every walk is a sort of crusade
And a holiday. With no school. But still work for both parents. Which meant four hours in the pool with clients this morning for me, and a husband at the hospital until 8pm. And a toddler newly recovered from a really brutal 5-day stomach virus that apparently turned her into a Snow White humanoid with superhuman energy. Who will not nap.
Anyone else googling “wine spritzer recipes”?
Two minutes only if you’re a really slow pourer.
Serves two.
#homemaker
You’re welcome.
Every night he’s there. Watching.
I never take selfies (“WHY??” I hear your collective mental chorus screaming, as you take in the above shot). And no, before you ask, that picture has not been photoshopped. That is me in my natural state about 3 minutes ago. No makeup, no fancy filters. In my PJs. All. Natural. Even the eye bags. #blessed
But the thing is, because I never have my camera turned around, I always forget that on my phone the automatic built-in setting for selfies is called “Beauty face”. And it says it right there on the screen. Every time.
It’s the best.
ANYWAYYYY…the reason I took the selfie in the first place is because this morning three extraordinary things happened:
So the obvious direction my morning would take was to drink another cup of coffee — HOT coffee — BY MYSELF and do something “productive”.
I never drank coffee until I started getting up at 4:45am to coach swim practice before work. And even then half the time I’d drink tea. Because coffee stains your teeth and gives you bad breath and is addictive.
Today, if I could mainline coffee, I would.
But maybe it’s a good thing I can’t, because I have found that drinking a really good cup first thing in the morning is one of the best things IN THE WORLD. Right up there with a getting a surprise package in the mail or a good morning BM. It can change the course of your entire day. And this morning, my coffee was DELICIOUS. And I am riding that high.
That’s all. That’ my entire point. The message I felt compelled to shout from the rooftops. Good coffee is so good. Highly recommend getting some.
And if you were wondering…
That is the coffee I had this morning. Garibaldi Goods is where you can buy it and other delicious things.
Happy Friday.
A few days ago as a gesture of gratitude for holding down the fort, and because he loves me, Paul brought me a homemade red velvet cupcake with a big dollop of some sort of cream cheese frosting on top, from the resident lounge.
“Something special,” he said. “Just for you.”
As he walked up the stairs with it, HH saw it, took it from him and carried it over, holding it up to me yelling, “MAAAAAAAAHM! DADDY BROUGHT YOU A CUPCAKE!”
I bent down and took it from her.
“That is so nice of you to bring that to me, HH! So helpful. Thank you.”
She looked up at me, expectantly.
“I want to stick my finger in it.”
I told her I’d cut it in half and we could share.
I got a plate, cut it in half, and we sat down at the table. She picked up one of the halves and shoved the entire thing into her mouth. I picked up one crumb that she had dropped and ate it, causing her to freeze mid-chew and look up at me with total suspicion. Then I reached to pick up the second half.
She grabbed the plate and pulled it into her chest, cheeks stuffed, red dye smeared across her face, glaring at me, poised for freakout.
I looked at her. “HH…we’re sharing. That half is mine. In fact, the whole thing is mine, I was sharing with you.”
Paul joined in: “That is Mom’s cupcake, she was nice to share it with you. It’s not yours. Give it back.”
Cue: freakout.
Wailing, sobbing, and with her mouth wide open and chewed food flying everywhere, she promptly dropped the other half of the cupcake on the ground. Frosting down.
E, who had been hanging out in the vicinity waiting for something exactly like this to happen, speed-crawled over, and puked on it.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there. I hope you all got something special. Just for you.
We spotted the ocean at the head of the trail
Where are we going, so far away
And somebody told me that this is the place
Where everything’s better, everything’s safe
In high school there were two girls who were best friends, I never saw one without the other, both used mini rolley backpacks covered in Toad the Wet Sprocket patches and stickers for their school bags. They were DEVASTATED when the band broke up the summer before my senior year. Every time I hear that song, including during a marathon, I think of them. But that’s beside the point.
The Catalina Island Conservancy Marathon was last weekend. 26.2 miles. 4,310 feet in elevation. 350 runners. Old friends. Bison. Garibaldi. Buffalo milk.
Friday afternoon my sister, myself, and our old friend met up at the Long Beach terminal to catch the Catalina Island Express out to Avalon.
The three of us worked together for a few summers at a camp for kids on the West End of the island. We hadn’t seen each other, or even really spoken much prior to the marathon, in almost 12 years. TWELVE. YEARS.
But as it goes with relationships that are built through sharing a singular experience, there is a strange kind of bond that doesn’t seem to fade, regardless of how long it’s been.
We took the ride across the channel, one we had collectively done dozens of times, arriving both sun and windburned. And as we pulled into the harbor, excitement set in over the nerves.
We checked in to our hotel and spent the rest of the afternoon making trips to the sole grocery store, picking up essentials for the next morning. It felt good to be back.
We stayed in Avalon on the East End, next to the finish line. The starting line was at the Isthmus, a narrow strip of land that connects the island’s east and west ends.
Kind of hard to see on the map, but the course is marked by a yellow line. It basically runs from Two Harbors / Cat Harbor on the Isthmus, cuts through to the west coast, back through the middle and ends in Avalon, on the East End. (The red crosses indicate aid stations, they’re a little easier to see on the map.)
Up at 3:45am on Saturday morning for another boat ride over to the starting line!
Apparently during previous years the ride over had been a little rough (two years ago Molly did the race and said 90% of the people on the boat were puking the entire ride, which is about an hour long.) We had nothing but smooth sailing. Thank God.
The first two and a half miles of the race are uphill. Straight uphill. Like, enough uphill to deprive your brain of sufficient oxygen to figure out how to take a picture on your phone.
…followed by about a mile and a half of minor ups and downs, and then some serious downhill.
Parts of the trail were narrow, muddy, and had a lot of loose rocks. We saw a few people bail hard…including Molly immediately after taking this picture while she was fiddling with her phone.
The island was super green, which was a nice change from the brown, dry hills we were used to in the summer and fall. It was pretty spectacular.
our view of shark harbor and little harbor, right around mile 9. those little dots on the road are runners that were behind us.
A few things about this race were really, particularly awesome:
The aid stations were perfectly placed and had all sorts of options for hydration and fuel, as well as sunscreen and first aid kits.
There were Catalina Conservancy crew going up and down the course the entire time, making you feel that even though you were running on a trail in the middle of nowhere, you were never far from help.
The sun didn’t come out until about 3 hours in, which was super great on a course that is so exposed.
The vibe. Everybody was supportive and nice and helpful and just psyched to be there.
Things that were not awesome:
This hill at mile 18, where we gained almost 600 ft in elevation in about a mile and a half…
…and the fact that my Catalina Marathon Running Mix didn’t download onto my phone. Because of that, my personal soundtrack for this race ended up being a High School Flashback alternative rock mix that I had probably accidentally downloaded a few years ago, because I apparently hadn’t completed it. It only had 8 songs. I had no idea it was on my phone.
While Space Hog and Savage Garden and Blind Melon and Nada Surf are great, they have their place. And I’m going to go ahead and say on repeat during a marathon is not that place. You can only listen to Truly Madly Deeply so many times before you want to tear your eyes out.
After mile 19 the course was pretty pleasant and flat-ish, though still uphill. The last three miles back into Avalon are a steep downhill, which can be rough on the legs after so much climbing.
But…(and not to beat a dead horse here)…it was just so gorgeous.
We all survived, made it back to Avalon, and recovered the only way we knew how.
That night we visited a few old hangouts, sitting in corner tables, drinking our celebratory buffalo milks, watching everyone else rock out, remembering when we used to do the same, before we were older and busted and had just finished making our way across the entire island on foot.
Catalina is a special place.
I went into this race feeling undertrained and overtired and overwhelmed and terrified that the hills would be undoable and my body wouldn’t make it.
I came out feeling revitalized. I loved every single second of it.
the morning after
So anyone who feels like doing this particularly challenging course in the future, let me know. I’m in.
Now we’re back at the homestead
Where the air makes you choke
And people don’t know you
And trust is a joke
We don’t even have pictures
Just memories to hold
That grow sweeter each season
As we slowly grow old…
She looked down the deserted path
breathing in the rain-washed sky
soaking herself in warm, delicious solitude
The trials and tribulations
failed attempts
disappointing efforts
highs
and lows
triumphs
and exhaustion
all behind her
she thought of the one task that lay ahead
And as she looked forward
envisioning what the next few days would hold
a single, solitary word filled her mind:
Shit.
The Catalina Marathon is two weeks from today. Let’s talk about that.
After the last race I did (the swim in June) things got busy. New baby. New home. New job. Paul is on a crazy string of rotations again (he just finished another block of nights where we basically didn’t see him for 2 weeks). In fact, I think February was the first month EVER in the entire history of this blog that I didn’t post anything.
Despite all that, sometime in the fall I decided that signing up for a marathon was a great idea.
Catalina has been a race I’ve wanted to do for over a decade. It is crazy hilly. I’m running it with my sister and a friend. There is no way at all that I will go fast, I just need to finish. How hard can training be?
Well.
The good news about the training is the weather has been nice and it has been refreshing to be outside and away from everyone else for a few hours.
The bad news is, for the first time I can really remember in my life, my body is fighting me. I have never struggled training for something as much as I have for this. And I might have some idea why.
Sleep
When I was in college I took Psych 101 and remember reading a study on sleep deprivation and physical exertion. It was from like 1950, had an n of 1, and were a lot of variables that weren’t super applicable to real life (ie, the guy stayed up voluntarily). But the results were essentially that while your mental capacity is indubitably effected by lack of sleep, your physical performance capability and muscle strength is not. I distinctly remember a black and white picture of this guy doing push ups after being awake for like 120 hours, smiling.
That image, burned into my mind, helped and me drag myself to morning practice on more than one occasion in college. I have done some of my best workouts during times in my life when I am getting sub-optimal sleep, and I rarely sleep well before a race. So I’ve never really worried too much about it.
me at alma mater pool…on less than adequate sleep
Maybe it’s the fact that my sleep has been interrupted for months on end and the effect has finally compounded, I don’t know. But for the first time ever I can’t seem to get past the exhaustion. I can’t get my heart rate up, my body just won’t.
This feeling of debilitating fatigue could also be linked to…
Nutrition
yerm. primanti bros.
For some reason, even though I manage to make sure my children eat just fine, I cannot seem to do the same for myself. Example: last night HH had lentils, avocado, strawberries, and tomatoes for dinner. I had 2 hardboiled eggs and half a sleeve of shortbread Girl Scout cookies topped with chocolate chips (I know the chocolate chips might sound like overkill, but trust me.) Most of the time I am just too lazy to prepare one more meal and do more dishes. But solely subsisting on PB&J tortillas after a 14 mile run…I am really not helping myself.
These two things combined leads to…
Illness
I have a 2 year old in preschool and a husband that works in a hospital. Walking petri dishes. In the past two months we’ve all had a puking/GI stomach bug. TWICE. And in between those I got some kind of flu. At one point, about 1/3 of the way into my training plan, I went over 2 weeks without running. When I finally started up again, I decided to start back at square one to avoid injury…and my entire training plan went straight out the window.
So training so far has been a very weird, unpredictable rollercoaster on both an emotional and physical level. The past 7 weeks have looked something like this:
Scheduled – How it went
10 mile run – Horrible. Horrific. Painful, terrible. But finished.
12 mile run – A little sore, but OK
14 mile run – Skipped it entirely, too busy puking again.
13.5 mile run – Dreading it big time, but totally fine! No issues at all, almost ran 15 I felt so good, but held back.
15 mile run – Headed out optimistic. Felt absolutely terrible. Body hurt. Joints hurt. Mind hurt. Cut it short, only did 8.
15.5 mile run – No problem at all, no soreness or pain the next day! Wheeeeeee!!
18 mile run – Turned into 10 mile run, incredibly slow and painful, took me 3 days to recover.
This is also, of course, assuming I can find someone to watch at least one of my kids for part of the day that I do my long runs. I’m happy to take them for a couple miles, but at this point I don’t feel like the extra challenge of pushing a double stroller on my 16 miler is necessary.
how i feel about life right now
I have 18 miles on the docket tomorrow. Who knows what that will look like.
I’m really not sure what is happening here other than I’m coming into this race pretty significantly undertrained and overtired. But who knows, given the way things are going, it could be hellish, but it also has the potential to be FANTASTIC.
last trip to catalina, 2009
Go get it.
Oh January. January was almost as fun as December. It started out with a move from our lemon tree in Culver to the beach. It also started out with a stomach bug and the first real El Nino storm of the year.
Have you watched Jessica Jones on Netflix? It’s based on a Marvel Comic, characters include an alcoholic PI who has superstrength and can lift cars and jump over buildings, a villain who can control minds and goes around making people kill each other in gruesome ways, and a man with indestructible skin.
In Season One there is a scene in which the villain decides he wants to move into a two-bedroom suburban house, so he goes and tells the owner to move out within 24 hours (which, of course, the owner does, because mind control). And 24 hours later the villain moves into the huge, newly vacant house.
Over the past week I kept thinking about that scene when he walks into the empty, perfectly clean house. It is the most unrealistic scene in the entire series.
Moving always sucks. Moving with a two year old and an infant, in torrential rain, when everyone is puking and having serious GI problems is…yeah. It took us over a week to clean everything out and get everything in. And almost a month to recover.
It wasn’t pretty, but we made it. And our new place, though tiny, is 5 blocks from the beach and pretty fantastic.
Welcome home.
December was a rough month. Paul worked nights and HH started sleep walking. Easy E decided around 2am every morning that he liked sleeping in our bed more than his own. It was a really fun time for everyone.
Christmas day, his night float rotation finally complete, Paul started 2 weeks of vacation. YES. That night two zombies left their reports with some very generous in-laws and boarded a red-eye flight to Managua to attend the wedding of a dear old friend on the 27th. We couldn’t WAIT to get on the plane to sleep. It was going to be great.
We were in the very last row. I was in the middle. Neither of us slept.
It had been nearly 10 years since I had last been to Nicaragua, when I spent four months living in Managua. We arrived even more zonked out than when we’d boarded the plane. I couldn’t think of anything except passing out on the three hour drive to our final destination, San Juan del Sur.
But as soon as we got off the plane, it hit me. The smell. Pretty sure it’s burning trash mixed with diesel, but to me it smells…exciting. Like old memories. Managua. And I felt a little tingle. Something in the back of my foggy, sleep-deprived mind started to wake up.
The groom had organized our ride from the airport. As soon as we got out of customs, we found a driver holding a sign with our name on it. His name was Delvis. Like Elvis with a D.
As we drove from the airport, past the families of 4 riding one bike down the busy highway, the emaciated feral dogs that somehow don’t get run over, the pulperias, the back neighborhoods down crooked streets with the pink and yellow and orange houses, identical to the one where I stayed so many years ago, I suddenly, inexplicably, felt…stimulated. Alive. If still not completely awake.
nicaragua, 2006
We spent the whole ride to San Juan catching up with the bride and groom and, upon arriving, immediately hopped on a catamaran with the wedding party. Which included a Nicaraguan pop star. Suddenly there was rum to drink and potential celebrities to befriend. Sleep became secondary.
We took the boat along the coast to a secluded beach with no road access and beautiful white sands. While drifting on my back in the turquoise water I saw a woman who worked on the boat swimming some sort of container up onto the beach.
“First aid kit?”
“No, cooler. I don’t even think we have a First Aid kit on board. Maybe some band-aids?”
Nicaragua. I love you.
The rest of the weekend continued in the same vein.
We stayed in ridiculous homes overlooking the ocean, partied with some of our best friends, relived memories, and had a wonderful, memorable, sleepless, extravagant, glorious time. And when we boarded the flight home 2 days later, I looked at my phone:
6 pictures.
Because our visit was so short, I had kind of intentionally put my phone away. I felt too tired to try to deal with trying to capture every moment, I just wanted to enjoy. But really, 6? And three of them are of Paul cleaning a pool. None with the bride and groom. None with our friends that now live in Costa Rica. None of the ceremony or the blinking, gaudy, quintessentially nica nativity scene with a REAL WATERFALL that graced the alter. None of Paul and I together wearing fancy clothes (which hasn’t happened in at least a year). None of the city. None of the beach.
But I did capture this blurry gem.
So, there’s that. Hopefully we’ll be back for more soon.
I don’t do crafts. But a few weeks before Christmas I decided I was going to. Because that’s what good parents do during the holidays. Paul was working nights, so I was flying solo on this.
Wednesday: On a trip to Target (duh) I decide baking cookies will be the perfect thing to get in the holiday spirit. I like baking, and I’m good at it. Sometimes.
Friday: After two days of the ingredients sitting on the counter, I decide to skip including my two year old in the dough-making process. It’s not like this is a life skill she HAS to learn. I make the dough on my own so it’s ready when she gets home from preschool. She comes home from school in meltdown mode. I make the executive decision to delay cookie making.
Monday: 3/4 of the dough still sitting in fridge. The other 1/4 I ate over the weekend.
Wednesday: A week later. This is the day we will bake! HH has been having night terrors and sleep-walking when she goes to bed after 7:15 (fun), so we rush through dinner and have just enough time to get the dough out, roll it, cookie cutter some shapes (which she is way less into than I thought she would be), and throw them in the oven. No time to decorate. No time to admire the finished product. I put the cookies in a tupperware after she goes to bed, keep frosting ingredients in the fridge.
Friday: Half of the cookies are gone because I ate them. Sans-frosting.
Sunday: Facetime with Nana and Opa. When I suggest HH show them the cookies she baked, she accidentally breaks an arm off of a star of Bethlehem. I tell her it’s OK to eat it. She looks at me confused, then suddenly the realization creeps across her face…these are edible! And not only can she eat the piece that broke off, she can eat the whole cookie. And she does so. From then on, every time she walks into the kitchen: “Cookie?”
Monday: Now that there are only 5 week-old cookies left in the tupperware, time to decorate! I get out all the decorating icings and frostings. HH smears green frosting on half of one cookie and goes, “I eat it now.” I explain that no, decorating cookies is SO FUN, we can eat them when they’re decorated, and don’t gingerbread men look better with a face? and they taste better with frosting anyway. “NO! NO FROSTING!! I EAT THE COOKIES NOW!”
So I take them away. Tears. Screams. Faux seizures. Drama.
The cream cheese I got to make special frosting is still sitting in the fridge.
Holiday crafts are the best.
Rambulatory Ambulatory 