I wanted to give a toast last night to Doug & Kerry, I had a lot on the tip of my tongue, but I hadn’t prepared anything and I’m no good at trying to ad lib these things.  So here is my belated toast to Doug & Kerry, the rare WUSsie couple that has managed not to have their names merged into one (Torstin, Clapon, Marthon……).

 

In March of 2010 I was in one of my deep funks that I get from time to time and which can go on for several months, this one triggered by losing my beloved cat in a snowstorm and being injured and unable to run, all on top of my usual end-of-winter doldrums.  Usually it’s a long process to break me out of the self-perpetuating cycle of self-loathing and this sense of entropy, and my friends were having very little success this time.  But when Sean Andrish told me that Kerry and Doug were seeing each other, it was like the curse was broken with a single lightning bolt, the world snapped together.

Because you come across only a handful of people in your life that seem so deserving of happiness, that anything short of an eternal blissful existence seems to violate your entire sense of world order.  And Kerry Owens is definitely one of those saint-like people.  Kerry is so generous that we can’t help but take it for granted.  All of us do — because the generosity is so seamless and comes across so naturally it’s almost invisible.  You have to kick yourself from time to time that the WUS house is not this magical castle in Woodley Park that God bequeathed upon all trail runners for their perpetual Tuesday night merriment — and occasional donut runs, beer miles, fatasses, etc.  Because God really digs trail runners.  The same can be said for Portobella, or for Kerry’s house in Frisco.  In fact, if you consider for a moment our amazing club of runners, you don’t have to look far to realize that so much of our club’s foundation has been laid by Kerry’s incredible open door (and real estate empire~).  I can say personally that if it weren’t for WUS and Kerry I wouldn’t be a trail runner today, that I wouldn’t have run the Women’s Half this weekend, that I wouldn’t have met Aaron — and I’m sure a lot of you guys could say the same.

Sometimes I try to think about what we can give back to someone who gives so much.  And the main conclusion seems to be that our main obligation is to never take it all for granted, or to allow someone’s great generosities of the past to become burdens of the future.  I’ll admit, as absolutely delighted as I was about Kerry and Doug’s marriage, there was also a sinking feeling that it could be a harbinger of the end of the WUS house.  But while it makes me so sad to think that there might come a day where I don’t trot over to 2711 Woodley Road on Tuesday nights (seriously one of my main criteria for buying my apartment in Cleveland Park was that it had to be near the WUS house — my real estate agents were so perplexed by what this mysterious runner group house thing was), you have to realize that the WUS house is a crazy gift, that we’ve all been so fortunate to enjoy long enough to meet each other and build such long-lasting friendships.  I owe so much of my happiness to that crazy Woodley House (I was so confused when Sean first tried to explain it to me — wait, you have married people living in your attic??), which so embodies the zany, free-form spirit of ultra-running.

But Doug and Kerry, while we like to think that you love us so much that you want us in your house forever because we are so cool and fun and wonderful, and plead that the DC running community will be hit with shock waves by any changes to WUS, we know that you have spoiled us rotten, that people like Kerry Owens do not exist in any other universe known to man, and that we have been living in a dreamlike reality that some day we will have to wake up from.  It will be so damn hard, but I’ll try not to hit the snooze button.

 

 

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.