On Coastal Breezes and Air Conditioners

When my mother first moved my sister and I here from Florida in August of 1995, I came kicking and screaming. When most peopleuse that phrase it's a figure of speech. I mean it literally: I was kicking and screaming. I was already an angry, confused adolescent who thought I knew everything, basking in my self-made depression and inner turmoil. I threatened to move to my father's house at least twice a day, I screamed at my mother about everything, and I slammed my door often enough that my mother took it away...multiple times. I...was...pissed. Everything I knew was gone from my life; everything and everyone familiar was now two thousand miles away. My beach, my Gulf, my house, my school, my friends...and I was stuck here in this hell hole freezing my butt off (the days would sometimes get to seventy degress in mid-August...that was the dead-of-winter low where I was from) and feeling constantly as if I was breathing through a straw. Boy, was I angry.

Ten years later I look back and laugh. Florida never held any promise for me, and while my life hasn't gone exactly as I would have liked it to (working for the second-largest natural-foods chain in the world managing promotions for one of our chains of stores isn't quite as glamorous as being a well-published author or even a lawyer or teacher), that has next to nothing to do with where I live. "This hell hole" has become home, and most of the time, you couldn't pay me enough to leave. I can barely afford to live in this town and yet I can't imagine how much I'd miss it if I had to move. Going to other places around the US and then to Greece over the last few years has given me a unique perspective on my home, and I often wonder if all Colorado residents feel the same inner glee I do when I look around other places in the world...like, hee hee, I have to put up with this for now but then I get to go back to Boulder! I'm sure most people have an attachment to their hometowns, home states/provinces/countries, etc., but mine feels better than theirs, I feel, if only because I had to fight myself so hard to really love this place.

Boulder proper, as a city, also happens to be one of the greatest places in the world if you're an athlete...or a wannabe like me. I remember reading recently in some fitness magazine quote that was ranking neighborhoods in terms of how healthy families/people who live there are, that something along the lines of a dozen Ironman (Hawaii) placers live in a ten-block radius of each other in the country's "healthiest neighborhood", the Newlands area of North Boulder. There are an overabundance of massage therapists, yoga practitioners, and of course your run-of-the-mill cyclists, runners, swimmers and triathletes. I'm five-foot-seven and around 140 pounds, not scrawny like I used to be but hardly fat...I have a little jiggle here and there when I jog and hey, I'm working on it. Going to run in a jog bra and a pair of shorts, however, as I quickly found today, makes me feel like the town's only fat person. Everyone else out today (not too many; most of the serious cyclists were out this morning and only the real crazy people like me would exercise during the hottest time of day) was slender, cut and trim, without an ounce of extraneous fat, and these are the not-so-serious athletes...the ones who only do 60-mile bike rides every Saturday and Sunday rather than 150-milers. I am just about the perfect weight for my height, perhaps a bit high, but in this town, I'ma fat person. It's almost amusing...and it definitely works in your favor when you're trying to get into shape. Aside from that, living in Boulder--or at any altitude, really--comes with it the privilege of training at altitude. If you watch any kind of sports, you know what advantage I'm talking about: you've seen the oxygen tanks lining the sidelines at football and basketball games, the benches at hockey games, and the dugouts at baseball games, when teams come from out of town to play our Broncos, Nuggets, Avalanche or Rockies. The reverse is true when you go to sea level: you last longer than usual (and usually, than most other people with similar fitness regimens) and you have more energy because your brain isn't focused entirely on sucking up as much oxygen as possible. You recover better and faster, and more completely.

There are a few benefits to living in Florida--and training and running in Florida--that I miss, and these came to me on my five-mile run today. The first came when I started thinking about getting home, about four miles or so in. I was getting fatigued, and I haven't trained in the past week after straining my knee and foot last Saturday. At my boyfriend's suggestion (Gregory has also become my impromptu sports physician and physical therapist) I laid off for a few days...and at my mind's laziness laid off for a few more, so I knew it'd be a painful run (it was, but not as bad as I thought...I did manage to get my Zen/zoned-out feeling going for a bit there) to start. Four miles in I began thinking about how mice it'd be to get home...then remembered it wasn't going to be a whole lot cooler at my house. Coloradans consider air conditioning an unnecessary luxury most of the time, and while most homes--including mine--have it, the air-conditioning unit in my apartment is pitiful at best, a wall model that makes the living room slightly cooler--sort of--and is so noisy it drowns out the television. I keep the shades drawn most of the time in the summer--which makes a dramatic difference--and the fan on in my bedroom to keep air circulating in there. Still, I knew it'd be only slightly better than outside, and my hopes faded.

Nearing the finish, I slowed to a walk, taking deep breaths and lengthy strides. A cool, dry brreze came thorugh and lifted my hsir off of my sweltering neck. Colorado's summers have an interesting efect: they're generally cooler in overall temperature over the span of summer days, but we're so much closer to the sun that it's 5000+ feet more intense than in Florida. Colorado also has about the aridity of a desert, whereas in Florida, if I didn't blow-dry my thinck, strawberry-blonde hair in the morning, it would still be wet when I came home from school. The air is so dense you can almost drink it in, making for not much fun during meets and races. I was suddenly brought back to those meets: during the hot, hot months of August and September, feeling as if you were running through water and drowning on your own breath.

But Florida, unlike Colorado, also has coastal breezes...that is, winds that sweep in from the Gulf, bringing floods of cooler, seaspray-charged air with them. For a moment, I weighed the possibilities...which was really worse?

Then I looked up and caught a view of the Flatirons. Days like today the world-famous rock-climbing precipices of Boulder's foothills--the Flatirons, which were closed for some time due to climbing deaths and boast cliff faces that invert climbers completely in some spots--look like a painting, or some fantastic mirage. There's no way to phrase in words the cut of the redd-ish-brown rocks and green treeline against the blue blue mountain sky, snowcapped peaks shining in the distance. They look as though they can't possibly be real. The first time I ever saw the mountains, when I was fourteen and woke up on our first day in Colorado, I could not stop staring. They did look like a painting...too big, too beautiful, and too alive to be real. Then, I gaped in awe. This time I smiled and put my head back down, breathing in deeply through my nose. The air smelled like pine needles and warm cedar, and for a moment I could have just as easily been on a trail in the mountains as I was standing in front of my apartment building doing my cool-down stretches. This place is my home.