The Last Time I Raced

The last time I raced was the state varsity cross-country championships in 1993. I was twelve years old and my team placed eleventh in the state. The next year I joined the marching band and the corss-country team placed first in state. Incidentally, the marching band won more contests that year than we'd ever wone before. It was a banner year for Northside Christian School, and with a K-12 population of 1000, one of the opportunities presented to students at the school--aside from the enviable luxury of being brainwashed by the Southern Baptist Convention--was the very good chance that if you were a musician, an athlete, a scholar or all of the above, chances were you'd be pushed into competition with upperclassmen while you were still in junior high. When I joined the cross-country team there wasn't even a question of whether I'd be on JV or varsity...there simply wasn't a JV team, and varsity needed a second alternate. I ran seven-minute miles, culminating in a 6:54 personal best, and a 14:08 personal best two-mile, the length of the girls' meets. In Florida the weather is easily bewildering and despite the fact that we routinely ran between ten and twenty miles a day, girls raced a comfortable two miles to the boys' 5ks, then considered too long and hot for the fragile females.

The last time I raced I wore a silver-and-blue-and-white cross-country uniform, a sleeveless, shapeless top over baggy basketball-style shorts and Asics running shoes. The shapeless top housed a shapeless, bony girl-child's torso, the long, baggy shorts accommodated well-muscled, nicely-shaped legs and the Asics were stuffed with bony feet constantly propelling me forward. The last time I raced I was just doing what I was supposed to do: run, dammit. Run fast. Run hard. Wear yourself out. Be red-faced, bleary-eyed, wild-haired and sweaty as hell when you cross that finish line. Run hard and fast. Or else.

This time, things were a little different. For one, nobody cared what my place time was. Including me. I wasn't out to win any medals or help a team place. I was registered in the citizens' race of the Bolder Boulder, one anonymous face among a sea of thousands. 48,000 or thereabouts, to be totally accurate. I knew five other fellow racers: my boyfriend Gregory, my good friend Brian, and Gregory's friends Janelle, Brad and Shannon. Instead of being surrounded by my teammates, I was surrounded by a sea of teeming humanity, everyone from hard-core runners who'd trained for months hoping to keep their finish time within a ten-second span to...well, to people like me, overweight former athletes who quit the worst habit anyone could ever start two months before and started haphazardly training. My "uniform" this time was a white Champion sleeveless shirt made of a synthetic material called Dri-Max or Dri-Fit or something of that nature, a pair of light blue running shorts and an awesome pair of running kicks that Gregory bought for me as a congratulatory present for quitting smoking. Oddly, they're Asics. This time, I didn't worry about my finish time so much...around an hour would be nice, but no big deal. I wasn't out to prove myself to anyone. I really just wanted a couple of things: I wanted to finish, no matter what. I also wanted to run the stadium, that is, the last tenth of a mile or so, where all of the runners for the Bolder Boulder wind up, looping into and around inside of CU's Folsom Field, my alma mater's football stadium. I wanted to run that part. The rest I'd leave to...fate? Chance? Destiny? God? Basically, whatever was looking out for me.

It was the coldest Bolder Boulder I've ever seen. I've lived here in this town to witness six Bolder Boulders now, and I was rather infuriated at the weather. However, being a Coloradan, my level of weather-based fury is rather tempered to a cool shrug. I'm used to the fickle weather, and it seemed fitting, after awhile, that my first Bolder Boulder would be the coldest anyone had seen in years. I fiddled with the safety pins holding my bib to my shirtfront driving us all over to the start line. It was the first time in ages I'd worn a race bib. GB317 on the front, and on the back I wore an "I'm Running In Honor Of" memorial bib. It wasn't in memory, but it was in honor...in my own little way, I had to dedicate this race to higher powers than myself, so I figured I'd run in honor of "those whose support got me this far", as I wrote, "Mom, Dad, Gregory, my wonderful family and friends..." etc., etc. I figured even if I sucked, maybe their spirits would be behind me, kicking my ass along a bit.

I stopped ot walk early on, and Brad and Brian, who'd been staying close to me, dusted me. I waved them on, not wanting to hold anyone back, and for most of the rest of the race, I ran alone. At one point Shannon ran by me as I was walking through a water stop. "You okay?" She called out, and I smiled and waved.

A couple of cool things about the Bolder Boulder. First of all, it's held on Memorial Day Monday and draws thousands of people from all over the country to this little mountain town to do this little 10k. It carries an infamy I was already familiar with, but only as a spectator. As a runner, I began to understand why people take weekends off and haul to Boulder for the race. For one, the spectators are awesome. Everything from Blues Brothers and Elvis impersonators to really, really bad garage bands to full-scale sound systems booming good vibrations and tinny boomboxes playing scratchy eighties music accompanies your run. At several points you'll come across belly dancers, hippie squads flashing peace signs, students armed with massive squirt guns hosing hot runners down and then your run-of-the-mill spectators: families, neighbors in bath robes, elderly couples waving and smiling, enthusiastic people of every age, race, occupation and athletic capability rooting you on loudly. All along the route people call out your number, random well-wishers encouraging you forward. I don't remember whether or not I smiled a lot during my cross-country races, but I know that if I did, my determined, gritted-teeth grin came nowhere near the heartfelt, one-thousand-watt, loose, cheerful smile plastered across my face for the duration of this 10k. I slapped five with at least twenty different people, from the Dan Aykroyd impersonator to a five year old little girl who jumped excitedly out at me, her hands outstretched.

Another cool thing is the run into the stadium. You finish your run feeling like an Olympic athlete. Just the buzz in the stadium created by the people in the stands waiting for their runner and/or finished runners chatting or sheering others on creates an enormous excitement and doing that half-lap around the inside of Folsom, it feels like everyone is cheering for you. No matter how beat you are, you have to run at that point.

Fellow runners are great forms of encouragement, especially when they don't know it. At one point a man ran by me and tapped me on the back. "I like your bib," he said, tapping the "in honor of" bib pinned to the back of my shirt. I have no idea who that guy was, I don't even remember what he looks like, but he gave me a second or, by that time, perhaps fourth or fifth, wind.

Meeting up with friends afterwards, comparing times (especially when you start in the wrong wave like most of us did) and goody bags, talking about the race and sharing our own little moments of it, and, this time, getting the bag Gregory packed with all of our stuff in it and tugging our warm-ups on over our shorts and chilly thighs, are all fun moments. I almost missed my favorite postrace moment, though.

My mom and I spoke the night before and while she'd been saying she wanted to come in for it, she wasn't sure if she was going to be able to make th ehourlong drive down, find parking, and get to the stadium in time. Life's been stressful for her lately, and she had company in town, an old family friend from Jersey who I didn't even really remember, who would have to come along as well. When I hung up with her, I was pretty sure she wasn't going to be there and, consequently, I kind of forgot to look for her, especially once I found my friends.

Fortunately my boyfriend is more conscientious than I am. As I was busy chatting with our friends, I looked down and over a section to see him chatting with a couple of strange women. One of them began dialing something on his cell phone, and suddenly my phone began to ring. As I picked it up and heard her voice over the line, I saw the woman using his phone turn slightly towards me. Mom had made it after all, and Gregory was keeping her--and her long-distance friend--company while they tried to locate me. I made my way through the stands to her, and she greeted me--despite my ignorance of her presence after she'd driven down in freezing weather at the crack of dawn to see me run, only to wait around an hour after my finish until I finally found her--with a big hug and congratulations. It was starting to feel a little more like the last time I raced, and even though my mom only stayed for a few minutes, the familiarity she brought to the day brought tears to my eyes as I walked back across campus to meet my friends and Gregory after walking Mom and her friend to their car. My legs were sore and shaky, I was a little dehydrated and I really just wanted to stretch well and sit down for awhile. I felt exhilarated and exhausted at the same time, but also happy and content. I'd done it. I'd finished, I'd run substantially more than I'd walked and I ran the stadium. My time was, at about an hour and a few minutes, a bit better than I originally thought it'd be, and I was now among the Boulderites who'd wear their Bolder Boulder shirts proudly about town. I happily set off across campus to meet my friends.

My euphoria came to a slightly halt, though, if only momentarily. While little could really change the way this race made me feel, and nothing could take the experience away, there was a little dark lining to this silver cloud. I hadn't beaten Gregory by any stretch of the imagination. Nobody in our group had, actually; he'd outpaced everyone and came in first of all of us, even Janelle, the serious marathoner among us. Next time I'll have to remind myself of a few things:
-Never ever ever bet your odds of winning are better than an Ironman triathlete's, unless you are one as well.
-Train better, not harder. Training too hard sidelined me for a week with a nasty strain to my left foot and swollen knees due to poorly-stretched ITB muscles (I am STILL paying for this one). While I'm not sure that week would've necessarily helped, it woulddn't have hurt, and as it is, he only beat me by about ten minutes or so.
-Never ever ever gamble with the French. Look at Vietnam.
-If you're going to make such a gamble, make sure you don't mind the consequences too much. In my case I didn't. Neither did he.

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.

Hey man...thanks

Almost everybody meets at least one person who has a profound impact on their life. Most of us meet a few. Some of us are lucky enough...or perhaps, thoughtful enough...to realize it. My family, especially my parents and my little sister Emily, most of my teachers but most especially my high school band director, Corry Petersen, my best friend Shawn, my ex-boyfriend Bob, who to this day knows me as well as any member of my family and remains a close friend. My colleagues Marsha and Denine, and my work buddy Kelly, who's becoming more and more my good friend. A lot of the time, you don't really realize the importance of their influence in your life, and hindsight is almost always 20/20. I have inherited from my parents the (usually) fortunate perspective that everything, no matter how weird, bad, good, extraordinary or seemingly detrimental, every experience is a learning experience. Everything works out okay in the end. And even when it doesn't, you've still gained all the more from actually experiencing it.

I've also, unfortunately, inherited a strange insomnia from my mother. My father sleeps like a brick, and I've never known the man to be less than a few minutes from solid, heavy sleep once his head hits the pillow. I hope, for his sake, that this is still the case, because insomnia sucks. Especially when you get it at least once a month, like me, and you know it so well you don't even try to beat it anymore. My body's reaction to sleeping aids is to fight them, so I refuse to try to take them anymore. When I get this type of insomnia, it's just all th ebetter to sit up writing a blog post or a journal entry with some cheesy movie on cable (it's "Kingpin" right now) in the background than lay in bed for hours on end watching the minutes tick by and trying to devise ways to trick my brain into shutting off. That's really it: my brain just won't close shop for the night, and I spend the next day wondering at the vibrance of my colleagues as I stumble through on an hour or two of sleep and a lot of caffeine.

However, serious insomnia also gives you a lot of time to ponder things. When in a position like this, I tend to let my brain wander and try not to dwell on one thing too much, just in case it should wander to sleep. This night, my brain keeps wandering back to my boyfriend.

You tend to forget yourself sometimes when you have such an idyllic person in your life, and I, having strong tendencies towards this, tend to push away when I feel like I'm getting too close. Especially when I don't feel that my feelings are being reciprocated. I freak out and I shut down and I almost lose one of the most important people in my life.

I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow or next week, three months from now or ten years, but I do know that no matter what happens between us, I'm quite grateful to my boyfriend. He really, really has been the defining influence in getting me back on the track to who I want to be, who I used to be when I was younger. All of the roads leading to my silly, playful, athletic, tomboy self have taken serious twists in the last seven or eight years, and somewhere along the way I lost myself...or at least, a lot of it.

When Gregory and I started seeing each other I was hyper-paranoid about this happening again. I didn't really feel like I knew myself very well anymore, but I knew I wasn't too happy with the person I was at the time and didn't want to get serious with anyone because I always tended to "lose myself" when that happened. Gregory was, much to his credit, extremely patient with me, and as things progressed, I started to see that I really didn't want to be without him. I really liked this one, mostly because he brought out everything in me that I always really liked. I have a better attitude, a better sense of humor, a lighter outlook, a greater sense of self-worth and a healthier approach towards life. I quit smoking, and while everyone I know has recognized this as no small feat, Gregory was there every day in the beginning and, though I don't crave anymore and never ever want to cigarette between my lips again, has been there throughout. Aside from being the biggest catalyst, he's also been my biggest supporter, at least insofar as physically being there for me day in and day out. A couple of weeks in I came home for my lunch break from work to find a card waiting for me on my desk. Its contents detailed his being proud of me, despite the apparent "fact" that I am going to beat him at the Bolder Boulder (not likely).

As it turned out, this is the one relationship where I didn't lose myself, but rather kind of stumbled across myself again. I often wonder at what I could have possibly done to deserve such a great guy, and relish the thought of having been canonized or martyred in a past life and this is some exixtentialist make-up for that.

Then I think about the nature of things between us, and just Gregory's character in general. Between attracting new clients to his company (and maintaining systems for the current ones), volunteering as "shark bait" at Ocean Journey, the Denver aquarium where he works twice a month putting his Dive Master certification to good work by jumping in a huge pool with a bunch of reef fish and sharks (yes, sharks) to feed the fish (and sharks), clean the aquarium, and entertain visitors, working towards his pilot's license, training for Ironman in Perth in November and maintaining his status so he can stay in the country and keep working (ah, the joys of immigration...after hearing about what legal immigrants have to put up with, I can't imagine why anyone would want to get into this country). Yet this guy constantly sports a huge grin that lights up his eyes, which sparkle even when he's being quite serious, and has one of the most positive outlooks of anyone I've ever known. He's attractive, fit, healthy, trim, and very handsome, but doesn't come off as if he knows that at all...there's much more of an "Aw, shucks..." presence to Gregory than anything else. He's unassuming, polite, sweet, incredibly friendly and extremely outgoing. He'll talk to anyone and no matter who they are, he makes them feel more valuable thereafter. Chatting with him is great, and hearing him speaking to his parents or his best friend in French is even better, though I don't understand fully one percent of what he's saying. It's the passion in his voice, the excitement you can hear no matter what the language. It's how alive he is.

It's how I feel too, in the last few months. Not to say I wouldn't have gotten there without him, but Gregory's provided a strong and stable compass that was also fun to be around and made me laugh in addition to pointing me in the right direction...back towards the person I used to be, the person I love to be. Back towards me.

When you pedestallize someone, anything they do can devalue their status in your eyes and therefore, hurt the relationship. When you practice a healthy admiration for your partner, your friend, your lover, you realize the difference really quickly. For me, it's that when I look at my boyfriend, or think of him, or talk about him, I always smile. The difference between pedestallizing and admiration is clear because I can see the way he looks at me too. His gaze mirrors mine. "What...?" One of us will ask. The other one responds, "Nothin...just looking at you."

So hey, Gregory...thanks. I could've done it without you---could've quit smoking, could've started running again, biking again, swimming here and there, could've broken out of my cynicism, etc.--but I probably wouldn't have, and certainly not so quickly. So hey man, thanks. I hope you stick around for awhile, because I sure enjoy your company. I hope you feel the same about mine.

On Failure and the Kindness of Strangers

So today was my first attempt at serious distance. I planned my route, dressed accordingly, ate beforehand and carried with me two energy bars, to energy gels (as disgusting as I always expected they were), and a bottle filled with diluted Gatorade. My route, if it went as planned, would take me on my usual 3.5 mile loop for a warm-up, then up an 8-10-mile descent to Gold Hill at the end of Sunshine Canyon, then back down into Boulder. All told, I'd walk roughly the distance of a marathon. I clipped my pedometer to my running shorts' waistband, typed up a quick e-mail to Gregory to let him know where I was going, and headed out.

Of course, things didn't go as planned (there would be no point in stating "if it went as planned" if it actually DID go as planned)...the canyon road was a grade of roughly 8-10% as well as being roughly 8-10 miles long. Over the course of the road, I would ascend approximately 3500 feet in elevation, topping out at Gold Hill, elevation somewhere around 8900 feet. I didn't really put two and two together here and ended up totally beat halfway up after race-pacing my walking. Yes, walking...I'd like to see you try to run it.

I also neglected to bring enough fluids. My hands began to swell badly about halfway up and I was out of Gatorade. I wasn't checking my pedometer as much as I probably should've--in the vain hope that I'd go further than I thought I had. By the time I nearly reached Gold Hill I had made up my mind to call Gregory when I got there for an impromptu rescue. In reality, I would've been fine had I just brought enough water...the constant uphill was a bit tiring, but it was entirely exhausting when exacerbated by dehydration. I ended up really kicking myself for that performance. By the time my pedometer read 11 miles, I was depleted, swollen and cranky. Every time I rounded a corner, the road just went up...and up...and up. I wanted to cry.

Instead, I kept moving. One nice thing about working out in Colorado is that as long as you're outside, no matter what else is going on, you have the luxury of some of the most breathtaking views imaginable. From the Sunhine Canyon Road (formerly a nice little mountain road home to fond memories especially with my friend Shawn, now a nemesis to challenge in a rematch) you can look right around you and see the semi-arid climate in its late spring splendor: tiny bright flowers scattered about, striated sandstone boulders, desert grasses...or, you can look up and see snow-capped mountains in the distance and the magnificent spread of lush foothills preceding the snowy fourteeners carpeted by evergreen and aspen. The houses up Sunshine Canyon, at first, redefine "property value" in terms of Boulder real estate, where the current average price for a single-family home is $549,000. Gold Hill, as a town, resembles Ward and Nederland in population: hippies, neo-hippies and real mountain folk (no, not the Vail poseurs who drove real estate through the roof by building multimillion-dollar homes along the I-70 corridor)--sun-chapped, wind-hardened, often sporting scraggly beards and skinny-braided locks of hair, higher-elevation people who have managed to retain their tiny plot of worth-its-weight-in-gold land because it's been passed down to them through the generations--as well as in real estate: strangely-shaped, poorly-built homes suffering from expanding from one to six rooms in a series of ill-devised construction attempts. These are the houses you see further up the canyon, especially at the end of the paved section of road. So no matter where you look, you're bound to see something interesting.

"Something interesting" did not, unfortunately, quite make up for lack of water. I was about a mile from Gold Hill when I happened upon two young men walking back up from a little overlook towards a bright yellow Jeep Wrangler. I'd long ago given up on any hope of getting water on the trail and was doggedly and devotedly trudging towards Gold Hill. "Excuse me?" I called. "How much further to Gold Hill?"

Now, as a single woman in a town most recently known for sex scandals, I tend to err on the side of caution and try to make myself invisible or, at least, appear deaf and/or mute when I'm on my own out and about. Not to say Boulder is a dangerous place--it isn't at all--but as a woman you learn quickly, if your mother taught you well, that just being alone puts you in a more compromised and sometimes dangerous position than it does men. Soliciting help from men when you're all alone, especially when you're alone, out in the middle of nowhere, and totally exhausted, is not advisable.

However, I was not only alone, out in the middle of nowhere, and exhausted, I was also seriously questioning my ability to continue. I'm pretty sure if I hadn't planned a route that gained 3000+ feet in elevation and managed to actually bring enough water to supply myself for the journey I would've been able to do it, but those were facts not in my favor, and besides, they looked like nice enough guys, and at least one of them was wearing a wedding band.

They confirmed what I suspected: that Gold Hill was at least another mile. I licked my very dry lips with my very dry tongue and mustered a small smile. "Hey, you guys don't have any water, do you?"

As it turned out, one of them had a thermos filled with water. We chatted for a few minutes, and I started to feel a little better. Then I looked back out at the road...still climbing. I sighed and turned back to the guys. "Are you headed back to Boulder?"

They were, and I asked if I could hop a ride. I've never hitched, I've never accepted rides from strangers and I have no problem getting myself around, but I was pretty done. I would have no issue with leaving Sunshine Canyon for another day.

They agreed, cautioning that they didn't have a back seat. Their names were Dave and Jeff, and as I gulped water greedily on the way back to Boulder, I discovered they'd come out to go four-wheeling, they had been friends for years and they were out for one last hurrah before Jeff graduated and moved away. They were extremely kind to me, especially given the horrible state I was in (swollen, thick-tongued, lips chapped and covered in sweat and road dust), and they got me back to Boulder. Once there I called Gregory and begged for mercy. I asked him about the edema I was experiencing and he replied candidly, "That's from not drinking enough water."

Okay, so I need to get a decent hydration rig and find better-tasting energy gels (chocolate-flavored Gu is terrible). I need to go out prepared next time I do any serious endurance training, so that next time I can finish.

As ill-prepared as I was, I slathered myself with enough sunscreen that I managed a decent runner's tan and not a nasty sunburn. My next effort at a marathon-length run/walk will be planned on a fairly level route, and if I don't have any better hydration gear by then, it will also include water stops at grocery and/or convenience stores so I don't swell like an overstuffed sausage in its casing. For now, I'm really very grateful for the kindness of strangers. And, of course, sympathetic boyfriends.

Man, does it feel good to finish nearly two solid hours of running and walking.

Man, if somebody told me I'd be writing something like that three months ago I would've laughed my ass off. But it does. I can feel my body responding more quickly and efficiently to the exercise. I am slow to warm up, and I still often have to run a good half-mile or so before easing into a comfortable pace, but once I'm there, that's it. I feel like I can run forever. When I DO stop, I recover very, very quickly, a fact that has surprised me.

The worst part about quitting smoking and upping the intensity of your exercise level substantially--and simultaneously--is that you really realize how incredibly stupid you were to spend whatever amount of time you spent smoking. It was seven years for me. Seven years of time, money and healthy lung tissue spent in the worst possible way. The saying that the only tihng worse than a non-smoker is an ex-smoker is true, too; I hate being around it, I hate smelling it on people, I hate smokers' breath, the way their clothes smell, the way that scent hangs around them all the time, and most of all I hate knowing that a lot of people thought the same of me not too long ago.

Running is an interesting endeavor; since you are constantly pushing your body and after awhile your knees feel like they're being jammed into your shins and every footfall is a chance to feel your joints knocking together, it's an easy sport to give up. Just as easy, however, is it an addiction. I'd long forgotten the feeling of zoning out entirely, feeling completely at ease just putting one foot in front of the other, matching pace to breath to stride, slowing when necessary, speeding up when possible, and feeling like you could go on forever. Today I ran/walked from my house in north Boulder to Gregory's at the edge of south Boulder towards the outer edges of town, then back to my office in north Boulder. Sometime soon I'll actually use the pedometer I bought the other day and start really working on my race pace, but right now it just feels so good to stride, stride, stride and feel as if I could do it forever. When I got to my office it was around eight p.m. and, gratefully, there was nobody there, but I ran up there to pick up a pound of extremely high-quality organic ground beef I'd received from our meat department earlier--the perks of working for a natural foods corporation--and subsequently forgotten in the kitchen fridge. I was stuck with a mild dilemma then...run home with the pound of beef and hope it didn't get too warm or fuck up my pacing too much by carrying it, or chicken out, call my boyfriend and beg in earnest for a ride. My legs were killing me by then, so I chickened out and Gregory was kind enough to drop everything and come drive me home.

The whole time I was running, though, by myself (Gregory met me about a third of the way from my house to his...or two-thirds of the way for him, and ran back to his place with me, so I had company for the first half), a little voice kept whispering three little words, rhythmically in tune with my breathing...(i'm getting stronger...i'm getting stronger). My lower back aches now and my hips hurt a bit, but otherwise I feel great. Oh, and there's nothing like running anywhere in Boulder, Colorado. My friends give me shit because I prefer streets to trails...don't ask me why, I don't know...and when I run the bike and pedestrian paths I tend to choose those close to streets, like this one out by the highway, but it doesn't matter. All you have to do is look up, and you see the most spectacular foothills on the planet, and the biggest sky on earth, and no matter where your mental conditioning is at that moment, you just have to grin and thank your lucky stars...you live in the most beautiful place in the world.

The Bikram's Experience

Yoga means different things to different people. To some, it's merely another deviation on the term "workout", a physical means of stretching and posturing with a physical end of increased flexibility, balance, and well-developed muscle tone. To others, it's more an experience of the mind, designed to draw you into yourself and promote greater mental, emotional and spiritual well-being through a highly meditational experience. For most practitioners, it's a combination of these two. Yoga students can be distinguished from the general population by several noticeable traits: they usually carry themselves with better posture and a grace of movement that comes from properly developing muscle groups to maintain balance and alignment, and they're often "stringbeans", or, very very skinny people with longer, leaner muscles resulting from toning through stretches rather than weight training.

Then again, to some people, yoga is the quickest way to lose five pounds in ninety minutes. No, I'm serious. When you start sweating the moment you walk through the studio door and are wiping away streams of perspiration (who knew you had so many pores?) within the first fifteen minutes, you can lose five pounds rather quickly. That's not the goal and since it is entirely waterweight you must rehydrate--and therefore, replace--those five pounds as quickly as possible or face the rather severe consequences of extreme dehydration, but it is a rather interesting little fact. The Bikram style of yoga, championed by former hatha practitioner Bikram Choudhury, is a practice combining a series of postures and bookended at the beginning and end by breathing exercises. Some of the postures are well-known hatha poses, such as the camel pose or the tree pose, and some are designed specifically for this particular style of yoga. It's all performed slowly and deliberately, and boasts the benefits of any standard yoga practice, from hatha to power yoga, of increased flexibility, mental clarity, muscle strength and development, balance, etc.

Did I mention that the room you're doing these postures in is a requisite ninety-five to one-hundred-and-five degrees Fahrenheit?

What sets Bikram's apart from the rest of the yoga world is, in a word, the heat. High-intensity heat is a part of this practice, designed to increase your body's ability to remove toxins. It also makes it more of a cardiovascular workout than yoga often is, and, at least for some of us, ratchets up the intensity of the meditational quality. I haven't ever tried abother form of yoga and don't think I ever will; I have kind of found my niche here, I'm a born multitasker; allowing my mind to wander freely at all virtually guarantees a shut-down of any sort of transcendental or meditational experience. Forcing me to contort my muscles into odd positions only guarantees that I will be a little more flexible; forcing me to contort my muscles into odd positions in 100-degree heat guarantees that I will be focused on it. When it's that hot, you can't afford to let your mind wander; it MUST be entirely focused on the postures. That's why this form of yoga is the one for me (knowing that I will be leaving with towels and clothing I can literally wring out is NOT).

So, I've been doing Bikram's on a very occasional basis for the past three years or so, usually going to a studio in Boulder run by a woman who makes the Nazis look like cuddly little teddy bears in her approach to critiquing her students and, as often as I can or every time I'm visiting my mother, attending the classes at the Fort Collins studio, run by a much nicer man with the unique ability to find something kind to say to eacj of his students, especially those of us who struggle. Recently a Bikram's studio opened at the Flatirons Crossing mall, a massive, expansive shopping center that very nearly has its own zip code (I think the lack of residential space is the only reason it doesn't) just up the street from lovely Boulder, Colorado. Aside from being entirely too amused at the idea that someone would actually, in mid-shopping, shed their street clothes for the lightest, skimpiest outfit they own and toil for ninety minutes in an oven only to emerge red-faced, dripping and stinky with perspiration, I figured it was nice to have an alternative to the neo-Nazi who ran the main studio in Boulder. I've been off-and-on bugging Gregory to give yoga a shot and, somewhere in the midst of the post-half-Ironman reverie that has apparently been clouding his better judgment, he agreed. We picked up a schedule at the mall studio and decided to attend a ten a.m. Sunday class.

Now, dating an athlete in training for an Ironman comes with its advantages...as well as its disadvantages. Some of the advantages are: almost always having something athletic to do, because you can just jump into his routine and do as much or as little of it as you can stomach at any given time, feeling like what you're doing is relatively easy because endurance training involves lengthy distances at a generally slow pace, and, yes, bragging rights to dating a bona fide lunatic. I mean who else would take on an event with those dimensions (2.4mi swim, 112mi. bike, marathon or 26.2mi. run) but the completely insane? Some of the disadvantages are: waking up alone on a fairly regular basis (my wake-up greeting is often a note: "D- Went running/cycling/swimming. Back in about three hours. -G 10:30am...when I wake up at ten-forty-five), feeling like a total bum while recounting that, while your boyfriend was out on a 70-mile bike ride you were at home devouring Sex & The City reruns, and suffering frayed nerves all weekend because your boyfriend just did one of the most intense half-Ironman courses in the world but it's out in the middle of nowhere with no cell service or signal of any sort and you can't even get an "Are you okay?" text message to him. The pros significantly outweigh the cons, but aside from being elated that he was going to come to yoga WITH me (nobody ever comes to yoga with me), there was definitely a little fiendish devil in me rubbing her hands and laughing maniacally. The boy had no idea what he was getting himself into. My mother, an avid cyclist, Tour de France follower and former triathlete, has been to one Bikram's class with me. When I told her that Gregory and I were going to take a class together, her first comment was: "He's screwed."

The heat isn't really the worst part about Bikram's, at least not after awhile. Some of the postures are torturous, heated room or not, and they are all designed to really amplify the intensity of muscular stretch and tone. What becomes difficult is trying to acclimate to the heat and do the postures and take enough water breaks so that you're properly rehydrating. I've seen people go through a gallon and a half of water in one class, and I've seen people pass out because they're not drinking enough. The heat is brutal, but the dangers come from not being aware of it. I love it because it turns my muscles into slightly more viscous Jell-O; I can bend and move in ways I never thought possible. Because I've been a fair-weather student I end up paying for it the next day, but I'm always grateful I've gone, no matter how sore my shoulders, triceps, hamstrings, pecs, quads and other assorted muscle groups are. BUT, Gregory hates high heat. And to his credit, he admits readily that his flexibility and balance leave something to be desired.

So we attended the class. I informed him that the shirt he had on wouldn't last long; he left it in the locker room. I told him to drink a lot of water, and he did. I told him that the most important goal was to stay int he room for the entire class, and he did, exiting flushed and dripping at the class' finish with me. He'd done an excellent job for a first-timer, completing most of the postures and sitting out a few at the end. I'd tried to keep my eye on him, mostly because I felt entirely responsible for dragging him into this to begin with, but also because...well, I never really saw my boyfriend as much of a yoga person. The man is built like a linebacker and trains for long-distance endurance events, not knock-down-drag-out ninety-minute sweatfests. By the time the class was over, I couldn't gauge his expression. For all I knew he fell in love with it...or absolutely hated it.

"I loved it!" He announced, striding up to the desk and paying for two more classes. Uh-oh...

We may have created a monster.

Thoughts On My First 5K In A Decade

Some interesting things happened to me today that haven't in over ten years. A sampling:

1) shin splints
2) self-pacing
3) "Are you sure you don't have to go?"
4) dehydration...that I really felt
5) Passersby running up to me, an alarmed look on their faces, saying, "Oh my God, are you okay?"
6) (upon arriving home, post-run) "Damn, I need to buy Gatorade."

Okay, so, the explanation:

1) shin splints: these are wonderful little pains that shoot up your--you guessed it!--shins when you're doing a high-impact activity like running. The more out of shape you are, the worse they hurt, at least in my experience, and the more fit you are, the more quickly they disappear. It's not like I spent the whole 5K in severe pain...though I started out that way. The bad news, at leats for me, was that they hurt like hell when they started. The good news is that they went away within about a quarter of a mile.

2) self-pacing: okay, so when you're in a race you can usually within the first few minutes lock down on a pacer, someone going about the same speed you are and is in your line of sight who you can keep your eye on during the run and maintain approximately the same speed. When you're out running alone it's really easy to screw up your pacing, especially when you're used to team training. As a cross-country runner and racer in Florida I never ran alone; I was always either with my teammates or in a race. Gregory and I ran together once and I was able to keep up with his pace, but the man had already done a full days' workout (which is something like four to seven hours of running, cycling, or swimming or some combination of two of the above) and the run we did was like a little cool-down for him. That one actually felt good, because we were moving at a snail's pace. My biggest problem with starting to run again from a performance standpoint was pacing. I would start out at my old race pace, which meant seven minute miles a decade or so ago but now means I get about half a block before I'm wheezing. To some degree this run began that way too; for the first half of it I did a pretty up-and-down run/walk, sometimes accelerating to my old race pace and sometimes walking...briskly. For the second half, though, I made up my mind to run it. That meant not stopping. I completed the last half of the run the way I wanted to, running the whole time, learning to pace myself, check my pace and re-pace as necessary. This was huge...I've never done it before and also never realized how essential, and difficult, it can be (largely because I never needed to do it before now!) to maintain your own pace. But finishing the last mile and a half and running the whole thing...man, did that feel good.

3) "Are you sure you don't have to go?" This is a phrase most of us stop hearing when we're children, and it's being asked of us by our parents, and it refers to the bathroom. It's one of those that is usually brought to an abrupt halt as the child matures and goes from smiling winningly at the parent to rolling their eyes and hissing "Yes!" in mortal embarrassment at the question. Now, I don't ask myself this every time I leave and I usually don't need to...I can handle my potty time by now, thank you very much; however, I forgot that when you're running for forty-five minutes or so and a substantial portion of your run is through neighborhood streets with virtually no commercial property whatsoever around you, chances are you need to make sure you've visited the loo before leaving home. This was, easily, the most amusing of my thoughts, as it brought me back to thinking that I am, again, an infant...an infantile athlete, that is. There are few opportunities in life where you get to regress back to infancy and literally start all over again, but athletics is one area where that is always the case...if you don't keep training, you lose your ability to perform, and the deterioration is quick and intense.

4) dehydration...that I really felt Okay this one isn't as scary as it sounds; I didn't drop dead of thirst halfway through or anything, but I am the first to admit that I am terrible about drinking enough water. I drink soda like it's going out of style and water only when I have no other option. Running today, I really felt that. My mouth dried up and my lips were a virtually impregnable fortress around my teeth, they were so thickly glued together. I'm glad I didn't feel thirsty because, as one of Gregory's tri magazines pointed out recently, if you're thirsty, you're already in trouble, but I was definitely overheating a bit and perspiring too little for the workout I was doing...I have GOT to start drinking more water....beginning with the refill of the glass I just downed sitting in front of me at my desk.

5) Passersby running up to me, an alarmed look on their faces, saying, "Oh my God, are you okay?" Now, actually, this IS something I'm kind of used to, because I'm a total klutz. I crash into stuff, drop things, lose my balance and fall over, etc. all the time. I am not, however, used to minding my own business and having someone run up to me--from across the street, mind you--to stop me in the middle of my run and ask if I'm all right. Seriously. Today as I neared Broadway on Balsam, a woman who was walking her dog across the street from me saw me, looked suddenly alarmed, and bolted across the street towards me. I was in the midst of my running reverie, that wonderful little somewhere you float away to when you're jamming to good tunes and your adrenaline is nice and boosted, when she grabbed my arm. "Oh my God, are you okay?" She asked. I jogged in place for a moment, tearing off my headphones and looking at her quizzically. "Yeah, I'm fine. Are you okay?" It seemed only natural that I should ask her as well; maybe she really wasn't and this was her way of using reverse psychology to be able to tell me or something. "Yes, I'm fine," she replied, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to bother you, but your face is really, really red." I smiled, nodded, assured her that I really was okay and thanked her, and we both continued on our respective merry ways. Now, while it was very sweet of her to stop and ask, I really was fine, and I broke my stride to chat with her, and, well, I would say it's due to the dehydration but it really isn't...I could drink gallons of water and electrolyte replacement drinks daily and my face would STILL be beet-colored after the first half-mile of any run. It's something that always happens, and if I've been running for a really long time, my skin turns white just around my lips, nose and eyebrows and the rest of my face is red. I can't help it, though while I appreciate this woman's concern (this really has happened before; when I was a cross-country runner in Florida I got asked this question at every race I was in, for school or individually) I'd rather just let the world of Boulder know that unless I'm flat on my back I'm probably all right. So this section also functions as a warning for any Boulderites reading this blog (yeah right...because sooo many of you are!): I have quite short red-blonde hair and fair skin, and I wear either black Adidas warm-ups (the kind with the triple stripe down the outside of each leg) and a grey yoga top with criscrossing straps or black running shorts with same top and/or maybe a tee shirt over the top. I also almost always wear some sort of sound system running...my CD player and stereo headphones thus far, but if I can get Gregory's sport MP3 player working he's said I can borrow it instead, and my hair is almost always in a headband. If you see me on foot, in this gear or something similar, jogging, and my face is beet-colored, I'm okay. Thanks for asking. ;)

6) (upon arriving home, post-run) "Damn, I need to buy Gatorade." I haven't needed to keep electrolyte replacement drinks on hand in a very, very long time, and nothing does the trick for me like Gatorade. My mom loves Propel, but I'm a classics fan when it comes to my sports drinks. It was nice to open up my fridge and think that rather than, "Damn, I need to buy some Coke."

The Bolder Boulder is May 30...T-minus 27 days and counting!

Aerobics OnDemand

Now, if King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in Monty Python and the Holy Grail had really been thinking about it when God charged them with their sacred quest to find the grail, they would probably have at least wondered why God couldn't find it Himself. After all, He is God. Now there's an alternate ending for you...one that would end the movie approximately twenty minutes after it began.

These are the kind of thoughts that creep into your head when you're trying to follow a perky blonde aerobics instructor who is charging you with a very different, though no less difficult, mission. "Tone those arms! Work those triceps! Yeah, starting to feel the heat now!" By the time she said that I rolled my eyes and sank onto the ground. I'd been feeling the heat since the stretching segment. The Monty Python thought came first. Next, I am so screwed on the 30th.

The Bolder Boulder is now less than a month away and, instead of being characteristically seventy degrees and sunny, the weather has taken a turn for the worse or, at least, the more ironic. I'm glad Gregory's returning from his tri/business trip on Wednesday as it will give him at least a few more days of psychotic Colorado weather, something he's yet to experience as a resident. It's the first of May and as I sit here writing this snow is falling outside. I gaze mournfully at the tiny flakes. A combination of recent illness (24-hour stomach flu and severl-day-long cold) and incelement weather has pushed my training regimen off track. Gregory may be able to go run in a blizzard, but that's because the man owns more quick-drying and weatherproof outwerwear than Patagonia. And he's training for an Ironman. And I'm not. Training sick is never a good idea, so I made up my mind to take the last couple of days off, determining last night that I would do a serious run this morning and a workout segment courtesy of my cable company later in the day.

When I awoke this morning, it was sleeting. Now it's snowing. It's not really sticking but it is damned cold outside, and I really doubt that my still-recuperating immune system would be very happy with me if I forced it into overdrive right now. So I pulled my coffee table aside, threw on my yoga clothes, made sure ALL of the blinds in the house were firmly closed and snapped on the TV.

Now, I am a huge fan of OnDemand already; it's reduced those pesky trips to the video stroe significantly, but I've only recently discovered OnDemand fitness, which is basically a library of exercise videos available whenever the mood strikes you. I decided on Total Toning and Ultimate Abs, because I am currently Totally Out Of Shape with Ultimately Flabby Abs. Soon I was being guided through a series of stretches and movements by a bright-eyed no-name fitness queen, whose workouts not only drew my attention to the fact that I am totally out of shape but also to the fact that I'm a total klutz as well. At one point during an "obliques" session I nearly gave myself a black eye trying to bring my elbow to the opposite knee. Among pondering the subtle nuances of Monty Python's most popular production and my boyfriend's finish in his half-Ironman...a not-insubstantial total time of slightly over seven hours...and how badly I was going to be beaten at the end of the month, I came up with a couple of suggestions for the OnDemand people regarding their fitness segments:

1) We don't need to be told how to operate the remote and how it will stop, pause, rewind or fast-forward whenever we'd like. If we figured out how to get to the fitness programs on OnDemand, a daunting task in and of itself, we can probably handle the complicated functions of stop, play and rewind/fast forward.
2) Please, please, please, someday have an instructor who isn't perfectly fit and drop-dead-gorgeous. I mean, you don't have to have the fattest people in America either but it would be nice to have at least some more realistic looking people running these things...less of a blow to the self-esteems of the real people trying to follow them.
3) Show movements slowly before jumping into the routine. These are largely being used by people like me: who need to get back into shape. Our lack of decent physiques notwithstanding, we still deserve to be treated like normal people, and normal people cannot necessarily swing from one motion into the next without severely injuring ourselves.

Anyway, that's the beginning of it. By the end of the segments I felt more toned, a little more fit and soreness in muscles I hadn't had in awhile. Seeing as I need to make up for missing my run this morning, however, I am going to have to take on a cardio segment or two before heading out to the show I'm going to tonight with my friends.