Dick Beardsley Foundation. It was called the Against the Wind 5K, it was for an awesome cause, and it was just kind of nice to do a race on my own time, without anyone else around me.

Here is a brief list of the things I thought about during my longer-than-I-wanted-it-to-be run. You can follow along on the map below.

1. Holy crap, I’m hungry.

2. I really like this campus. I wish it were bigger, so I could spent all of my time looping it, instead of taking Route 22.

3. Oh, look, we are starting to go downhill.

4. Can I cross now? The light says no, but there are no cars…do I stop my watch while I wait for the light? Oh well, I’ll just go.

5. Would I enjoy this more or less if there were masses of people around me? Less, I think, although I did always love race day.

6. Hm. I have always wondered if this deli would make as good a prosciutto sandwich as they make at the Iron Tomato.

7. That can’t be my turnaround already, can it? It is! Boy, that’s a slow first half.

8. Boy, am I snotty today. I can’t stop my nose from dripping.

9. I always liked these apartments. They are called Juniper Walk. Isn’t that sweet? I do like juniper.

10. Maybe I will even mix myself a gin and tonic before we go out tonight. No, I can’t. We don’t have limes.

11. Even if I had just eaten that Cadbury egg for LUNCH instead of for BREAKFAST, I wouldn’t be starving like this now. Stupid, stupid!

12. What should this week’s stew be? I have chicken, chickpeas…I think that’s about it. Uh-oh.

13. What is that curious twinging pain in my hamstring?

14. That can’t be the road to home, can it? It is! Goodness!

15. I have just under a minute to make it if I want to pull negative splits.

16. That there is an old woman with a cane and some really wide shopping bags. I do not think I can squeeze between her and the telephone pole.

17. Home! God, I’m slow. Reverse splits, my ass.

ATW5K Dick Beardsley Dick Beardsley Foundation white plains

Too many irons in the fire

It’s been six weeks since my last post. There’s nothing, really, to explain this. Since I last wrote, my semester has ended, the Arab spring is on the verge of becoming the Arab summer, we’ve had two American weather disasters, and we did our first triathlon of the season. I’ve also started reading and been unable to complete reading three novels, which might say a lot about both my attention span and my reading grade level, and I visited three whole new states.

1. Books I Have Loved

Well, books I have wanted to love, anyway.

Middlesex: First few pages not enough to hold my attention.
Moby-Dick: Started right before deployment to Arkansas. Rotten timing.
The Palace Walk: A must-read for class in August. I like it so far, but there’s not a whole lot of action.

You know what’s really sad about this? I might have to come to grips with the fact that I’m more an action-flick kind of reader, if that makes any sense. I’ll tear through mystery novels, crime procedurals, “chick lit,” YA, no problem. But give me an award winner and I’m like a fish out of water. Ugh. This is bound to shape my writing.

2. My semester.

Difficult, at best. Worse, I’ve got a middle-grade novel I really like that I don’t want to lose momentum on, and while one of my professors has kindly offered to walk me through it once I have a completed draft, I’m terrified of the time commitment involved in that. Summer is so short, and my thesis advisor is asking us to write over the summer, as well. I need to learn to take advantage of this time.

With the semester’s end I experienced an uptick in the need to be creative. (Perhaps all that macrame finally got to me; I made almost 50 of these bracelets for ShelterBox this semester.) While that was temporarily curbed by my trip to Arkansas, I had the bug worse than ever on my return a week ago, which has encouraged me to sign up for an commit to private art lessons with the very talented Janice Cianflone. My hope is that it will help me to gain a new perspective on creativity, and allow me a new way to record the things I see and experience in my daily life.

I’ve tried more than once to do this, but I was never very good at keeping up with things unless I was forced to. Likewise, there’s a definite bump in the road that I need to get over–I’m very easily frustrated with drawing, since I’m quite bad at things like perspective: all of my drawings, whether they be of buildings, dogs, peanut shells, or cubes, end up looking flat. I get discouraged, and I quit.

Even now, as Janice and I are talking about lessons, I’m considering asking her to let me come to lessons twice a week. Any less, and I fear I’ll never improve, and worse, won’t be keen on the assignments if I don’t have some input (I’d rather have been in a class, where students can feed off each other’s energy, but the timing wasn’t right).

Anyhow. I guess I’ll check in on that later.

3. Arkansas tornado

This is my fourth deployment for ShelterBox and the first time I’ve been first team in and team lead. It was harrowing, to say the least. We were deployed for nine days, and at least half the time I had nightmares about customs and mobile homes being blown away. I slept maybe ten hours total for the last four days. I’m glad no one forced me to operate a forklift, although there was plenty of driving involved (communities in rural Arkansas are very spread out).

We met amazing people and were blown away by the way the community tried to rally around itself. Folks who arrived at the tent demonstration to learn how their own ShelterBoxes would work showed up the next morning and worked tirelessly to set up other people’s tents before they received theirs. The Boy Scouts turned out in force–we had nearly 40 of them.

And one 84-year-old man, after denying that he needed help over the two weeks since the tornado had struck, moved promptly in after we’d done setting up his tent.

Here he is, on the far right, with our volunteers AC and Jean-Paul.

I’ve got an interview with a radio station tomorrow morning to talk about this deployment, and I’ve been trying to figure out if I’ve learned anything. I remember the frustration and the worry, surely, but these things are de rigeur when it comes to deployments, and I won’t count them as memorable. Weirdly–or perhaps not so weirdly–I remember being sort of struck by the desperation, the need, the good humor of these folks. One woman, as we approached her land with her ShelterBox (her husband had been helping us all morning), gestured to the area where her home had been and said, “Don’t mind the mess. Looks like a tornado went through it.”

Yeah. Pretty fricken awesome.

4. Triathlon bug. Three girlfriends and I have been training for the Sleepy Hollow Triathlon. It fell two days after I returned from Arkansas, so I wasn’t thinking about posting any times, and well I didn’t, cos my swim was sheer misery. I finished that at the bottom of my age bracket and ended up with a total time of 1:35. It wasn’t where I wanted to finish, but my expectations were low.

Two of the girls have already signed up for another triathlon, and I couldn’t be happier. I really hope they keep it up. One of them is attempting 30 days of bikram yoga, which just sounds unhealthy to me, but I’m tempted to try it, just to boost my routine a bit. Could be interesting. Next race on my docket isn’t until September, and then there’s a half-marathon and another potential half-IM in Taiwan, but we’ll see about that as we get closer. Swimming in the warm waters of the ocean just of Kenting brings to mind riptides and sharks…!

Okay. More later, maybe. For now, gotta bang out some work before going to guest bartend for Big Green Box Week, ShelterBox’s annual awareness campaign.

The 30-Day Experiment: How’d It Go?

About a month ago, I told you all that I was going to do five things for 30 days straight. So, what were the results?
Here:

Drink a glass of water every morning: 100%
Make our bed every morning: 100%*
Write a one-page diary entry longhand every day: 93%
Go to the gym or do something physically strenuous every day: 76%
Read at least the headlines of one entire section of the newspaper that arrives at my door each morning: 0%

So what now? Well, let’s look at why I picked these five items to begin with.

The water thing was about the fact that I woke up dehydrated every morning. That and the making-the-bed thing were also both about establishing a mini-routine that would help me to feel more organized in the morning. (Somehow, brushing my teeth, washing my face, and making coffee wasn’t enough of a routine.) And then, it’s kind of nice to walk by the bedroom and not see a rumpled mass of sheets and blankets every time I go past it.

Numbers 3, 4, and 5 are all about things I badly want in my life but hadn’t found the focus for previously. To be more specific, I’m more organized when I can take five or 10 minutes each night to jot down what happened during the day, and clear my mind of any extraneous garbage that might disturb my sleep, like pissiness over the way a meeting went, or the way a friend’s been treating me, or the way I’ve been treating a friend.

Working out every day was sort of a physical experiment. How long could I keep that up for without a break? And what would it do to my body?

Reading the newspaper was about being a better citizen of the world. And about cutting down on waste. Every day that I do read the newspaper, I find something I care about, something of interest.

So. Here are my conclusions.

1&2. I like starting the day with a little automatic movement and routine. I’ll keep these habits and probably build on them. In the last week of the experiment I started getting up at 6:30 with Jim and walking to the train station, where he catches his shuttle to work. Sprocket got an extra two miles–and I got an extra-early start to the day, which meant I could knock off earlier and not feel guilty if I was sitting in a beam of sunlight, reading, at 4PM.

3. I liked bookending my day with a focused task like this. It was nice to recap the day. There was a time when I wondered how people could fit everything they thought into one day, or even half a page.

levenger — really? merely a page for a day? yes, but not with restrictions like this. Photo: Levenger

But I could see how it would be soothing, to know that you only had to get to the end of the page and then you could stop or go on. And, unlike my previous practice of making lists for the next day each night, this freer form allowed me room to rant if I wanted to. I still like the night-before list. Good way to ensure that everything’s out of mind and safely on paper where you won’t forget it. But you can’t rant, or worry, or muse, on a list. You can with a nice blank sheet.

formerdiaries — I used to do stuff like this all the time. What happened?

4. I have a love-hate affair with fitness. I’ve raced in countless events and even done Ironman. So what’s my block? I still don’t know, but I believe I am closer to solving the puzzle with these 30 days. I kept up the streak for 12 days straight. And then I had to travel one day, and that sort of screwed the pooch. But do you know what? I was so much stronger for the day off. I know, DUH, right?

Still, my experiment reinforced the need for balance. I love being outdoors, and often, a walk in the woods is so much more rejuvenating than a session on the Cybex. And then, friends also make everything so much better. Towards the end of my 30 days, some friends signed up for a June triathlon. I tagged along. Getting outside with friends reminded me how important it is to have people to train with, and folks to egg you on.

bikewlinda — Linda, me and Jim on North County Trail

Then, too, it’s been very wintry here, so the days I was tempted to go outside were limited. I’m still not sure what I want to do with this, but now that it’s spring (although it’s snowed here for the past two days, or sleeted), my options will include many more outdoors miles. Either way, I’m stronger for this past month. In total I skipped seven days out of the 30, two of those for illness, two for travel, and three cos I was just plain lazy and couldn’t be arsed.

5. Oh, my newspaper. my beloved newspaper. I can’t give this up. I get so much out of it when I do sit down to it. But it almost never happens. Must approach this with renewed vigor. Maybe with looser parameters. But at which point do I abandon ship and just go to e-version? This would make me cry, by the way. I once had a nightmare about giving up the newspaper. Yes, really.

There are varying opinions on how long it takes a habit to form. One article I found said 21 days; another said 68! My take is that the habits you form are the ones that truly, deep down, do something for you.

I have a new challenge for myself. This one is just because I’m curious. Starting today, I will write down everything I eat each day. Will I calorie count? Maybe. I *am* curious.

Here’s the takeaway from my 30-day experiment.

*I don’t seem to be in danger of letting exercise either run my life or escape from it entirely. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing.

*So, too, for the glass of water, the making of the bed, and the daily longhand diary.

*I’m giving the newspaper another crack. I’m just not willing to give up the feel of it.

And here’s what I’ve consumed today, so far:

(2) eggs in (1) tblsp corn oil + 1/2 c salsa

(2) cups coffee w (2) tabls half and half

(2) packets emergen-C w 16 oz. water.

Are you bored yet?

ARGH happy writing

Kickstart My Heart, Part II

So. While I was headed down to the gym earlier tonight (at 10:30! What a joke!) I was struck with the most certain terrifying thought that if I didn’t write down all of the wedding weekend festivities, I’d just…forget.
I mean, hey, we all say things like, “It was a night we’d never forget,” but…well, a girl gets old. Stuff falls out and between the cracks. And besides, I want to share this with peeps who weren’t able to go.
So I’ll give you the rundown of the weekend now. But in the interest of space and your own sanity, I’ll save the rumination for later. There’s a lot to think about.
Got that? Boring timeline now; potentially boring reflections later.
Okay. So when last we left this blog, it was Wednesday afternoon and Lara and I were picking up Ms. Jody. We collected a bizarrely baggage-less girl, and although gullible me just shrugged when Jody waved her small carryon backpack at me and said, cheerfully, “dress and shoes, that’s all I need!” it proved to be that the airline had lost Jody’s luggage.
So we spent part of the trip out of Vegas trying to find mobile phone spots in which Jody could bark at the airline, trying to figure out when her luggage was going to get to Death Valley. We had a minor detour during which we stopped at WalMart and Michael’s to pick up some odds and ends*, and then it was finally, finally off to Death Valley. We checked into our individual rooms, said hi to Jim and Scott and Nichole (Jim’s best man and our officiant, respectively), and then, delight of delights, got a text that Peter was already at the resort, family in tow.
We met Peter for drinks and some light eats at the Corkscrew Salon, and then hot-footed it back to my suite to put together gift bags. This included some small disappointments: The letters I’d had the resort print out came out in a different, decidedly non-1920s font, despite my spending some time having chosen a specific look, and I forgot to add the location of the post-race BBQ to said letter, so Jody spent some precious time and energy writing the location on each of the 52 gift bags. Nuts. This might be why the scene in our room looked like this:

[photo: Jody]
In the end, though, everything looked OK.

It felt a little bit surreal. I’ve never undertaken such a large-scale “craft” job, unless you count the time I made all those bracelets for Terry, and that was just with Jim helping. This time, having two of my closest friends nearby, felt strange, especially with Kim Kardashian yammering in the background. I still don’t know why Lara chose that channel. But I said I wouldn’t ruminate.
Okay. So. The next morning we gathered for breakfast and then showed Lara and Roj (he’d arrived earlier that morning) and Jody around the ceremony and reception site, and then, with Scott and Nichole and our friends Kathy and Jeff in tow, we finally set off a little after lunchtime for a trip to the nearest sites available to us, Badwater Basin, the Artist’s Palette, and…something I can’t remember right now. Oh, right, the Natural Bridge.
Here’s Badwater.

Yes, yes, that’s me and Roj tasting the water. I daresay, I think my plank is better than Roj’s, although I will confess I had a dangerous time of actually getting up from the dip that was required if I was going to taste the wine of the desert.
Here, I like this photo:

And here’s a photo from Lara’s camera of our group. Lookit all the friends!

Jody and Lara and Roj and I went back to the Inn, where Jody and I went to sit by the pool and chatted up the race director, and then we ended up deciding that it was a good time to head up to the bar with Lara. The text messages started coming in then; Jen and Ken; Kara Andersen, and Jim stopped by, and I know there were one or two others, but I cannot remember now.**
Dan and Audrey arrived then, and we had drinks up in my room, and then eventually my parents and my brother and sister-in-law pulled in, and after getting them all settled in, we went out to dinner down at the Ranch, where we ran into a whole bunch of other friends, like Ed and Kathleen and Peggy and Amalia and some other people*** and it began to sink in just a little bit that everyone was gathered here for a reason.
It was a most delicious sensation. But I digress.
The next day was race day. We got up and dragged ourselves down to race start, where, oh! joy of joys! My parents AND Kara’s were waiting, to take pictures of the race start, and we heard that Lara had indeed decided to undertake the marathon with Jody and Jim’s brother Jon and his trainer TJ. The half-marathoners were me, Roj, Kathy, Jeff, Kara, Rachel, Ed, Kathleen, Peter, and Dustin. And Jim decided he was going to do the 10K. Here’s this lovely lovely race photo!

Kathleen and I ran almost all the way together. I’m sure I was holding her back, but by mile ten my hamstring was seriously jacked up and I told Kath to go on. We had a nice run together, anyway, and I enjoyed the company and stopping to take photos and the scenery and all of it. I do love that race.
I came in nowhere near where I wanted my time, but there’s not a whole lot you can do about crap training.
Roj won his age group, and Jody won her age group in the marathon, and and and … well.
After that, we stumbled back to the hotel and did stuff I can’t remember, like…ummmmm. Gosh. I really don’t know. This is awful. I know I was with Jim. Maybe we were looking for my parents. Maybe we hung out with my brother? Maybe we hung out by the pool again. Or maybe I went down to the Ranch to hang out with Jody. No, that’s not right, cos I was back at the Inn in time for rehearsal.
Yes, rehearsal!!
Here was our wedding site, pretty much:

If you look real closely you can see all the chairs set up for the ceremony in the upper right hand corner of the photo.
So rehearsal happened, and then there was a post-race BBQ where there was a ton of roasting and a ton of laughs and just some really good times and apparently the cameras didn’t come out until, at 8PM, it got windy and we all repaired to the bar at the Ranch.
Oh. My.
It was crazy buffoonery and there was rather too much drinking for the night before a wedding, but hey, what the heck. You only live once.
Jim went to stay in another room (why? why? I will never understand this), so when I woke up hungover then next morning at 5:45, having been awakened by the howling whistling wind, I totally freaked out. And I called Jim.**** This is the problem with outdoor weddings, you see. Things could Go Wrong.
Well, they didn’t go wrong. The wind died down, we took our pre-wedding photos, which included a little bit of this:

and some of this:

and finally some of this:

And then there was an Epic Fricken Party with the best friends in the world and a pretty good after-party, and that’s all I have to say about that for now, cos this post is SO LONG.
But I will risk a bit of rumination and just say here that it was one of the two best weekends of my life, for a few reasons. One, everyone who was there mattered. Really, really mattered. And two, it was the best ever for its normalcy. Think about it: We had drinks and dinner, we ran a race; we had a post-race BBQ, and then we had a big event and everyone went home happy.
This is the way every weekend should be.
Next post, some Deep Thoughts. Well…some thoughts, anyway.

*these included some gift bags and an item of clothing which I will er, reflect on later.
**See? How awful is that? I’ve already started to forget! If someone out there is reading this and was there, could you remind me?
***Seriously, brain is for shit.
****It would have been so much easier if we had been together, so I could have just pounced on him and yelled, “MAKE IT STOP!” instead of doing it over the phone.

Chicago friends happy Jim Jody Lara New York stories weddings writing

The People in My Neighborhood: The Track Rats

These are people in my literal neighborhood, not people in my imaginary neighborhood. I know a couple people already, like the crossing guard who says hello to Sprocket every morning (she says it makes her day) and the woman with the delicate Italian greyhound who plays like it’s a much larger dog.

But it wasn’t until I spent two hours on the track, two weeks in a row, that I felt a part of the neighborhood. The track is 1/5th of a mile long. It sits right below Eastview Middle School, which was built in 1929 and still retains most of its architectural charm. Jim and I have run around the track before, in the summertime, but we were not partaking of many of the activities that were going on. Rather, our activity–the dull pounding of pavement in a loose oval, around and around–seemed downright odd, and totally unpleasant, compared to the fun going on in the center of the oval. Families picnicked. Friends brought volleyball nets to play what my brother, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in South America, fondly calls “Ecuaball.” Kids rode their bikes around the track, dodging boring people like me and Jim. Soccer was had, and rubber balls were bounced, and even though there was a big sign saying NO DOGS ALLOWED, there were one or two who ventured onto the field and gamboled about with the children.

It was a community space, and we felt like intruders, robotically moving around, and around.

But recently, as the days have been getting shorter and I have found myself with no safer option than to put in two hours at the track, I have discovered another set of people. They are another type of authentic neighborhood person, and being there with them has helped me to feel more a part of this community.

I have run into them each once, and some of them twice.

The Boxer. The Boxer is pretty amazing. When I got there, he was already on the track, and he didn’t leave until an hour later, I don’t think. He wears a heavy sweatshirt and leaves his hood up, and he runs on the outer side of the track, which might account for why I am able to lap him. He jogs loosely, arms sort of flopping. He never sprints. What he does that absolutely makes me want to stop and watch, though, is use the straightaways to practice a few footwork moves. He jabs and spins, stays on his toes. In the deep dark of the night, with snowflakes falling all around and the wind whipping them into a fine smoke at your feet, there are few things more magical.
The Loner. I’ve seen this guy each time I’ve been to the track at night. He’s OK with two people on the track, but when the number boosts to three, he vanishes, and you think he’s gone, until you see his grey hooded sweatshirt on the turfed level above as he completes his lap. Each time, you can see his face turn towards the track–the point at which you can see him is also the only point at which he can see the track–and you know he’s checking, either to see if you’re still there or to see if the track has become less, um, crowded.
Le Flaneur. An older gentleman, he arrives in a car coat and a fedora. He wears a red plaid scarf and walks a mile or so, five laps. He executes a very slow jog sometimes, slow even by my standards, presumably when he gets cold. He waves when he arrives and waves when he leaves if you’re within sight.
The Hooligans. They are inevitable. The first time, I arrived on the track at 6PM and predicted someone with nothing better to do would show up around 7. They did, right on the nose, screaming and pushing each other around in a shopping cart, which they then left. As hooligans are wont to do, however, they left within fifteen minutes.
The Football Star. He takes up only one part of the track. He runs on the grassy part of the track just inside the oval and sprints hard, running drills, with an imaginary football under his arm.
The Heartbroken Greaser. He wears a leather jacket, motorcycle boots, clomps along the track. Huge on-ear headphones. Moping. Lots of hair. He walked a good two miles before he left, and that was only to run down into the parking garage, where they were ticketing cars and his, apparently, was wailing. I guess he hadn’t had enough of soul-sucking walking in the dark beginnings of snow, because he came back to do another two laps before he left.

Some characters, right? I’m rarely alone on the track. I guess that’s why I don’t mind it so much. Why would I ever consider a treadmill again???

happy The People in My Neighborhood white plains