This is a remarkable photograph, for anyone who knows me knows I don’t ride bikes.  But while the rest of you are out there vanquishing Frenchie mountains, as well as those local slopes at the Ring, I’ve been conquering, well, my ass.  And my shoulders.  And neck.  And long-standing absolute conviction that bicycles are vehicles of death.

It was my freshman year of college where my childhood friendship with the bicycle really went sour.  Standford University’s sprawling campus made a bike a necessity.  I had one friend who refused to bike, and I think she was late to every class she took.  You could differentiate a Stanford undergrad from a grad student by whether they wore a bike helmet, with the grad students falling universally into the head protection category.  With 5-10 thousand teenagers and young 20-somethings speeding across campus quads along self-defined pathways, a bike crash was witnessed on nearly a daily basis.  But the kicker for me was the rainy season.  As a prospective student I had visited Stanford in the delightful balmy spring.  No one had informed me that Stanford’s paradise would descend into an abysmal bleak unabating rain storm from December to April.  Seriously, not a sunny day during those months.  The worst part was not biking in the rain, or the spike in wet-induced bike accidents, but the sitting through all your classes with a soaking wet ass.  How in hell was I supposed to absorb multivariable calculus when my ass had just absorbed Lake Stanford?

When I transferred from Stanford to Amherst College after my freshman year, the reasons were primarily related to academics and athletics.  I could devote a pretty hefty blog to why I left Stanford for Amherst, it was a pretty dramatic decision that most people around me heavily questioned at the time (many of the Californians at Stanford thought that I was returning home to attend a community college — I swear half the Stanford students did not know that Massachusetts and Maryland were not neighboring states).  But I nothing made me happier than trading in the sprawling Stanford campus where Japanese tourists were shuttled around in long trains of tourist-mobiles snapping shots of students like they were exotic zoo animals (if you google ‘golf cart tour’, Stanford is the 3rd place that comes up, after Rome and Catalina Island) for the quaint, New Englandy, entirely stroll-able Amherst campus.  The bike didn’t have anything to do with why I left Stanford, except for symbolizing my sense of being completely lost amid the dizzying flurry of Stanford bicycles ridden by kids who seemed to know where they were going and getting there in a hurry.  I knew a fellow freshman who was taking double course loads, working for a start-up (this was 1999, the height of the tech bubble), and sleeping 3-4 hours a night.  My parents were kind of miffed that I’d left my bike with a friend in Palo Alto, but the bike could have no part in the second incarnation of a more zen collegiate Martha.

I wouldn’t ride a bike again until Thailand.  After graduating from Amherst and working in San Francisco a bit, my friend Sarah Wright (yes, the horse barn Sarah from Milwaukee I just visited) and I decided to muck around the world, starting in Southeast Asia.  Again, a much longer blog is required for Martha & Sarah’s adventures in the Far East, but one day Sarah convinced me, despite my deep reservations, to rent bikes for a day so we could explore some of the more remote parts of whichever city we were in — maybe it wasn’t even Thailand, maybe it was Laos or Vietnam or Cambodia, I really can’t recall.  All I can recall is that my bike ride HURT.  Hurt places that had not been hurt since the first time I tried as a 14-year old to ram a tampon in.  I suppose the $3 bikes we rented in Thailand were not exactly of the highest quality.  From then on I equated biking with some kind of torture.

When I moved to Penn State to start my PhD in biology, I discovered that biking was not only ergonomically challenging, but also of a different culture.  Maybe some of you are aware that State College, PA is one of the country’s foci of road and mountain biking.  I swear State College has the highest number of bike shops per capita.  And a new store pops up every time there is drama in the biking community (and there is A LOT of drama in the biking community), as one of the business partners splinters off.  Since I was an energetic endurance athlete entering a small town, it was quite assumed that I too would join in the biking party.  But the bikers were worlds different from running community.  I thought collegiate runners were obsessive, but bikers brought it to a whole new level, with tightly stratified levels of competition and membership in sponsored teams, resulting in an intense, cliquish, chauvinistic, commercialized clash of egos jockeying to redefine to the pecking order.  But there was humble respect for the marathon runner’s suffering.  Even among the most hardcore bikers (State College played host to the World Championships for the Single-Speed Mountain Biking), they had to admit that even in the gnarliest of rides they didn’t quite taste that kind of intensity of suffering as the last miles of the marathon.  And as a female runner who could run a marathon faster than Lance Armstrong, I got a measure of respect that was rarely afforded.  But I pretty much steered clear of the biking world during my three years living in State College.  Not only did biking strike me as the Wall Street of endurance athletics (ie, a completely commercialized arena for a certain breed of male to engage in proxy battles of the ego), but the number of injuries and deaths by bike in the area were haunting.  Within my first weeks, a fellow grad student admitted that he had gotten the down payment for his house from the settlement he received from a horrific bike crash with a car.  I was absolutely convinced my friend was on a death mission when he would ride his bike on the roads in the dark through the ice and sleet and snow.  I left for DC as probably the only endurance athlete in town who had having never ridden what I had come to term ‘the vehicle of death’.

I was thrown for a loop when I saw that Aaron’s license plate read ‘TRI GEEK’.  Aaron had never struck me as the biking/triathlete type.  But Aaron shrewdly played down the extent of his past life as a biker/triathlete during the first months of our becoming acquainted.  He let it drip out slowly: the bib shorts, the double ironmen, the accidents and injuries.  I had vowed long ago that I would never in a million years date a biker, but quickly realized that Aaron deserved a pass.  In fact, as evidenced by the photograph above, Aaron has quickly softened my opposition to biking.  This was my first time mountain biking.  My ass is sore, the ascents were thigh-busting, and the steep rocky descents terrifying.  But it was pretty darn fun.

 

A couple of months ago, Aaron and I were in the bustling metropolis of State College, PA, watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, when we witnessed this commercial for the Farmer’s Only dating website.  Since then, Farmer’s Only has provided an endless source of entertainment.

I have an account so that I can access profiles like this one:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So while I was visiting my friend Sarah’s farm in Wisconsin I had a chance to work on updating my profile:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And showing my kinship with tractors:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sarahs figured the Ryan affiliation would score big points with the Farmers Only folk:

 

Maybe farmers like romantic walks on the beach:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or meercats?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I dunno, kinda tough to competes with the likes of this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a picture I came across from a 5k race I did in Reston back in April.  At Lake Fairfax park they were simultaneously running a 5k to raise money for a local Catholic school so they just decided to combine that race with the Operation Care Package 5k and run the two simultaneously. The group of nuns who did the race were awesome:

Laugavegur Ultra Marathon

55k

July 14, 2012

There’s an old saying that goes, It’s not a real Icelandic trail race until someone falls into the freezing glacial river.

I guess someone had to oblige.

I guess that someone had to be me.

~                      ~                       ~

Motivation, aka The guy who tricked me into this.  I heard about the Laugavegurinn Marathon from Magnús Gottfreðsson, an infectious disease doc from Reykjavik who was a guest researcher at Fogarty.  One of the real perks of working at Fogarty is that there is a continual stream of international researchers who visit us for 1-6 month periods to study their influenza data and liven up the workplace (many of you recall our illustrious Italian visitors, Alice and Isabella).  These visits often generate long-term collaborations, friendships, and excellent reasons to visit our friends in their home countries.  Back in 2011, Magnus’s detailed descriptions of an other-worldly volcanic trail race in Iceland that would blow your socks off, along with the photos from the race website, had greatly intrigued me.  But with work trips planned to China and Nepal already planned for July-August, the summer of 2011 had already saturated its adventure quota.  But with only one major foreign adventure on the books for summer 2012 (Machu Picchu in June), Aaron and I jumped the gun in January to sign up before the race filled (typically in less than a day).  Back then things were looking good for our running: I had nearly kicked my plantar fasciitus and was getting healthy again, Aaron had finished Hellgate (not in his top form, but compared to the Hellgate monster, 55k seemed like it would be an easy pee).  The Americanos were ready to take Iceland by storm.

Doubts, aka Several friends thought they’d never see me again.  But nearly as soon as we signed up, I was quickly brought back to earth.  First, I had my little pukefest at Holiday Lake, introducing the prospect of flying across the Atlantic only to be too busy barfing and sick to enjoy any of Iceland’s spectacular volcanic landscape.  And instead of spending the spring season building mileage and experimenting with stomach solutions, I hurt my IT band at the over-heated Boston Marathon, reducing spring training to skipping and doing pilates (between mid-April and race day in mid-July, the longest run I got in was 15 miles, to Meadowbrook Stables and back).  But when I started to be able to run a little again, Aaron and I bought our flights to Reykjavik and emailed Magnus that the Americanos were a-comin’.

Intro to Iceland, aka Now I get Sigur Ros.  Although Magnus himself was injured and decided not to run Laugavegurinn this year, he and his family were very gracious hosts when we arrived in Reykjavik, welcoming us with a feast of Icelandic salmon.  He also provided a critical pre-race briefing that emphasized (a) not taking the opening 10k climb too fast, (b) not falling down on the subsequent steep downhill, (c) bringing an extra pair of shoes in the dropbag for after the glacial river, and (d) don’t expect much from the aid stations.  I was heartbroken about his description of the aid station fare: only water, poweraid, and bananas.

Magnus also took us around for a day tour of some of the sites around Reykjavik.

One of Magnus’s great contributions was also providing us with some tin foil and tape so that we could cover the skylight window in our hotel room so that we had a prayer of sleeping through some of the night’s never-setting sunlight.  Aaron and I are still debating which hotel room was worse: our room in Reykjavik or our disaster room at America’s Best Value Inn that we stayed at for Fire on the Mountain.  We booked at this particular hotel in Reykjavik because it was the only one we could find where we didn’t feel like we were hemorrhaging money like a Zaire Ebola outbreak.  The room cost about the same as our hotel room in Lima, only this room was smaller than that room’s antechamber, with only about 6 sq ft where we could actually stand upright. Given that Iceland never actually experiences darkness during July (the sun officially sets for a few hours, but continues to reflect off the sky), we quickly asked hotel staff where the blind was to cover the large skylight window that seemed t0 angle streams of sunlight directly onto our pillows, to which the helpful reply was, ‘Don’t you sleep with your eyes closed?’

 

Race Morning, aka Gee, it’s way easier to get up at 3:45am when there’s bright sunlight.  It was a 3-hour bus ride from Reykjavik to the race start at Landmannalaugar (don’t even try to get me to pronounce that).  To get there our bus had to ford a glacier river, a harbinger of what was to come.  Along the way we met Aaron’s friend Mitch, who has a connection to Aaron’s friend Kiwi Kris.  (Maybe in 2013 Aaron, Mitch, and I will run the Keppler Challenge in New Zealand.)

Game on!  The race started immediately up a steep slope, with no chance to spread out runners beforehand.  Aaron and I just relaxed and went with the (very slow) flow.  Neither of us were in any kind of fitness shape to be taking the race seriously from a racing perspective.  Which ended up being an excellent thing, as we were able to amble along, appreciating the vistas and enjoying ourselves, Aaron snapping pictures along our other-worldly journey.  Iceland seriously feels like the moon.  So much so that the US Apollo astronauts came to Iceland in 1965 and 1967 before launching to the moon to practice collecting and examining geological samples.  I would use all kinds of fancy adjectives to describe how awesome the Iceland mountain scenes are, but it makes me blush when I try to use big words so you’ll just have to rely on the pictures, which despite Aaron’s amazing mid-race photography skills still don’t quite do it justice.

 

 

Running through the first glacier was fun, slip-sliding around in the snow.  But by the fourth or fifth glacier I was starting to curse them aloud.  I tried to blame my slipping on my tractionless Nike Pegasus, but that’s not entirely fair.  I think I hated the glaciers the most because there was one dude who always used his hiking poles to pass us on the glacier but then who would nearly poke my belly out with his flailing pole as I tried to pass him back on the narrow trail.  In fact, the greatest disappointment of the otherwise spectacular race was that the fellow European trail runners were decidedly unfriendly, in stark contrast to the great camaraderie Americans have out on the trail.  Aside from a couple obvious asswipes [the guy who nearly poked me in the gut with his pole, a guy who cut off a large portion of the course, and another guy who rammed into my left shoulder while I was carefully picking my way down a descent (it’s hard to get down a steep descent when your knee has swelled to the size of an egg because you fell on a rock in the glacial river — more on that fun event later)] I only could elicit even a marginally friendly acknowledgement of my existence from a tall Spaniard.  I found it so dispiriting that runners weren’t more friendly, that’s always been a big part of trail running for me.   But I’m told by a European friend not to take this personally, that this is the way Europeans are.  Fortunately the cheers from the bands of hikers we came across on the trail (Laugavegur is one of the most popular hiking trails in Iceland) were terrifically uplifting.

 

But Aaron and I had a good time just running the two of us (we ran together the whole race, start to finish).  The course was actually more challenging than we thought it would be, with a lot of scree and tough footing.  One long section was kind of like the Bull Run Do-Loop, full of those dip-see-doodles, only (a) these rocks moved and (b) at the bottom of the dip-see-doodle was slick snow.

At around the mid-point of the race you had to cross a treacherous freezing cold, fast-running glacial river that they gave you these giant red waders to slip on to keep your shoes dry.

But the current was so strong, I had an impossible time walking in them and the river swept my feet out from under me and I went down hard.  Although the freezing water wasn’t necessarily pleasant, the big problem was that I smashed my left kneecap into a rock and it swelled hugely and made walking and running excruciatingly painful for the rest of the race (and to the current day).

But I figured out ways to hurt it less while I ran (in order to go downhill, I had to canter with my left foot leading, bracing with the right quad — I told Aaron he should have some coconuts running behind me so we could reenact King Arthur in Monte Python) and by the time I got to the last aid station at mile 25 I knew I would be able to finish.  [Brian Greeley would have wept at these spartan aid stations, with nothing more to eat than banana and powerade and water.  Don’t even think about golden oreos.  Lord, if they could see Quattro’s Americano buffet spread!]

The volcanic ash towards the end was thick and soft and fun to run in.  Although I couldn’t run very well because of my knee, I had loads of energy at the end of the race, and Aaron obliged my picking it up a bit to pass a woman ahead (even if I’m not racing, it’s hard to resist a sitting duck).

The warm soft blankets they gave us at the finish were WONDERFUL.

The awards ceremony was entirely in Icelandic, so I never got my age group award (I was 5th woman).  The woman who won, Angela Mudge from Britain, obliterated the course record by 20 minutes and is one badass mountain runner, having won everything from the World Mountain Running Championship to the Everest Marathon to Pike’s Peak in Colorado.  You will be absolutely amazed to read Angela’s biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Mudge.  I’m tickled that such an amazing woman was kind enough to tell Aaron and me before the race while we were wallowing on the bus that we had to go and check in.

 

 

 

 

 

Machu Picchu, Peru

June 30, 2012

‘Crap, we totally screwed up Machu Picchu.’

I was lazing on the bed post-breakfast at the Casa Andina Hotel in Cusco, Peru.

‘We should never have gone there at this age; we should have waited until we were old people, like eighty or something.’

Aaron was only half-listening, but I continued my explanation, ‘I mean, we’ve ruined travel for life now.  How is anything going to live up to Machu Picchu?  Where are you going to have such amazing ancient culture situated perfectly within such sweeping, lush mountain scenery?  We’ll be in the Himalayas and be like Sure these are awesome mountains, but where’s the cool Inca stuff?  Then we’ll be in Giza at the pyramids and be like Impressive, but kind of a boring, arid desert don’t you think?’

I paused.  ‘Aaron, this is where you say Martha, you’re thinking too much.’

He rolled in bed. “I think you had too much Coca tea.’

‘No, I just had a little.’  But altitude made caffeine and alcohol go straight to your head (Cusco was at 3,300 meters), and my head wouldn’t stop flittering: ‘Do you think Sean would like Machu Picchu?’

We concluded that every WUS would be blown away by Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu is so famous and so hyped, you go in almost certain that there will be letdown.  For instance, the Great Wall of China was very cool, but so crawling with tourists and entire packs of schoolchildren that it kind of lost its allure.  

But I have no reservations about over-hyping Machu Picchu – it not possible to.  Pictures can’t convey the aura of the place; no adjective (‘majesty’, ‘grandeur’) does it justice.  No, I would not describe Machu Picchu as a life-changing experience.  There were lots of people there meditating and pursuing deep spiritual experiences.  The only small change for me is that there is now a drip of sadness I can’t shake, knowing that the amazing Inca civilization, so beautifully aligned with its natural environment, was crushed and dismembered and ultimately enslaved by a small band of Spanish thugs led by Pizarro in the 1500s, who eventually melted down all the golden statues of Sun Gods from the Inca temples and shipped it in gold bricks back to Spain.  To what end?  Pizarro was eventually murdered by his own men.

~                                    ~                                    ~

Martha’s Tips for Enjoying Machu Picchu

1. There is no shame in tours. Part of Machu Picchu’s charm is how remote and inaccessible it is and how tightly the Peruvians control the number of tourists per day. I’m a seasoned traveler but I was almost brought to my knees trying to make online reservations and all the bus and train bookings needed to get there. 

2. Get a window seat on the left side of the plane (not over the wing) from Lima to Cusco (sit on the right side of the plane flying back to Lima).  Peruvian Airlines is the cheaper option compared to LAN but we had no problems.

 

3. If the person who is not picking you up at the Cusco Airport is not there immediately, don’t panic, just wait there.  Most likely, as in our case, she mistakenly picked up a different person named ‘Marta’ from the flight and didn’t realize her mistake until she had brought the wrong Marta back to her home (we can’t imagine how that conversation went….).  But don’t worry, she’ll come back and rescue you and give you delicious fruits and tea at her home.

 

4. If Malu’s friendly neighbor Sam offers to drive you to Ollantaytambo for a modest sum, definitely do that instead of taking the bus, definitely take him up on that.  There are beautiful places to stop along the way.  It is a breathtaking drive through the mountains with many places to stop, including a neat little shop where we could watch women make yarn from alpaca.

5. Hit the restaurant in Ollantaytambo that is inside the train station

6.  See Machu Picchu at sunrise.

7. Do the hike up Huaynapicchu, but know what you’re getting into, as footing can be tricky and the climb very steep.  There were loads of tourists who clearly had not known what they were getting into and were vocally not enjoying themselves.

8. Enjoy the view from the top

 

9. Climbing up is tough, but don’t underestimate the climb down

 

10. Make friends with the alpacas

11. Wear layers

12. As the day wears on, sitting is the way to go.

13.  Bring music for the train ride home, unless you like listening to the same jingle-jangly acoustic version of some Paul Simon song that is played EVERYWHERE in Cusco.

14.  There is so much more to this region than Machu Picchu. We’ll definitely be back to explore more of the beautiful region around Cusco, as we just got a quick taste this go round.

15. Stock up on coca (but only in forms like coca chocolate that won’t be detected by the many drug-sniffing dogs in Peruvian airports)

16. Travel with fun people 🙂