Think Andrew are I are happy to be finished?
For all those who wonder why I run marathons, why I subject my poor little body to that murderous bludgeon of 26.2 paved miles, the answer is entirely contained in this photograph. The best thing about being female is that you can win the race and still have a big sweaty runner hug waiting for you at the finish line. And today there was no one I was happier to see waiting for me at the finish than Andrew Webb.
~ ~ ~ ~
The road to Charlottesville began back in September, on that fateful day when registration for the Boston Marathon 2011 closed in a record 8 hours, blocking out many of the Boston faithful who had run year in and year out, including the many members of our Nittany Valley Running Club (NVRC) team that raises money for the charity Centre Volunteers in Medicine (CVIM), which provides healthcare to uninsured working adults. This debacle resulted in a new staggered registration process for Boston 2012 and 2013 that gives priority to runners with faster qualifying times. In the meantime, our group reorganized and headed southbound to the Charlottesville Marathon, which was rumored to be a scenic course rolling through a charming city and surrounding horse farms, conveniently timed a week before Boston.
I have wanted to win a marathon for quite some time, and a small one like Charlottesville seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so. All the previous female winning times were over 3 hours, and I’ve been 2:55 consistently. However, due to some unconventional turns in my training regimen, with one week to go my legs were strongly messaging that finishing 26.2 miles at all was going to present a challenge.
As of early February, I looked poised to rock Charlottesville. I had managed to train all winter, building up a mileage base and having a convincing win at the Uwharrie 20-mile trail race. But the timing was all messed up: training-wise, I was ready to start tapering after Uwharrie, recovering and cutting back on miles, building up speed. But I still had two months to go, so instead I squeezed in the Catawba run-around, slated for 35 miles (I planned to run ~20 miles and instead ran closer to 37-38 miles, see race report). I crawled to the finish of Catawba battered up with a throbbing left butt. I still wasn’t fully recovered by the time I ran the DC National half marathon 3 weeks later, although the 1:22 was a heartening reminder that I could run through some soreness still at a decent clip.
Although I have made a tradition of running the classic Cherry Blossom 10 miler every April through the tidal basin’s pink bloom, I vowed not to run it this year as it lay a mere week before the Charlottesville marathon. But when Tom Cali said he was going to come down to run it and when my friend offered me a free bib, I was unable to resist. I was still damn sore in the hamstrings and calves from National, so I vowed to run an easy 1:07/1:08 marathon-pacing run. Ryan Lane, who has enough gear to measure something like heartbeats per meter, promised to pace me to exactly such a time. Unfortunately, Ryan fell victim to the infamous Cherry Blossom port-o-potty line trap (there are additional port-o-potties available, they are just not in places where any reasonable person would expect them to be). The backs of my legs felt painfully sore and tight every step of the way, and I ran sans expert pacer, but somehow I ran exactly 1:07:51, right on pace. However, it required a gritty effort, and it was impossible to imagine that I would be able to keep that pace for another 16 miles in 6 days.
But I launched a quick two-pronged attack: on one hand, doing everything in my power to recover (massages, warm salt baths, major cutback in mileage, days off), and on the other mentally preparing for a worse-case scenario, identifying places on the marathon course where I could easily drop and contacting race directors of later spring marathons about obtaining a registration spot.
Fortunately, Kate Barron-Avilion is the most magical masseuse I have ever had. I need to start seeing her every time I go to State College. My visit to her on Tuesday was the turning point in my recovery, providing the first glimmer of hope that I had a prayer of finishing Charlottesville. Meanwhile, Tom Cali ably covered the critical nutritional component of my recovery with a week of Lunchtimes with Tom Cali, filled with heaping sandwiches and burgers that made my tummy giddy. Poor Tom lamented that I was going to make him gain 3 lbs during that week since we weren’t running much for the taper. I eased up and let him take Wednesday off from our lunch binge so he could go home and eat his diet fiber cereal lunch while I monster sandwiched. Then again, Tom’s biggest concern all week was getting his poop schedule on track for a murderously early 6:30am gun time.
Between the lunches, massages, light running, and negative response from the Vermont marathon RD (they are full, but at least he promised me an elite bib for next spring), I was beginning to see the Charlottesville marathon finish line at the end of the tunnel. But Thursday threw I wrench into my recover plan when I found myself with ample reason to get hammered, for that afternoon I received news that my key paper that I’ve been working on for a year, Spatial dynamics of human-origin H1 influenza A virus in North American swine, was accepted to PLoS Pathogens. To put this in a running perspective, getting published in PLoS would be like a girl running a 3:10 marathon – there are loads of people who do it, but at the same time loads of talented, hard-working people who don’t. Or maybe it’s more like 3:05 — regardless, clearly the only proper response was ample beer and vodka (unfortunately in that order).
With less than 24 hours to race time, I woke up Friday morning with a splitting hangover headache. I dragged myself out of bed at 8:05 and Tom picked me up at 8:15. I managed to throw down some oatmeal, gather my belongings for work, and kind of get some clothes on. (Tom reports that my jeans were neither zipped nor buttoned and that I was holding my sneakers while walking through the rain in my socks. Tom also reports that I sent him incoherent drunken messages the prior evening, the first of which was ‘Walling’). But I got done what I needed to at work, with all my BEAST (Bayesian evolutionary analysis by sampling trees) jobs running, and got back to Kathy’s house by 11:15 to do laundry and pack up and go.
When Tom and John Domico showed up in the Lincoln MKX, my clothes were predictably not nearly dry in the dryer. But we managed to drape them around the car and head off with Kathy around 12:30. Less than a minute into the trip I piped up, ‘So when do you guys plan to feed me?’ Oh, boy was I in for a surprise – Done’s Bones!
After Done's Bones pulled pork bbq, Domico and I were totally ready to take on Charlottesville
~ ~ ~ ~
Race day morning was vastly improved by having a straight-shot walk to the start, in contrast to Luna and I driving around Anacostia and Sean and I driving through the driving rain to Uwharrie. There was some trickiness about finding bathrooms (John Domico is still riled about the lack of facilities impeding his timely race start and making him lose to Ken Davis). I inherited from my mom a natural radar for quality toilets, and found Tom an excellent hidden bathroom across the street for his much-needed last minute poop (apparently all that effort from the past week to get on schedule was thrown by an early Thursday breakfast meeting with Joe Faulkner). Tom repaid my services by expertly blazing a trail to the start of the pack, just feet behind the starting line. I chatted with a woman next to me who had run the course many times previously. When I told her that I planned on running 6:50 miles, she retorted sharply, Not on this course, honey.
From the first mile it was clear that this was going to be a relentlessly hilly course. It was also clear that I had some female competition, although I couldn’t tell whether they were half marathon or full marathon runners because the two races ran together (the RDs should take a tip from the National marathon and pin ‘Half’ on the back of the half marathoners). It made me antsy to have girls blow by me – even if I didn’t win the race I wanted to at least be in contention. But Tom was a calming force beside me and we chatted and commented on the scenes we passed through – the cute little woodchip path that was much to our liking, the stately campus (What, did someone have a sale on columns?), the little stream on our left. Leaving the downtown area, we had an out-and-back through some very nice countryside with beautiful estates where Tom was tempted to knock on the door to request mint juleps.
I calmed myself by convincing myself that the two girls ahead were half marathoners, information that was initially confirmed by one of the marathon marshals on bike (the helpful bike marshals almost made up for the race’s many logistical shortcomings), much to my relief, but then later corrected to say that one of the girls was running the full marathon, much to my consternation.
As Tom and I trolled along, our teammate Andrew Webb caught up to us and ran with us. We were immediately blown away by his massive new tattoo on his right arm, which he explained to us was Nadine’s family crest from Japan, which he had acquired just a week ago in downtown State College to commemorate the first anniversary of her tragic death. Andrew admitted that he was not the kind of person to get a giant tattoo, but I really can’t imagine that a better reason exists for getting one. Typically Tom and I are faster marathoners than Andrew, who hadn’t yet broken 3 hours, but one look at that tattoo and Tom and I knew that we were Andrew’s toast today, and he left us in no short order after the turn-around point at mile 7.
The turn-around was actually great fun because we had so many State College runners (12, to be precise) coming the other direction to wave and say hi to (or, like Thurley, jump over to our side for a big High Five). In no short order we saw Mike Weyandt, Meira Minard, Ken Davis, John Domico, John Sheakoski, Kathy Simin, Hayley Weyhe, John Thurley, Jamie Volkert, Jaimie Wright, Anne Lehman, and Michelle Hutnik. My did we look snazzy in our new blue singlets (!), which Tom had done a monster task of sorting the night before. It was a bit discouraging that we had to run back up those giant hills we had just come down, but we were still having a pretty good time of it all.
Of the 1500 or so in the race, two-thirds were running the half-marathon, so the race thinned out tremendously after 13.1 miles. The two girls had been so far ahead that they weren’t even in sight, but I think the full girl must have suffered quite a set-back when the other girl finished halfway, because when she drifted into sight in between miles 14 and 15 she did not look to be moving very fast. As soon as I spotted her at the crest of the hill my heart started pounding. As Tom describes it, he was running full tilt to catch up with me after stopping at a water station but couldn’t realize why I kept getting further away. He didn’t have his glasses on, but finally he discerned the shape of the female ahead of me and understood exactly what was going on. According to him, I flew by her like she was standing still. She actually muttered ‘Okay, fine, just go ahead’ as I passed her. Like I needed permission.
I let myself put some distance on her (‘gap’ her, as Andrish puts it), wondering in the back of my mind if this little surge was going to seriously bite me in the end, especially on such a brutal hilly course. But something had snapped when I saw the girl in front of me, something came unhinged, and I ran alone the rest of the race. Well, except for the two motorcycle cops escorting me, as well as a really nice guy on a bike who offered me words of encouragement at multiple points and even gave me a gu packet (I found him after the race and gave him a big hug and told him to come to all my races~). I saw Andrew a minute or so ahead of me, an image that was immensely satisfying — as competitive as I may be, I was absolutely thrilled to see Andrew running strong and well. It was also soothingly familiar for me, as the distance between us was about the same as the distance at the end of Tussey MountainBack Discovery Series legs 8/9 as I followed Andrew to Colyer Lake during my first ever Tussey run back in September 2004, a fresh arrival in State College to start my PhD — I can remember that run so vividly. I kept expecting Tom to catch up with me as he has often done before (I’ll never forget when he told me to go on because he was absolutely Dying during the Nittany Valley half marathon, only for me to hear his scuttling little legs blow by me down Rock Road 3 miles later), but apparently Tom was content where he was.
Tom Cali doing the Ken Davis windmill
I never hit the wall. I’ve heard people tell me that they’ve run marathons without hitting the wall, but you never believe it’s possible until you experience it yourself. Not that my legs felt fresh as daisies — my left hip flexor was searing and I could feel my right leg doing most the work up the hills — just that my body didn’t grind to that painfully slow trudge the way it normally does in the last couple miles in a marathon, as if every step is labored. My legs actually felt far better than they had at the end of Uwharrie. Joe said that when he cheered for me at mile 25 I was grinning ear to ear — then again he was whooping like a macaque in heat when I passed by, exuding such enthusiasm about my pending victory (the first of many fantastically uplifting fan responses in the last mile or so, including Jamie and Costas), how I could I not grin like the Cheshire?
There wasn’t a single clock along the course, so even though it was a goal of mine to be the first woman to break 3 at Charlottesville, I didn’t know that I was on pace for 2:57 until I saw the finish line clock. It wasn’t a PR, but I was thrilled with the time. I found Andrew Webb and bear hugged him (see picture above). Andrew had finished in 3rd, then 2 brothers finished after him, and then I finished 6th overall. A couple guys finished and then Tom finished 10th. Meira Minard, my teammate from State College and a first-time marathoner, came in a couple minutes after Tom for second place female in 3:02, both of us breaking the course record (3:03)! State College runners kept pouring in – 6 of the top 20 were CVIM! We cleaned up at the awards ceremony: Andrew 3rd male, Meira and I took 1 and 2 for the women, Tom won the 50s age group, Ken was 3rd in the 40s age groups, Hayley and Kathy took 1-2 in the 30s age group…..CVIM domination! Hell, between Andrew, Meira, and me, CVIM took half the podium.
Not another belly shot! And why am I still running after I already hit the mat?
So here is my take on the Charlottesville Marathon. First, I loved the course, hills and all: the pretty little section out in the country, the parts winding through the campus, the bike trail along the creek, it was highly varied and never monotonous, although some were bothered by the number of turns (personally I like them, more like trail running). I liked the out-and-back because I got to see all my friends, and then during the two loops it was nice to get encouragement from all the runners I was passing who were still on their first loops. The weather was perfect, cool and overcast. The fans were sparse but cheerful and much appreciated, especially are the CVIM family members that came along. I liked the women’s race shirts they gave out (the men’s color was not so good).
Tom Cali (1st place 50-60M), me, and Andrew Webb (3rd overall)
However, this marathon was run on a shoestring budget and it was pretty apparent in a number of ways. I managed to find a bathroom at the start, never needed one during the race, and didn’t care that I never got a single split time, but this definitely wasn’t the case for everyone. For me, the one logistical problem was that my surge coincided with getting a water cup at an aid station that only had about an inch of water in it. This wouldn’t have been a problem in marathons where water is given every mile or two, but the aid stations were pretty sparse along the course, seeming to come every 3 miles or so, less frequently than I was used to. And that gu had made me darn thirsty. Mentally, it was really hard seeing the mile markers for the second loop while we were running the first (ie, seeing miler marker 23 while we were on 17, a cruel reminder that we were going to be back at that point in 6 miles and feeling much worse….). My other minor disappointment was that there was no ribbon for me to break at the finish line. Yeah, I know I’m romantic, but I’ve always imagined my first marathon victory to involve breaking the tape. It was also pretty brutal that the balloon arch was about 20 feet from the final timing mat, so you had to keep trudging on uphill after going through the balloons – might not sound like a big deal, but at that point every step is torture. The stretch to the finish was confusing for everyone and I even went off course a bit there and had to double back. The awards were really meager, especially with Miller Lite as a sponsor (after the free beer garden at the National half that Luna and I enjoyed, we were astonished to be charged $5 for our beers at the Miller Lite marathon). We thought we’d get some decent stuff as prizes but they were pretty shoddy (I got a pair of free shoes for winning — well, really they just told me I could take a box of one of the left-over shoes they were trying to sell…..). Other complaints included no time mats (Jamie pointed out that it would be bloody easy to cheat in a course with turnarounds and loops), crappy post-race pizza (although I’m sure Andrish would love it), and one of the worst post-race bands we’ve ever heard (we fantasized about pulling a John Belushi from Animal House smashing the ‘I gave my love a cherry’ guitar).
Personally, my biggest gripe was with Charlottesville’s The Daily Progress Newspaper, which devoted 5 full paragraphs of text to the male winner of the marathon, 2 paragraphs to the 2nd place guy (and bloody boring paragraphs at that – heck, the winner was only like 10 minutes faster than I (2:46)), and a lone sentence to the female winner, even botching my hometown (listed as Washington, PA – some amalgamation of Washington, DC and State College, PA — I guess kind of true, actually) because they didn’t even bother to interview me. And nothing about Meira, the second place woman. Well, I guess that’s Virginia for you, right Sean?
The great part of not bonking is that I didn’t have to go to the medical tent afterward, first time since 2008. I think the ultra running is actually helping a lot in this regard, teaching me how to eat, drink, and run. I didn’t feel nauseated towards the end, I ate all my cliff blocks, and even walked at the aid stations to take both water and gatorade, kind of treating it like an ultra. My stomach wasn’t perfect at the end, but I was able to down my whole plate of eggs, sausage, hash browns, and toast afterward. My stomach finally objected at 11:30pm that night when I had subjected it to nachos, tacos, beer, and vodka and then made it dance to 80s music, but really who can blame it?
John Thurley, looong day
was running down the trail and straining
From my nose came rockets that were snotty
Runners had for many months been training
Having won a spot in bull run’s lott’ry
Up above the skies had full cloud cover
Dawn had brought a cool and pleasant race day
On the ground, though, we would soon discover
Sloppy, slip’ry mud on top of hard clay
Red WUS shirts defined the competition
Boldly stating our affiliation
Even as I dropped in my position
Suffering performance degredation
This one took a lot of effort, therefore
Surely next time I will know to train more
I received an e-mail this morning from the Friends of Rock Creek’s Environment (FORCE), a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting and restoring Rock Creek Park. While browsing the FORCE website, I noticed they have several trail maintenance/trash cleanup events scheduled over the next few weeks. For example, on Saturday April 16th @ 9:00 AM, they’ll be working in partnership with the PATC to clear vines from the trails around Dumbarton Oaks. Tools and gloves are provided. I don’t recall any major trail races scheduled for that weekend, so if you’re interested in volunteering send me an e-mail at jschramka@yahoo.com or reply to this blog post.
If you’re interested to learn more about FORCE, feel free to visit their website at:
Luna mortifying me by trying to record for posterity my 'elite' status at packet pick-up
Saturday, March 26, 2011 was supposed to be a whopping big day for Team WUS, highlighted by the highly anticipated Brian v. Sean showdown at Terrapin Mountain. Instead, Sean sat around Leesburg reading sci-fi novels and watching March Madness, while Brian went for a makeover, rediscovering his chin beneath that burly beard. So I’m afraid all you get is my measly 13.1 miles at the National Half Marathon. But Greg Luna and I sure packed a surprising amount of adventure into that short little race.
Gregory Luna Golya is 40-something anthropology grad student at Penn State, married with lots of pets but no kids, who still parties seamlessly with kids a decade or more younger. In that way Greg is kind of like Tom Cali, except that with Tom you are always aware that he is older because he is wearing expensive clothing no grad student could afford and driving some fancy car. Greg never jokes about his age because I don’t think he even knows he’s not 25 anymore. Greg has bad knees, rides his bike a lot, but never really trains for races. Instead, he pops ample doses of Celebrex and somehow bites the bullet and makes it through Boston every year. It’s easy not to realize how cool Greg is because he is so understated. For instance, I was listening to his account of the time he was airlifted after a terrible accident in a bike race that shredded off part of his ear and left him in a pool of blood with a concussion, only to realize that this horrific event occurred while I was still in State College – I vaguely recall hearing about it, but it was totally underplayed. Hell, the bloody nose I got on Bear Mountain got way more play in the Nittany Valley Running Club than Luna’s catastrophe airlift.
Lookin' good there, Luns!
Luna’s arrival Friday night was a complete godsend. It’s always hard for me to come down from Italy, where life is so rich and fabulous and full of beautiful places, fantastic food, friends, and cocktails. But this time was particularly hard. WUS is in tatters – no one even showed up to run on Tuesday night. Sean, Brian, and Brittany are all injured in various ways. Cori (my work friend) is off with her new boyfriend obsession. At least Sean ponied up and ran a little with me on Wednesday — Brian wouldn’t even join us Wednesday night for dinner because he’s wailing about putting on pounds. Made me want to slam his pretty little head against a wall.
But with 10 minutes to go until gun time, Greg and I were still lost in Anacostia. I won’t go into details, but it really wasn’t our fault – I blame the metro not opening early enough, the faulty instructions from the parking attendant, the closed bridge back into the city, and a GPS that kept wanting us to go over that said closed bridge. But I did manage to make it to the starting line in time, and even to find my WUS friends Keith, Nancy, and Sean in the pack. Unfortunately, I did not have time to pee before hand. I had to go like a racehorse, so I scooted off to the closest bush. Maybe if I hadn’t been rushing so much I could have managed to pee without exposing myself or wetting myself, but in my haste I erred on the side of the latter. There is a horrifying moment when you realize that although you can feel that you are peeing, you cannot see any of the pee shooting out anywhere. Then you feel the warm dampness against your leg and realize what terror has befallen you. But the gun was going to go off at any minute, so I wrung out as much of the pee out of my shorts as I could and then scampered back to the WUSsies. No one mentioned anything about the big wet mark on my butt – I still do not know if anyone noticed, although it is hard to imagine that they did not.
Keith Knipling is the de facto President of WUS, sending out emails, designing our WUS shirts, and one of the few Tuesday night regulars (also see the glossary of the Uwharrie 2011 race report). Nancy has technically WUSed with us, coming to a Tuesday night WUS run. But by the end her legs were dripping in blood due to a series of mishaps, the most memorable of which involved tripping over a low-hanging chain at the end of the Glover Park trail. We resign ourselves to the fact that Nancy probably never return to WUS, although we were thrilled to see her come to the Knipling’s famous Eagle Run in January (which is held during broad daylight and suffers few casualties).
Nancy pacing Keith, enjoying the roads
Sean here is not the Sean Andrish you may recall from Uwharrie (Sean A.), but rather Sean Burns (Sean B). Sean B. is fast like Sean A., but you need to knock off about 20 years and add a lot of tattoos.
Sean B - how does he already have a farmer's tan in March?
The nice thing about road races is that if you can actually get yourself to the damn starting line, the rest is pretty much smooth sailing, which is clearly not the case with trail races (see my Catawba race report). At first I agreed with Keith that it would be a nice idea to run with Sean B., chat about pissing myself in the bushes and such, but I had it hanging over me that I was supposed to be an ‘elite’, so we split after a mile or so.
Shorts look good from the front! (Why are all my race photos belly shots?)
My legs were still fatigued from Catawba and my left butt was still somewhat problematic, particularly up the hills, but in general I was pleased that even though I could feel that my legs were laboring like poorly lubricated gears, they still managed a pretty good clip, finishing as the 6th woman in around 1:22, justifying my free entry as an ‘elite’ (see the very embarrassing picture below that Luna snapped of me getting my bib at the elite entry table). I am going to have to seriously rest up these next two weeks if I’m going to feel good at the Charlottesville Marathon.
9am beers -- yum!
The finish area after the race was awesome: Greg and I enjoyed 9am beers in the beer garden where we watched Michael Wardian cruise in to the victory and snagged entire trays of Greek yogurts and boxes of granola bars that were being given away. Maybe those beers weren’t such a good idea – or maybe my pre-race menu of Indian Buffet for lunch and Vietnamese for dinner wasn’t such a stellar choice either, because somewhere on Florida Avenue on the way home I asked Luna to pull over.
‘Min, that Burger King is pretty sketchy. Looks like you could buy crack at the door. Maybe we shouldn’t stop here.’
‘Luna,’ I replied exasperatedly, ‘I already pissed my pants today, I’d really rather not crap in them.’
Needless to say, I made it past the BK Broiler bouncers at the door, relieved my intestines of the offending contents, and even rallied for brunch at the famed Parkway Deli, where I’ve been going since a child for the classic Jewish fare of oversized sandwiches with salty meats and of course the pickle bar. Afterwards, Greg went back to State College to judge an anthropology grad student poster competition, but I made him first drop me off at my favorite thrift store in Bethesda so I could go shopping (I found a perfect BCBG Max Axria skirt – still with the $80 price tag on it). I returned home to Macomb Street only to find my first four-leaf clover of Spring 2011 in DC, entirely restoring my sense that everything is this crazy little life will work out okay in the end.
Passing by the Vatican en route to more pizza (with prosciutto)
When Isabella’s father told me that his stomach had become a ‘pig graveyard’, I could only laugh and assure him that the same had become of mine. There are many ways to enjoy the Pig in Italy – pasta carbonara (with bacon), sandwich with prosciutto and mozzarella di buffalo, pizza with speck and funghi (mushrooms), or simply soppressata or jamon straight up as antipasti. In fact, if there is something on the menu that you do not know the English meaning of, there is an ~68% chance that it is just another slight Italian twist on how to cure a pig.
However, I consider my excessive consumption of pig on this trip appropriate, given my reasons for coming to Rome in the first place. The International Symposium on Respiratory Viral Infections (ISRVI) had provided me with a whole of 10 minutes to give my talk on the ‘Spatial dynamics of human-origin H1 influenza viruses in North American swine’: in other words, how the economic calculation that it is cheaper to truck pigs from North Carolina to Iowa than to truck all the corn needed to feed them is spreading influenza viruses in pigs like crazy in the US, resulting in all kinds of new genetic recombinants.
I am sure that you have noticed that I have not yet made any allusion to running in this race report. Yes, I am afraid that eating, drinking, and socializing (EDS) figured far more prominently during my 10 days in Italy than anything that can be described as running. In my justification though, my time in Rome was being half-subsidized by US taxpayer funding, so anything less than full-on EDS would have deprived Uncle Sam of his due share. And in my further justification, my hotel was not quite situated in a location that could be described as conducive to running.
It takes an awful lot for me to deem a place unsuitable for running. I regularly run through snow, ice, mud, wade through streams, and sweat out code red DC summers. It really takes a lot to put me on a treadmill, my ultimate sign of defeat. At the last ISIRV conference in Bangkok, I ran around a square with four ~10m sides in the 90+ degree heat dodging attack peacocks, much to the amusement of the resident hotel gardener, before relegating myself to the more appropriate treadmill.
But while feisty peacocks are one thing, packs of attack gypsy dogs are another. Bypassing the hotel concierge’s highly recommended treadmills, I set out in the only direction that did not lead directly onto a highway ramp. The dreary apartment buildings reminded of the settings of unflinching violence in the Italian organized crime film Gomorrah. Within minutes I found myself in the neighborhood gypsy trailer park, which unfortunately stood between me and what appeared to be the only green space in the area. Determined to explore the green hills, I skirted past the encampment of tents and rusted trailers, picking my way along a hillside that must have been their trash depository of choice, and managed to be noticed only by two mangy mutts that barked menacingly but did not follow me.
The Green Space was not the Land of Eden I had hoped it would be. Muddy plowed fields with highly uneven footing were interspersed with thickets of thorns, and the hotel staff would eye disapprovingly when I returned to their red carpet with legs of dirt and blood (at least I took my shoes off before entering). But I would have returned to the hills regardless had it not been for the packs of half-wild dogs – it turned out those two mangy mutts had quite a lot of friends. I mixed stern, steady gazes with getting the hell out of Dodge as quickly as possible and averted any run-ins with the animals, but when I safely arrived back at the hotel I could only think one thing: Tomorrow we are making friends with the treadmill. Oh, and I am definitely getting a rabies vaccine before I go to Nepal this summer.
Running on treadmills is anathema to my sense of what constitutes running. For me, running is freedom and relaxation, giving the body free rein to move exactly where and as quickly as it pleases. I cannot enjoy biking because my feet feel tethered, confined to the pedal’s small defined orbit. When biking, it matters not if the breeze is in my face or the sun on my back, my whole body feels trapped between bars and mightily unhappy. So you can imagine what kind of contorted expressions my face makes about the treadmill – like a kid’s over a plate of broccoli.
But I am trying to get my butt back in order after Catawba shredded the poor thing, and I knew a couple easy miles on a treadmill would help loosen things up a bit. So I put on my most relaxing music – Neil Young’s Unplugged has been my calming music of choice recently — and put the treadmill on to just a slow patter to see if the feet would take. It was helpful that the readings were all in kilometers so I did not know how slow I was going. I let ‘Harvest Moon’ coax me into an easy rhythm and tried to distract myself for quite some time with anything on hand: Italian TV stations, the lizards darting about outside in the rose garden, the sound of the broom sweeping in the song. Okay, so Quite Some Time does not mean the same thing on the treadmill that is does in other real life settings – time on the treadmill passes at about the same rate as, say, during a rectal examination. I lasted 20 minutes, which felt like a total victory. Back on the floor, I let my head whirl around the room a bit – the treadmill always makes me so dizzy – which fortunately distracted me from thinking at all about what a pathetic workout I had just completed, definitely fewer kilowatts than Old Lady Aerobics.
Isabella and I at a monastery outside Padova
I had a second chance to revive my running doldrums during the second half of my Italy trip in Padova, where I was visiting the illustrious Alice Fusaro and Isabella Monne, who are described as part of the Charlie’s Angels team of gorgeous Italian influenza researchers at the viral diagnostic reference lab in Padova, just west of Venice in the Northeastern part of the country. But priorities re-orient — why go running when you can shop with the beautiful Isabella in Treviso for a smashing dress to Alice’s wedding?
Who needs running when there is dress shopping??
