Almost a Fight at Postrun WUS? Well, not really, but you missed the fun. (Ask Aaron sometime).
Yep, classic night at CPB&G. Best lines of the night:
Creepy Dude: I’m just gonna move here!
Aaron: Excuse me? Well, OK!
Tom: WHAT DID HE JUST SAY TO YOU!?
Aaron: Nothing. No, nothing Tom.
Tom: NO,WHAT DID HE JUST SAY TO YOU!?
Creepy Dude: I just said I’m just gonna move here! . . .
‘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.