Transcontinental

This post took me forever to write because I wrote it last week, thought I had saved it, but lost it. I got really annoyed and couldn’t gather the motivation to re-write it, so this is a truncated version of the original.

We had a nice week back East visiting family and friends, but I must say, I am happy to return to this:

It did surprise me how much this place so unlike western NY or NJ now feels like our “home” after living here for just under 6 months.

Back to last week, we enjoyed some Rochester, NY delicacies:

Abbott’s frozen custard

Genesee Cream Ale

We ate at my sister’s restaurant one night where she surprised me with a  belated birthday dessert:

We also visited Letchworth Park, “the Grand Canyon of the East.”

Apparently NY is more restrictive than CA, “banning” the public from the dangerous riverbed. [Meanwhile, here in CA, back in June we hiked 2 miles to a creek/swimming holes in the middle of the mountains where it was totally legal to dive/swim/walk around.  Oh and another time we hiked along the San Gabriel river, subject to flashfloods, where people were camping along the riverbed).

   

You can see Dan was thrilled to pose for this picture, one of many taken by my parents.

I don’t know why this large chair was at one of the scenic overlooks, and I don’t know why I’m looking confused by Dan taking a picture of me.

  

Even though NY was in a “drought” it was much wetter and greener than the opposite corner of the country:

 

   

I’ve been out on that railroad bridge before back in high school when I was younger and braver.  It turns out the park also made it much more difficult to get to that bridge than it was 10+ years ago, and I didn’t feel like doing an army crawl under a boarded up chain link fence to walk out there again just for a picture for the blog.

Later in the week we met up with several high school friends at one friend’s family cottage in the Finger Lakes for a couple days.

This included floating on tubes in the lake, leisurely boat rides on the “party barge,” playing games like Settlers of Catan and Cards Against Humanity (my first time playing; best way to describe it R-rated, non-PC Apples to Apples), icing (though, tamer than previous years), and on Saturday morning running what a friend estimated to be “about a 10k” around the little lake we were staying on – but we were without watches and later, mapmyrun informed us it was more like 10 miles.

 

   

And finally, we stopped by Dunkin Donuts at the airport after finding out our departing flight was delayed only moments after we checked our bags.  It was only the beginning of an exhilarating day of travel which included missing our connecting flight and getting bumped to another flight 6 hours later, impatiently staring at the clock waiting for our plane to taxi to a gate, running through the Chicago airport, lucking out and getting two highly coveted standby seats when on a waitlist of 56 people, our luggage not arriving in LAX with us, then sitting in traffic for 2 hours to get from the airport to home when it should have taken less than an hour.

Reading about someone hiking the Pacific Crest Trail reverses the donut’s damage, I’m sure.

New 3 mile XC PR!

Last Thursday I ran the first race of my last year of my current age group; also the only group I’ve ever been in since I didn’t run any races before the age of 25.  As of last Monday, I’ve got one year left before advancing to the 30+ age bracket.

I ran the same cross country course I ran 2 weeks ago and managed to shave off about a minute, for an overall time of about 24:15.  They called out times at the first mile and I was on par with where I ran last week; I heard the guy calling 7:56-7:59 so I was somewhere in there.  For the second mile, I heard them call off 16:36-39 which was about a 20 second improvement over my last run.  That mile included what has been nicknamed “Killer Hill.”  For my last mile, according to my Garmin I ran a 7:30 mile.  I glanced at my watch only occasionally to check distance; I didn’t wear my heart rate monitor, and I ran by feel.

I can probably attribute some of that improvement to the temperature being about 15 degrees less than 2 weeks ago and the lower humidity, but I’ve also been kicking my own butt running up lots of hills.

Sorry, no race pictures.

Probably going to be a negligent blogger for another week or so as I’m headed back to upstate NY to visit family and friends… wish me luck in the land of humidity!

Still alive.

 

Hello again!

So 2 weeks ago, I ran a 10k- my first time “racing” that distance.  My splits were wildly inconsistent, but my overall time was 53:27.  This is how I looked at the end – thanks to my friend Nicole for cheering me on near the finish and for the picture.  The cloudiness was great in that it didn’t get too hot and sunny, but bad in that it meant I didn’t need my hat and sunglasses which usually disguise my running-death-face.

My 53:27 was a 8:36 pace.  I was 4th out of 23 in my age group; 22nd of 115 women; and 97 of 237 runners overall.  Mostly I was happy to beat the guy running in Teva sandals who ran past me somewhere around mile 1, and I was able to muster up the strength to pass a couple people in the final stretch toward finish.  First place guy ran this race in 33:15, which blows my mind.

The weekend after the 4th was a super awesome outdoorsy weekend.  Friday I ran a few miles in the morning, then Dan and I biked 11 miles.  Saturday we hiked, and Sunday I ran 11ish miles with the running group. Then I did absolutely nothing on Monday (well, I worked, but that’s it).

Back to hiking: we went with a few friends, this time about an hour away to the East Fork of the San Gabriel River.  The 11.25 mile out-and-back hike involved about 6 river crossings (each way), and lots of climbing on big rocks.  The river was still flowing which meant we could take a dip to cool off on our way back.

    

  

There was a large “meetup” group congregating at the trailhead and we encountered them a few times on our hike.  We referred to this as Disney Land because of this massive group of people loudly making their way through.

After climbing up this crazy hill (a poor choice due to some trail congestion ahead), we got to come back down that same scary hill.

We saw horses and people panning for gold in the river and no rattle snakes, so I consider it a success.

This past Friday I had the opportunity to be an extra in a movie being filmed in my town.  My running group was contacted by someone from casting for the movie, looking for people to play “marathon runners".”  After filming, Haylie Duff and her costar were nice enough to join us for our running group – group picture (I assumed it would be against the actors’ contracts or something).

Last week I wimped out on going to track because it was still 103 degrees at 6pm and I could not talk myself into sprinting, or even slowly running, in that heat. 

However, on Thursday night, I did talk myself into running in 92 degrees + 30% humidity (rare in these parts).  A nearby college hosts a 3 mile cross country summer series every week for 7 weeks.  I hoped my humid-northeast upbringing would give me an advantage over these native Southern Californians who are used to running in dry heat. 

I ran the combination road/hilly dirt-and-sand XC path (including what has been nicknamed “killer hill”) course in 25:14, which I am told is good especially considering it was my first time on the course.  I hope to run it a couple more times in the next month (maybe on a cooler evening) to see if I can do any better.  It turns out that the beasts in this running town were not deterred by the humidity and I placed in the middle of the mix of 400+ runners that showed up.

Anyone else running in hot summer races?? 
I know summer is just getting under way and it will be HOT here, but I am already looking forward to cool fall weather running.

Nuggets

1.  I am attempting to teach myself Spanish with Rosetta Stone and Duolingo (<—free!).  Not surprisingly, Spanish is more useful in this corner of the world than the German I spent 5 years learning in middle and high school.

  
For some reason this dog is hilarious to me.

This saying will be really useful in my daily work.

Factually incorrect.

2.  The most recent addition to my employment status is “part-time running store employee.”

3. At some point in the last year, yellow Sour Patch Kids replaced red as my favorite flavor.

4. I take pleasure in finding strange classified ads.