Year: 2011

 

 

‘Don’t be scared,’ the man instructed me in a thick Nepalese accent, ‘just run.’

Normally ‘running’ is one of the few things I can do, but I was deathly afraid of these monkeys.  Vikash told me they carried herpes B virus and attacked and bit, Aubree said they had rabies, Aaron said he’d heard of ‘assassin monkeys’ that were trained to slip into people’s homes and murder them.  So when a pack of screeching monkeys clogged up my jogging path, it was a bit challenging to simply ‘not be afraid.’  But it was true, when I tried to be cautious, showing deference and giving them their space, one had hooted and chased me, requiring a nearby Nepalese man to intervene by stomping his foot and shouting to make it retreat.

I had found an absolutely lovely place to run in Kathmandu.  There was a Buddhist temple at the top of a lushly jungled hill that had a dirt jogging path encircling it and a series of badminton courts filled with Nepalese playing doubles.  As you rounded the corner of the track you glimpsed through the trees sweeping views of the mountains looming over the city.  Nepalese men jogged clockwise around the path, and groups sat in circles to practice a form of Nepalese yoga that seemed to center around loud humming and chanting and grunting (more on my own adventures in Nepalese yoga later).

I was quite conspicuous in my little running shorts.  Not only was I running twice as fast as everyone else (soliciting quite a few ‘You run fast!’ commentaries) but my shorts were probably about as culturally appropriate as a dude running on the National Mall in a Speedo.

~            ~              ~

The next morning Dan greeted me on my way to the monkey temple with, ‘The monkeys are CRAZY today!’  I almost scampered back to the hotel where my daily breakfast of eggs, toast, hash browns, chicken sausages, fried tomatoes, yogurt with muesli, and mango juice awaited me (the Dwarika Hotel in Kathmandu is AMAZING).  I mean what kind of choice is that: a) get mauled by the crazy monkeys or b) see if you can get eggs, sausage, toast, tomato AND hash browns all to stack on a single forkful (I almost did it).

But no, I was determined to take on the monkeys.  This was a symbol for my life.  Was I going to cower in the face of lesser beings, mangy and flea-bitten, or was I going to assert my place as the rightful Alpha Monkey?

It’s a strange thing to run straight at a pack of monkeys, wondering if they’re going to bite or attack you.  But once you do it once, puffing up your chest and trying to be fearless, and see them scatter before your feet, you realize that you have learned a major life lesson: when in doubt, Be the Alpha Monkey.  As long as you exude confidence, the others around you will respond in kind.  I applied this lesson when I subsequently ran through a group of Nepalese teenagers.  And I even used it the next day when I had to give a talk way over my head about methods of Bayesian MCMC analysis (I am definitely not a statistician, but apparently if you talk like you know your shit, know one else knows the difference).  You can really get yourself through a wide range of tight spots if you simply take on the role of alpha.  Puff that chest!

 

Some other pictures from our day in Bhaktapur, where we are currently running a project to study the effect of early nutrition and diarrheal diseases on childhood health, growth, and cognitive function:

The Dwarika hotel where we stayed was amazing:

 

ps – in 2002 I went to Japan where my brother and I spent considerable time laughing at the signs surrounding temples and other tourist sights trying to help foreigners navigate the monkeys.  I don’t have any digital photos from that trip (10 years ago I was still using film), but there is a plethora of pictures on the web and here is a sampling:

Aug 1-7, 2011

Beijing, China

There was blood…..

Sweat…..

Smog…..

And random Chinese kids continually wanting us (and Very Exciting Token Black Guy) to stop and pose for pictures with them……

Even the fearless Chinese military was feeling the heat.

But we had a fearless leader ourselves.  Equipped with a little red flag for us to easily follow like sheep.

And we had fuel!

And duck heads…….

And beer! (once the bartender cleared away the dead fish heads…..)

And places to go and things to see…..

And Team Fogarty was determined to reach elevations of the Great Wall where the crowds and eye-poking umbrellas would be thinned out…..

And so we did.

 

**In all seriousness, Beijing is the least conducive city to physical exertion that I have ever come across.  I would rather jump on a treadmill than brave the smog, crowds, and sewage smells.  I would take DC’s hottest summer day at noon over this, with Ed C. as my running partner (although I’d keep a fair enough distance to duck any incoming slobber).  Hell, I might even take Hellgate over Beijing.  I have been in Beijing a week and not even been tempted to lace up.  This is coming from the girl who took a taxi in Bangkok to a park so she could run loops around the tai chi-ers and ran by packs of growling gypsy dogs in Italy — I’m not easier deterred.  But I don’t even like making the 5-minute walk from my hotel to the conference center.

Not that I haven’t been enjoying Beijing.  The city certainly has its charms — like really, really cheap cab fares.  And I got to see my little cousin Claire, who’s been living here 5 years (but moving to London in 6 weeks).  Claire scored big points by taking me, Andrew, and Eddie to a restaurant that served good pizza with prosciutto and no knuckly bits.  ‘Knuckly bits’ has been the theme word for the trip.  It all started when Andrew Rambaut, whose adventurous palate had included sea cucumber (‘slimy and tasteless’), jelly fish (‘might have been a gelatinous fungi’), and turtle soup (covering quite a range of phylum diversity there), shoved the remaining brown morsels to the side of his plate in disgust.  When I asked him if they weren’t good, he replied that they were okay ‘until you hit the knuckly bits.’  Andrew is from Edinburgh, so you have to say knuckly bits with a good thick accent to truly imagine the scene.  I was so delighted by the phrase that I challenged the table to incorporate ‘knuckly bits’ into the next day’s presentation at the International Forum on Respiratory Viruses (Andrew and I both managed to — we’d love to know what the simultaneous Chinese translators did with that one).

Thursday, September 29, 2011 – 2nd Biannual ‘Bob Nelson’ Donut Run (on this day Bob will turn 67)

 

Thursday, October 6, 2011 – 2nd Biannual ‘Happy Birthday Matty’ Beer Mile (3 days after Matt Woods turns….32?)

 

[Note that these happen to be the most inappropriately attributed running events, as Bob is diabetic and Matt doesn’t drink.]

I lost my first toe nail!! (She hung on a while after Cowans Gap but finally succumbed). I feel like a part of my innocence has been lost; I’ve been launched into ultra runner adulthood.

I got to pee before the gun went off!  Hooray!  That’s right, in a portopotty, and with ample time to get to the starting line and mill around, see the wheelchair racers go off and take note of a dude wearing shorts bittier than Matty Woods’s (Matty was supposed to be running for PR as well, but he had to work (ie, terrorize young lifeguard girls)).  At one point we were going to try to get a WUS team together for this race to see if we could upend some of the traditional DC road runner powerhouses like PR or Georgetown Running Company in the team competition, but I didn’t decide to race until last minute and no other WUSsies ended up running it — even Wardian didn’t show (something about trying to set a record for an indoor marathon that morning — why anyone would opt for an indoor marathon over the Twilight run is entirely beyond me).  Twenty-five years running, the Rockville Rotary Twilight 8k has become Washington’s premier running event of the summer, a classic.  The prize money isn’t huge ($350/250/200/175/150), but many of the region’s top runners come out for it at a time when there aren’t many other big races (both the men’s and women’s races this year were won by Ethiopians, see below) — and the whole running at night thing is pretty cool.

It’s rather nice to start a race comfortably, rather than a) having pissed your shorts (National Half Marathon, March), b) dashing across the Mall after the gun’s gone off (Race for the Cure 5k, June), or c) holding your bladder as tightly as you can for the first four miles because you’re determined not succumb to either a)  or b)  (Summerfest Rock ‘n Sole Half Marathon, July).  And the race stayed comfortable the whole way.  It was cool out for a July eve in DC, my bagel was sitting in my stomach nicely (it was hard to figure out what to eat before an 8:45pm race), my respiratory infection wasn’t giving me asthma despite the fact I forgot my inhaler, and it was nostalgic for me to return to a race I hadn’t run in, god, like 15 years.  Yes, the last time I ran this race was in high school, running it with my brother Fred, my brother’s friend Josh Hoyle, and my friend Sarah Schwertner.  It was bloody hot and when I sucked wind the whole way I discovered that all the girls I was running against in high school actually RAN over the summer (what a notion!) and beat me handily.  But despite the cold shock of pain and failure, there was something idyllic about all the neighbors sitting on their front lawns playing peppy music on their boomboxes and spraying us with their garden hoses.  And that there was a band playing and free beer at the end of the race that my brother snuck to me somehow which totally made those 5 hot wind-sucking miles entirely worth it to a 15-year old.

I’ll admit it was a little sad to be there this time without any friends — I really can’t recall the last time I ran a race dead alone.  In fact, I was pretty down at the beginning of the race, wondering why I had trekked all the way up there to run by myself and get my ass kicked by all these super speedy people.  I was snot-rocketing all over the place and my nose was all snuffed up and I was drained from a hot day of intensive shopping (as long as I had to go to Rockville I crammed in a million errands along the Pike, including a trip to Racquet ‘n Jog sports, the best running store in the world — it still tickles me pink how they let me Mix the Box (as in buy a discounted box of Cliff Shot Bloks and put whatever different flavors I like — gotta love the little things in life) — but I think I lost a good 20 seconds off my time from the absolutely miserable trip to the Verizon store, where I almost dropped an F-bomb when they told me the $15 of minutes I’d bought for the pre-paid cell phone I bought merely for the purposes of having a doorbell expired after 60 days) — anyway, I digress….).

Truthfully, my legs felt like puppies let out after a long snowstorm.  I kept furrowing my brow in minor confusion — why were they going so fast?  In the opening mile I just picked female runners off one at a time (the cuter and more elaborate the running outfit, the more I enjoy passing them — I kept recalling Aaron’s hilarious impression of the Apolo Ohno speed skater starting positions he witnessed at his latest 4-miler).  But I didn’t want to get carried away — 5 miles might seem awfully short to an ultra runner but it’s still a bloody long way to go at the 5:45ish pace I was clipping away at (I couldn’t help but see the big clocks at every mile — I wish I hadn’t, as I found it highly disconcerting to be going through so quick (at 3 miles I was in the 17:20s), making me feel like I was a ticking time bomb that was going to blow.  But I had a big kick at the end, passing a bunch of guys and the 5th place woman to finish in the money.  I still can’t quite figure out why I felt so good — I felt good even after the race, and dashed the mile or so back to my Volvo still feeling high.  Maybe it was my new Mizuno racing flats I broke out — they are flashy and red!

After the race I actually apologized to the 6th place woman I passed right at the end — it just seemed like a dick move to sit behind her most of the race, maybe 10 yards back, and then blow by her right at the finish.  I tried to explain to her that I just don’t have enough current speed work or experience with short races under my belt to know what I have in me and had run a bit too conservatively perhaps because I couldn’t recall exactly what the threshold for pain is supposed to be in these short events.  I really wasn’t out there to murder myself — I really just wanted to have a refreshing race where I felt good start to finish — after the dismal Highland Sky experience I’ve been on a quest to just try to feel good about running again, get a little pep and confidence back in the legs — they were so defeated and dejected after HS.

Here are the women’s results (ignore the Pace part — this is clearly incorrect on the website).  The race was won by Ethiopian Tezeta Dengersa.  So the girl who was 4th ahead of me, Lucinda Smith, I used to run against in high school (when she was Lucinda Hull — I was always faster than her and her twin sister Claudine (I don’t know who named these kids…)).  But yeah, yeah, she’s all faster than me now, runs for Adidas and is in some US Elite Development program.  Back in high school she and Claudine would use their formidable twin power on me, who always felt very abandoned, as everyone else was on these big teams with lots of fast girls and my school, B-CC, didn’t even have the 5 runners needed for a team and our second-best runner, my friend Mary Havell, quit XC to play field hockey.  So I could run with the guys during practice, but on race day I was pretty much on my own against these swarms of girls in matching uniforms and hair bows (or matching faces in the case of Lucinda and Claudine).

Place Div/Tot  Num   Name                  Ag Hometown         Gun T Net T  Pace

===== ======== ===== ===================== == ================ ===== =====  =====

    1   1/192     12 Tezeta Dengersa       31 Burtonsville MD  27:03 27:02   4:21

    2   1/199     10 Amanda Rice           27 North Bethesda M 28:39 28:37   4:37

    3   1/186     14 Lisa Thomas           35 Alexandria VA    28:47 28:45*  4:38

    4   2/199     13 Lucinda Smith         29 Darnestown MD    28:49 28:48   4:39

    5   2/192   2860 Martha Nelson         30 Washington DC    29:33 29:26   4:45

    6   1/134     41 Elena Orlova          41 Gaithersburg VA  29:36 29:35*  4:46

    7   3/199     38 Melissa Majumdar      26 Baltimore MD     30:03 30:00   4:50

    8   4/199     25 Laurel Jefferson      25 Washington DC    30:02 30:01   4:50

    9   5/199     26 Lindsey Jerdonek      26 Washington DC    30:15 30:13   4:52

   10   1/86     641 Megan Digregorio      23 White Marsh MD   30:24 30:21   4:53

In the Team Competition, GRC won by 6 minutes. PR really suffered without their WUSsies Wardian, Matty, and Aaron.

1. GEORGETOWN RUNNING CO.
25:12 27:39 27:44 30:13 30:26 = 141:14
Paul Guevara M 24, Andy Sovonick M 25, Patrick Murphy M 27, Lindsey
Jerdonek F 26, Laura O’Hara F 31
2. FALLS ROAD BLUE
27:58 29:08 29:58 30:00 30:38 = 147:42
Patrick McLoughlin M 30, Kris Simms M 39, Louis Foudos M 24, Melissa
Majumdar F 26, Megan McNew F 32
3. FALLS ROAD WHITE
27:20 28:02 30:21 31:05 31:09 = 147:57
Brennan Feldhausen M 26, Seth Tibbitts M 30, Megan Digregorio F 23,
Joel Gladfelter M 32, Amy Horst F 31
4. POTOMAC RIVER RUNNING
25:32 29:38 31:19 31:25 32:14 = 150:08
Christopher Sloane M 28, Stephen Crago M 43, Peggy Yetman F 43, Bryan
Mikesh M 46, Mijiko Phelps F 41
5. CAPITAL AREA RUNNERS
30:01 30:15 30:37 30:45 31:13 = 152:51
Laurel Jefferson F 25, George Buckheit M 54, Sarah Bard F 27, Eugene
Holmes M 46, Brandon Hirsch M 41

And the men’s, won by another Ethiopian Abiyot Endale.

Place Div/Tot Num Name Ag Hometown Gun T Net T Pace
===== ======== ===== ===================== ==
1 1/149 1 Abiyot Endale 25 Bronx NY 23:47 23:47 4:48
2 1/85 5 Ricky Flynn 23 Lynchburg VA 24:21 24:19 4:54
3 2/149 59 Birhanualem Feysa 29 Silver Spring MD 24:25 24:24 4:55
4 1/173 4 Tariku Bokan 30 Herndon VA 24:36 24:35 4:57
5 2/173 6 David Berdan 30 Owings Mill MD 24:38 24:36 4:57
6 2/85 17 Paul Guevara 24 Alexandria VA 25:12 25:12 5:05
7 3/173 8 Wilson Komen 33 Washington DC 25:14 25:13 5:05
8 3/85 16 Paul Zwama 24 Fresno CA 25:15 25:15 5:05
9 4/85 62 Matthew Abernathy 22 College Park MD 25:27 25:26 5:08
10 3/149 58 Seife Geletu 29 Washington DC 25:28 25:27 5:08

I also noticed that Karsten Brown finished 26th in 26:53 — he’s in the VHTRC right?