WHM

VHTRC Women’s Half Marathon

Manassas, VA

September 10, 2011

Apologies for the delay in this posting.  Last week I wrote a lengthy report on the Women’s Half Marathon, saved it 4-5 times as a draft on wussies.net and then Poof it disappeared.  I’m not going to try to reconstruct that detailed report again, I’ll just be frustrated that I can’t recall exactly how I crafted it, but I have a few things I’d like to say.

my low point
ugh – a low point

First, I’d like to heap some praise on the volunteers and people who were along the course – not just for the usual general things like hard work and generosity of time, but for something more specific: tone.  I had a bit of a rough day out there: I’m worn out and undertrained from weeks of travel (Nepal, China, Malta, I’m writing now from Minneapolis); I’m still dealing with a foot problem that isn’t too painful to run but is too painful to run normally, and it’s set off a cascade of troubles in other areas and muscles; and maybe, as Keith Knipling so put it, ‘I’m distracted’ by some pretty life-altering recent events.  Throw on top of that getting my feathers all ruffled by some new unexpected competition, and I think everyone could see on my face that I was troubled early in the race.  I welcome a good race, but it’s a whole different thing to get blindsided by totally unexpected competition of an unknown quantity, especially on home turf with some high expectations on a day when you’re not physically sharp.

Maybe it’s because the VHTRC has a lot of experience offering words of encouragement to runners who are not looking too good deep into a long ultra, but the ‘cheers’ I received along the course were so welcomingly subdued and calm.  I say ‘cheers’ in quotes because they were subdued, calming, reassuring.  Having run since high school through throngs of parents screaming ‘go get ‘er!’ I can appreciate this greatly.

Aaron gets me to crack a smile

One of the things I liked least about high school cross country were the ridiculous things parents yelled at the runners, parents who didn’t know a thing about running (fortunately my own parents were not bad).  I could never understand why people would shout things at me like ‘She’s right ahead of you!’ as if I had a field of vision that was limited to 3 inches.  Fortunately my team knew to yell things at me like ‘Go, Martha!  Smack It!’ that would get me to crack a smile and relax, which was far more likely to get me in the mood to hunt down the competition than ‘Use your arms!’  Other inanely unhelpful lines included ‘Use the hill!’ and ‘Time to go!’  I know there are some classics there I’m forgetting so if anyone else can think of any more, please add to my list.  I think the best cheer I’ve ever heard is Penn State legend coach Harry Groves yelling at one of his runners to move up on the runner ahead with the line, ‘Sniff it!  Sniff that butt!’

 

not really looking like the champ in this picture

 

 

 

 

 

Cascade Crest

Keith on Thorp Mountain

 

Cascade Crest 100

August 27-28, 2011

Easton, WA

‘Interesting choice of a pacer,’ Keith remarked to Aaron on the Friday before the start of the Cascade Crest 100 mile race in Easton, Washington.  For I, his pacer, was most known for being whiny, dependent, delicate, and with zero experience in long races.   On top of that I was having lingering stomach problems from my recent trip to Nepal that nearly kept me from boarding the plane to Seattle.

It has been fascinating to observe the power of preconceived notions and their ability to block out anything that deviates from one’s prefabricated order.  To someone outside of WUS like Monica Ochs, who crewed for CCC female victor Shawna Tompkins and joined Amy and myself in touring the course in Amy’s Civic ‘Bridget’, the natural question within the first hour of meeting me arose, ‘So is the guy you’re pacing your boyfriend?’  To which I answered, ‘Yes, he is, but it’s quite strange, no one knows.  You see, we don’t hide it, we act normally – he walks home with me after each Tuesday night group run, we’ve made numerous references to the ‘extra’ bed we have in our hotel room, and heck everyone knows I’m a princess and here I am flown across the country to wade through mountains for an entire night.  We’ve been waiting for people to use their own powers of inference to call us out on it.  But the closest anyone has come is that someone thought Aaron was showing up to all our WUS runs because he was having a fling with another male runner (who actually was a girlfriend himself).  I guess he gets some credit for noticing and wondering why in recent months Aaron has greatly increased his Tuesday night attendance.  But overall they’re all astonishingly oblivious.’

Aaron all smiles coming into Tacoma Pass

I knew that I would not be particularly adept at crew.  At the first crew-accessible aid station at Tacoma Pass Aaron asked me if I had his bag.  Not only did I not have his bag, but I didn’t even find out what it was he wanted so I could try to dig something up for the next crew-accessible aid station in 10 miles.  All the other crew people were leaping to attention, taking charge, disseminating instructions, asking the runner key questions – kind of how I imagined war would be.  Wives kissed their husbands, friends patted their runner on the back.  You know what I did when Aaron arrived?  I threw my hands in a V and exclaimed, Yea!  And remained standing exactly where I was beside Monica.  Then I admitted I had none of the materials Aaron was requesting and apologized profusely for being worthless.

Fortunately I did have a learning curve as the day and night wore on, and by the mile 68 aid station at Lake Kachess, where I was to start pacing, I had Aaron’s drop bag ready for him as well as extra drink powder mixes and shot bloks and felt proudly organized.  Although externally chipper and unfathomably polite, Aaron was not in great straights when I joined him at mile 68.  As we trotted off up the road to the ‘Trail from Hell’ Aaron explained that he had ‘no up and no downs’ and it was going to be a long 32 miles home with lots of walking.  But I was giddy to be out on the trails, talking a mile a minute as I recounted all the stories from the day, continually gazing up at a black sky freckled with so many stars that it was difficult to make out any of the known constellations (although the 7 tough miles of dirt road with 3,000 feet of gain to No Name Ridge provided more than enough time for us to identify Orion, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia’s Chair, and the Seven Sisters as we plodded (and mainly walked) along).

It was not easy to watch Aaron navigate the ‘Trail from Hell’, groaning like an elderly patient as he tried to discern the easiest way to sprawl across the multitude of giant blowdowns (apparently late snows had slowed their removal by the forest service).  Always so unshakably positive-minded and rarely expressive about suffering, it was entirely unnerving to witness the pain take over him and his body.  I found myself getting increasingly angry at the course for having so many steep inclines (those damn Cardiac Needles!) that came in such gratuitous droves – couldn’t the trails be more merciful on my poor Aaron??

Somewhere along that relentless 7 mile dirt road climb I began to experience problems of my own in my right foot.  I have a history of coming down with plantar fasciitis when I have run at an unnaturally slow pace to accommodate another runner, something about altering my footstrike and coming down harder on my heels.  The pain alleviated somewhat when we returned to the softer trails after No Name Ridge, where Aaron also found new life and started running again, but I had to dance on my toes to spare the inflamed right heel (although it was impossible to complain too much given the state of Aaron’s much-abused body).

Sunrise from Thorp Mountain

Overall, I discovered that I absolutely love to run in the night – it’s surreal, peaceful, and so beautiful with the clouds of stars and a faint outline of the mountains.  On barely any sleep I never got tired, never took caffeine, never got in bad spirits.  Although I’m still a bit perplexed how female runners plow through the night without imagining killer psycho rapist murderers around every blind turn — I would freak out.

And of course the best part about running through the night is getting to see the sunrise, which Aaron timed perfectly to coincide with the most scenic section of the course between Thorp Mountain and French Cabin, with a red ball of fire glowing over the Alpine Lakes Wilderness and Stuart Range.

Did I enjoy pacing?  Absolutely.  Does that mean I wish I’d run the other 68 miles?  Not really.  Does that mean I’ll never run 100?  Fortunately I don’t have to decide that today.

(Photos courtesy of Glenn Tachiyama)

Hooky

I distinctly noticed on Laveta’s watch when it showed 9am.  That meant that the last day of our MISMS meeting was commencing back at the Dwarika hotel, where I was supposed to be helping South Asian influenza researchers use the BEAST program.  Instead I was out climbing Pulchowki, situated at an elevation of 2782m just outside Kathmandu, already drenched in sweat with my new Nepalese trail running friends Roger, Richard, Narayan, and Laveta.

I had been terribly torn about the decision.  On one hand I really liked the participants at our meeting and wanted to help them master some sophisticated software for the Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of their influenza virus sequence data.  But on the other hand, this was just a puny half day of tutorial.  I had been working for nearly two weeks straight, traveling to Beijing and then on to Kathmandu, giving talks, helping people use the software, explaining all the details of it, over and over again.  So when Laveta invited me to head out to the mountains Saturday morning with some of the local Nepalese ultra trail runner folk she knew, I decided to play hooky.  I mean, I had been on the road for 2 weeks and while I’d had loads of interesting experiences I hadn’t yet done anything just purely for myself.  Despite it being monsoon season, Saturday’s weather called for sun and blue sky — that sealed it.

I knew that I made the right call when halfway up the mountain we were able to look out across the valley to see the snow-capped Himalayas, even glimpsing the Annapurna.  The peaks were so high, jutting out above the clouds, that at first I thought they too were part of the clouds.  They were so beautiful.

There was another unexpected upshot to the good weather.  When Roger explained that the blood streaming down his legs was not from thorns or cuts but from leeches, he then clarified that if it had been raining we all would have been COVERED head to toe in leeches.  I have to say, leeches fall into my Things I Very, Very Much Wish to Avoid category.  Laveta had already warned me about the leeches, recalling that the last time she’d run through the kind of temperate rainforest that covered Pulchowki she’d uncovered loads of leeches on her feet when she took her shoes off.  But she assured me that by then the leeches had been sufficiently ‘gorged’ and although bloated with blood were easy to remove and no longer interested in feeding on her insteps.

Everyone’s legs were covered with blood from the leeches (leeches have anti-coagulants).  Laveta had even removed one from her face, although fortunately it hadn’t yet drawn blood there.  Going up the mountain there wasn’t any leech problem as we were on a graveled Jeep road.  But going down we took a single-track route that was highly overgrown.  In fact, I’m not sure you could refer to it as a ‘track’ at all.  It was more like an impression of a trail — perhaps if one looked at it from a certain angle a trail had once existed there.  (We did encounter a couple cows on the mountain [a lovely spot to be a cow!], prompting Roger to enthuse, ‘Where the cows can go, WE can go!’)  The other problem was that the track was so steep and so slippery (again, they assured me that with rain it would have been even slicker) that in order to not fall on our asses we had to grab handfuls of foliage (Richard and Laveta continually fell on their asses anyway), exposing our hands and arms to any leeches on the nearby foliage.  [Those of you who thought that leeches only exist in ponds and streams, let me expel that delusion — leeches can exist anywhere with sufficient moisture.]

It must have been my lucky day though.  I was the only one not to take a spill and the only one not to get a leech (although I brushed a few off my shoes before they could crawl any higher).  I did get quite a few ladybugs on me, but Roger and Narayan were so disappointed that I hadn’t gotten a leech that they tried to transfer some of their own to me (this was NOT successful).

So once we got down the mountain, braving the leeches, flies with 3-inch stinger-tongues, navigating through the overgrown trails that were slick as ice (I don’t know what is in that soil, but it even glistens like ice — I can’t count how many times I hydroplaned and nearly wiped out), Roger and Narayan announced that we had taken the wrong trail and rather than staying on the ridge had arrived in an unknown village.  We had all long ago run out of water, we were drenched in sweat and covered in blood and mud.  So the Tea Break at the village was very welcome.  Village Tea Breaks are apparently a routine part of Nepalese trail running, and this was in fact our second one of the day, as we had stopped for tea about 3 miles in at the village at the base of the mountain.  Women boiled the tea over an open flame and served it to us with milk and sugar and we ate biscuits.  Nepalese are extremely friendly, as evidenced by their open arms welcome of a very war-torn group of strange trail runners.

We had to add about 4 more miles to get unlost and back to Narayan’s house, where his delightful family served us more tea (Tea Break #3) and a wonderful meal of rice and daal with 7 kinds of beans that had been made for the Hindu religious festival that day.  At the beginning of our run we had passed men partaking in the festival by mass bathing in their underwear in a giant concrete pool with string tied around their necks (something about upper caste members wearing string around their necks and once a year they have to change the string).

Before I sign off, I have to apologize for not having any pictures from this run — from the leech-bled legs to the Himalayas to my colorful running partners*, neglecting to bring a camera was a major omission**.  Especially since I actually wore a pack this time and could have easily toted along a camera (my first experience running with a pack — there was no way I could run 20+ miles in the Nepalese mountains unaided without a pack with water and granola bars and such — and I actually found the pack very comfortable — what a breakthrough!)

*Roger Henke is a Dutch expat living in Kathmandu who now manages the Summit Hotel and runs an excellent website about trail running in Nepal, including the Annapurna 50k/70k/100k in January, visit http://trailrunningnepal.org/.  Roger is exactly how you would imagine a old hat European transplant in Kathmandu trail runner: lanky frame, nothing to them shoes, completely unfazed by anything, was the only one not to exhaust the water supply in his Camelback (as if a camel himself), and with a set notion of what our run was going to entail and entirely non-catering to any of the other group members, some of whom were not particularly enjoying his selection of nonrunable ‘trail’ (Laveta was having an especially rough day, not much taking to the overgrown trails, steep and slippery descents, the leech on her face, her bruised tailbone (from many spills) or her blistered feet and chaffing thighs).  Laveta hails from Baltimore and is in Nepal doing a year of fieldwork for her PhD at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health on the community-wide effect of vaccinated pregnant women with influenza vaccine (very cool study).  Hence, she attended our influenza workshop and provided my critical link to the Kathmandu trail running community (she did marathons and Iron Mans in the States but got into trail running in Nepal).  Narayan is exactly how you would imagine a native Nepalese trail runner, legs toothpick thin, long black hair back in a ponytail, a pronounced hooked nose, friendly but self-contained, gliding up the hills as if he had been raised in these mountains (actually, he had….).  Richard, of the UK originally but with no place he calls ‘home’, represents the substantial ‘lost souls’ category of young people living in Kathmandu.  Richard does various computer-related jobs to make ends meet, broke up with a girlfriend of several years a week ago (she was living in Afghanistan and the distance became too much), and very openly admits that he has lost his traction in life and feels directionless.  Richard had that cutting British wit about him (his favorite game was pointing out the ugliest buildings in Kathmandu, ranging from over-the-top ostentatious in a neighborhood of makeshift shacks to 1970s Soviet Eastern European) and provided good-humored commentary about his opinions about Roger’s selection of ‘trails’.

**Fortunately I found the blog from ultra star Moire O’Sullivan (just published a book Mud, Sweat, and Tears) who had an eerily similar first time run in the Kathmandu mountains with Roger, Richard, et al. with pictures that look entirely familiar so just insert my little face into these photos~ http://moireosullivan.com/2010/03/24/ridge-running-in-kathmandu-valley/

Be the Alpha Monkey

 

They may look cute and harmless.....

 

‘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.

The Monkey Temple

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!

A lovely little running path once I'd escaped the monkeys

 

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:

14-month girl participating in our MAL-ED study
women lining up to enter the temple for the 'Women's Day' celebration
around every corner was a different kind of architecture

The Dwarika hotel where we stayed was amazing:

US tax$$ at work

 

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:

explicit
reassuring.....

Team Fogarty/NIH Takes on Beijing

Aug 1-7, 2011

Beijing, China

Bring It

There was blood…..

Vikash had multiple suchers in his shin (beware the Box Jumps)

Sweat…..

Climbing the Great Wall in August humidity is no small task, our Director Mark Miller discovers.

Smog…..

I think that's a sun....

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

Peace.

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.

Follow the flag? Wait now, just because we're tourists in China doesn't mean we're Chinese tourists.

And we had fuel!

Eat me!

And duck heads…….

Beware the knuckly bits.

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

No, we didn't eat those (after the duck night we actually decided to have pizza).

And places to go and things to see…..

The Emporer's Palace (Cynthia actually took this picture)

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

Don't mess with Eddie.

And so we did.

Not even close to the top. But high enough to escape the umbrellas.

 

**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).