The Big Stupid

Pretty funny. The folks at Sunday Scribblings have done it again.

Only I'm not actually training for a marathon at the moment. Marine Corps training doesn't officially begin for me until July 1.

Nope, this time I went for the Big Stupid. That's right, I'm running an ultra.

For those of you not crazy enough to live in the world of endurance sports, an ultramarathon is anything over 26.2 miles. This particular race is the logical (if running at one time for more miles than the average commute can be called logical) next step up, a 50k. Which is, after all, "only" another five miles past marathon distance.

Yes, I know I've only been out of PT ten months. Yes, I know it's incredibly masochistic to run 31 miles. In July. In Texas. In the middle of the night. With a new moon so there's no natural light. But I was sort of talked into it by Nita, Jimmy, Zeus, and Gunz (none of whom, it bears mentioning, are actually running the damn thing this year except Zeus, despite their promises. Though Nita might actually be there for ground support, which is good since she lives down the road. I'd hate to have to kill one of my favourite people. On her birthday, no less. You'll notice I didn't tell anyone what age you were turning. You're welcome.) and cemented when I found a roundtrip flight to DFW for less than $240.

Somehow it hasn't yet occurred to me that this will be even harder than any of my marathons. I'm hoping the ignorance will keep me at my current level of insanity.

Also, I seem to recall once saying, "I will never do an ultra. Those people are fucking crazy." Guess it's time to book that room at the hat factory.

RR Shamrock 8k and Half Marathon, Code Name: Billie's Bounce

First of all, if you don't understand the code name, you clearly don't listen to enough jazz. Nor have you met Deb's mom.

This is the race I accidentally spectated last year, having signed up for the so-called "Dolphin Challenge" sometime before all the ass-foolery that sidelined me. So I had a special appointment with St. Patrick's Day weekend in Virginia Beach this year.

Um, you might have noticed some talk about my complete lack of training. There was a lot of that. Some of you seriously underestimate my ability to undertrain. I was deeply worried not only about potential reinjury (honestly, though, aren't you getting tired of hearing that? I'm getting tired of worrying about it, frankly) but also complete mortification and being lapped by marathoners who started 15 miles and 90 minutes south of me. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself. (See? I even got lapped by this blog post.)

Crazy week, crazy semester, packed in about fifteen minutes Thursday night without doing laundry (which resulted in a very funky sports bra experience during the 8k, I am sorry to say) and by the time I left Friday morning I was sure I'd forgotten something, or my leg was going to fall off, or I was going to be arrested on entering the State of Virginia, or I don't know what all. I just didn't feel focused. I did, however, manage not to get lost driving around the Hampton Roads area for the first time in the history of the universe. Not once all weekend. I did miss a turn, but it was hiding behind a shrub. Not even my iPhone was expecting it to be there. Went straight to the expo, missing the Blisses, Jerry, and Gunz by about three minutes. Of course. Spent about a minute and a half in it picking up both bibs, scoring a pair of my favourite Mizunos for less than my monthly internet bill, and yakking with Team Hoyt VB and these fine ladies from LiveSTRONG, as they know a friend of mine from last year's Ride for the Roses.

LiveSTRONG ladies say hi Rica!

Left the expo in a big hurry, ran into the only other two people I know in the area, one of whom I've known since high school, checked into the hotel, and hoofed it up Atlantic Avenue to meet the crew for dinner.

Whereupon of course it started raining. Bucketing, actually. By the time I got to the restaurant, my hair was soaked, my Chucks were soaked, my underwear was soaked--then I hugged Gunz and Gunz was also soaked. Hey, I warned him. Had a sad bowl of mac and cheese that was actually quite good and seemed to be penne in alfredo sauce, but I really wanted chicken alfredo. Alas, it was Friday. It was Lent. I may not be really good about being Catholic in ways that matter, but for the life of me I can't eat meat on a Lenten Friday. To save my life.

After a certain amount of beer,

(glug)

and several goofy multi-race plans for the fall (go ahead, Gunz, I dare you; no, I double devil-dog dare you to run back-to-back marathons on back-to-back weekends) and lovely conversations with Deb's mom Billie (the titular one, in fact), I was escorted back to my hotel on the ass end of the planet--seriously, it's the only thing further out of town than my start corral--and only managed to be a moderate asshole to Gunz after he delivered me to my doorstep. I must be losing my touch. Anyway, got upstairs to my room and a text and turned on the TV just in time to see the last six seconds of holy shit possibly the biggest upset in the history of NCAA basketball. Seriously. The one weekend I'm not in town, and this happens. We do love us some CJ, here in Doodlehem.

Needless to say, that wrecked any pretense of sleep for the next hour. Add to that the beer, the restlessness, the general stupidity, and I kid you not I was up every 90 minutes until 5:45 when the alarm went off. I was not a happy FireCat.

The 8k was kind of fun--the best thing about a distance like that is it's an automatic PR. Yes, I've never run an 8k before. They can't count to eight in Pennsylvania, everything has to be a multiple of five. Didn't feel awful, didn't feel great, just ran. And then they gave me beer and cookies. I was back in the hotel by eleven, tried desperately (and failed) to nap for a lot of the afternoon. Caught up on some reading for school. Laid low. Didn't even get down to the beach the entire weekend because any time I wasn't running, it was cold and grey and foggy and windy as hell. Seriously?

Oh, also let me not forget to mention the extreme stomach distress that immediately followed the 8k. I attributed it to something weird I'd eaten (probably the Filet O Fish on the drive down, because...you know, Friday) but things were....ahem. Well. Unpleasant. And mostly not in a way that you can take care of by puking in the middle of the street, which as we all know is perfectly acceptable behaviour during a distance race. So I was really worried about Sunday. Didn't eat a lot at dinner, stayed with whole wheat pasta with chicken and broccoli, no cheese whatsoever, no dessert, no beer...all in all it was a very sad dinner. Also, there was no Sweet Caroline sing-along this year, because we couldn't get reservations there. Still, good craic and I didn't actually get sick during dinner.

By Sunday morning the worst of the grumblies had settled down, and I hadn't yarfed in like 15 hours, so I figured I was good to go. Or as good as it was going to get. I had no plan. My plan was to run until I fell over, let the medics tape me up, and then run some more. Actually, that's not too far from my usual plan. I decided to stay with Deb, who was staying with her mom Billie, for as long as I could, judging from the times at the 8k. And damn, those ladies are some fine pacers. Billie just puts her head down and goes. Deb gives her advice or split times or pace from time to time, but mostly just does the border collie thing and keeps Billie in sight. I trained my eyes on Deb's Michigan visor and imprinted on them like a little baby duck (apologies to one of you, because I know I stole that from someone who ran Wineglass in the shitting-down rain last year, but I forget who) and just kept waddling and quacking. 

Despite feeling like I was going to die a couple of times, I also felt good some of the time, and managed to keep up their pace until about Mile 8.5, when I started to get that head-squeezy feeling that says, "Um, you should walk now." And, really, if that's going to happen, Fort Story is not a bad place for it. So I let my mama ducks go and did some check-in with myself. And my self was starting to think this was stupid. On the other hand, there were no fewer than FOUR, count them FOUR beer stops (ok, one was the Hashers on the return loop) so I was getting lots of good carbs at least, some of it served to me by my friend Moo in a green dress. (Let me explain that Moo is a guy. Thus, green dress being notable.) More than anything, I was tired, and warm. Nothing particularly hurt. No, wait. I mean, it hurt, but it didn't....you know, hurt hurt. 

Hit Mile 10 in pretty decent time. Hit Mile 11 in...wait a minute. Is that right? That can't be right. Hit the LiveSTRONG corner right at Mile 13 and realised that unless I fell over and required medical assistance in the next 150 yards, I was somehow going to PR in a race for which I was completely untrained. I'll be damned. The Nita Training Plan works.

Hit the mat, got my medal, got my cookies and beer, found Deb and her mom and Jerry (who had also all had really good races) and stood around kicking ourselves for not signing up for alerts for Gunz, who was running the full. In a kilt. Because he is an idiot. But he's our idiot.

There are some things you can never unsee.
This is one of them. You're welcome.

After a good while I found Flex. Flex! Flexmeister! Flexorama! Also known as Jon Leiding, Flex had just tied himself to four other men and set a Guinness World's Record by running the marathon in 3:06 (which is also within 90 seconds of his PR not tied to anybody, as far as I can remember).

I love Flex. Big Flexy love.

Stood around yakking with Flex and his wife, Nicole, and Shep. Still no Gunz. Decide to head for my car. It was then that I remembered that Gunz is like Goldbug from my old Richard Scarry books. He's always popping up somewhere when I'm not looking for him. Therefore, I proceeded to run smack damn into him. And he did not look particularly good. In fact, he looked like I'd felt most of the day before, like he just wanted to find the nearest couch and sack out for three or four days. Still, it was nice to know he wasn't dead.

Ran into Nicole around then and ended up waiting with her for her husband, finishing his first full marathon. When he finally limped in, he looked like hell, but once he crossed the finish line reality set in and he was floating on air. I have never seen someone more proud of an accomplishment, and I doubt anyone deserves to be. In the last year and a half, Brian has lost 150 pounds and started exercising for the first time really ever. And here he is, a marathoner. Damn, Whitaker. Way to earn that medal, bro. Wear it proud. (PS, you look really good in running shorts.)

By this time I was hungry, cranky, having post-race, post-seeing-my-friends letdown, and had a six-hour drive home. And class to teach in the morning. Ugh. So I hit the road. Made pretty decent time up the Eastern Shore, but still didn't get home in time to hear Lehigh lose to Xavier (thanks for keeping me updated via constant text, Deb!) As usual, couldn't be arsed to take a hot soaky bath. Just went straight the fuck to bed. Woke up the next morning to discover that Billie had placed second in her age group! Go mom! Also woke the next morning to discover that my quads were, in fact, entirely trashed. Colour me surprised. 

Needless to say, I did not hold office hours in my third floor office on the side of a mountain Monday morning. If anybody really needed me, they could follow the creaking to the first floor lounge.

So. Not a particularly memorable race, partly because I was focusing really hard on keeping up (the thing I remember most clearly on the course, sadly, is the remains of a car-flattened fox in First Landing State Park) but memorable as always for the company I kept, and the stupid ideas we came up with for next time.

Do Not Adjust Your Monitor

This isn't going to be a very exciting post. It's just going to be a place-holder. Because I'm pooped. I'm not depressed. I'm quite happy, in fact, for the most part. I love my program, I love my department, I love love love my friends and my research and my home and my goofy kitties and most of my life. Except that whole can't get a date with a single guy thing.

I'm just fucking exhausted.

In the midst of all the exhaustion, I got a cold, which was also fun, but the bottom line is something is decidedly out of whack. That feeling that you get right after finals, when all you can do is sleep for about a day and a half? I feel like that about four days out of the week. Each of the last three weekends has lost at least one day to sleep. Today I slept until four-thirty. In the afternoon. And I'm about ready to go back to bed (it's twenty to ten). My beloved chiropractor (hi Lauren) has put me on an adrenal supplement, which has helped. That in itself is scary. That this is an improvement.

I'm also really irked because it was warm and sunny today, almost fifty degrees, and I woke up just as it was getting grey. It was running weather. And once again there I wasn't.  I have a race in a month. For which I haven't run more than three miles since....oh, November.

Last time we checked, my bloodwork was fine. I'm not experiencing any other thyroid symptoms. In fact, excepting the Martian Death Whooping Crane Plague last week (which everybody on campus had), I'm not experiencing any other symptoms at all, except excessive stupidity. But that may be all the Marxist theory I've been reading.

Speaking of which, guess what I have to go do. After I nap, maybe.

Unceremoniously Yanked Out of Our Burrows

English Department Eddie (yes that nightcap on his head is a fleece sock, and yes Viv made him a construction paper shadow) says "six more weeks of winter."

FireCat (yes, I've got my hair up in a wad because I didn't feel like showering before class, and yes that ass is entirely made of pea coat) says "six more weeks of birthday."

Campus security is lucky neither of us bit anyone during this photo shoot.

River

“It may be a derivation of Naraticong, meaning ‘river beyond the island,’ Roaton or Raritanghe, names of a group which had come from across the Hudson and displaced the previous population known as Sanhican (who moved farther into the interior). Alternatively, it is a Dutch pronunciation of the Algonquian wawitan or rarachons, meaning ‘forked river’ or ‘stream overflows.’”

River of my childhood, gauge of every friend I had over, coaxing them to wade deeper and deeper, always getting us in trouble--who was my mom kidding by forbidding it? We always went in. I couldn't make her see the river would never hurt me--all she knew was the dam at Rockafellow's Mill and Paul's daughter's body washing up--but my river knew me. My river was skipped shale and the green leaf red rock river smell and the willow trailing its fingers between the skater-bugs. Seen from all angles over the years, countless hours traipsing along its northern floodplain meadow, scaling the jagged shelves on the farther south shore--even now when I'm raging inside and bolt up from the table and bark that I'm going for a walk, they always know where to find me. On the bridge, watching the current, always facing downstream towards the future, towards what I’ve cast in as it's carried away.

The river has offered many gifts these forty years: half-broken crockery; catfish; stones that still line my kitchen sill; half an eel drug home by an ambitious barn cat; snappers the size of hubcaps; old Mason jars washed out and filled with flowering field weeds, Queen Anne's lace and blackeyed susans and goldenrod and thistle; my mother's mashed-potato spoon, the one piece of kitchenware we'll fight over when she's gone;

Mosquito bites and scraped shins and the stitches through my eyebrow from pickup hockey with the Skolits boys, all twice my puny thirteen-year-old size. The stolen cigarettes and shattered brown glass bottles of my angry adolescence, the stolen kisses with John on our bikes those awful, sticky, sweet, awkward teenage years when the river was my only constant friend;

Three miles and twenty years downstream, the iron bridge, kayak eskimo rolls and mammoth spiders in the haybale and sweetness of your body in the cool shade of the full moon under the bridge all those July midnights when we should have both been elsewhere.

Material Witness

Recently a class was asked to respond to the first chapter of Walden as it regards materialism and material goods. What I had to say rather surprised me. It's probably far more personal than some of the other responses (not to mention twice as long. I'm the lone PhD student in a cross-listed course otherwise filled with undergraduate upperclassmen.) It also came fast on the heels of an in-class writing assignment asking us to define, as close as we could in the ten or so minutes allotted, what we meant by the term spirituality; I believe my initial response was something along the lines of, "Jesus, Ed."

Apparently it's going to be one of those semesters.

It's all well and good to agree with Thoreau's thoughts on materialism as a theory, but as it plays out in our own lives, it's sometimes another story. To wit: the past six years have been a very curious journey for me and my stuff. As anyone who's ever been through a divorce can attest, the ceremonial "that's mine, this is yours" is about so much more than simply who gets the glass barware (him) and who somehow ends up with not one but both cocktail shakers (me). It becomes about power, revenge (though thankfully not in our case; most of the division was rather simple--he for the most part just took his marbles and went home), memory, sentimentality, and ultimately sometimes about our very idea of who we are versus who we thought we were.

That process is weird enough, but I then spent the next five years living with my parents, with the bulk of my belongings, save for some clothes and books, in storage. A year ago, when I was finally reunited with my furniture, the majority of my books, the rest of my clothes, and all that miscellaneous.....well, stuff....I had a couple of realizations. The first of these was precisely how much crap a life accumulates. The second was how much of it is truly unnecessary. I lived without my X-Files lunchbox just fine--why save it? Well, because of the third realization. While I did donate, pass on, recycle, or just plain heave quite a bit of stuff, I also kept quite a bit. After five years of driving past the storage facility and waving at the packed-up symbols of my exile, here I was, rediscovering who I had been during the divorce, and how well it meshed with who I was now.

I don't know if you know this, but it's hard living in your parents' house as an adult. There are space wars. In my case, there were also stuff wars, about how many belongings I had and how much they encroached upon the "public" areas of the house (which, of course, was filled with "their" stuff) and whether or not that was ok for everyone involved. I won't get into that here, but suffice it to say that unpacking into my own apartment again was nothing short of revelatory. My stuff, c'est moi. In addition to things I'd forgotten I had, there were things I was surprised I didn't have (really? he left me the blender but took the iron??)--and those things were and are not just a representation of the pain of our separation, but also of the resilience of my soul and heart. Here I am again, me and my stuff. All in one place. For someone who spent the better part of six years feeling like she was in limbo, having a home and your stuff to put it in is a pretty empowering feeling. There's a huge difference, it turns out, between deciding to rid yourself of the trappings of materialism and being forcefully separated from your possessions.

(For the record, I kept the X-Files lunchbox.)

Unexpected Christmas Gift

Something odd happened a minute ago. I was bent over (in a position no one with a degenerative lower back condition should actually assume, but that's beside the point) adjusting the screws of my cast-iron Christmas tree stand before attempting that moment of truth: standing the sucker up both to see if it fits without lifting ceiling tiles and seeing if it will capsize under my own inability to measure straight (my floor is crooked. There's a lot of geometry involved in a crooked little woman standing a crooked little tree up in a crooked little house. But again I digress.)

I debated getting a tree this year because of the kitten. The kitten is a climber, and a leaper offer of things. Given his history with my houseplants, a tree in the house seemed like asking for trouble. But then I realised that this is my first Christmas in the new home, my first Christmas in my newly restored life. Since, you know, I've been in storage for the past five years at my parents' house, hibernating until the wings were fully mature. And I missed all of my Christmas decorations, since only a very few got unpacked, the essential ones that it couldn't be Christmas without. And that dammit I wanted a tree, even if it meant taping the cat to the bathtub for the next couple of weeks. Which, you know, might not be a bad idea anyway.

This is the first time I've put up a tree by myself in....a long time. Before this blog started. Before I met my husband. Before I had to worry about things like could I lift this box or reach to put this ornament on this branch without paying for it later in physical therapy. And while turning the brass screws on the stand, I realised that I'm less lonely doing this alone than I have been the past five years at my parents' house, helping them in the most precious of our Christmas traditions. Somehow, returning to those same rituals year after year by circumstance rather than choice made me curiously, painfully homesick, despite the fact that I still found joy in them, despite the fact that for so many years that had been home, especially at Christmas.

I realised that it's good to be home. Here. By myself. In my own little town of Bethlehem. It's good to be me. At long last, again. At the moment it would also be handy if the me that I am again were just a smidge taller, so I could reach the top without standing on a chair. But I'll take the me that is.