Nobody Knows Anything

A while ago — we lived in LA, I know that much, and we had Sophia, at least — I picked up a running or sports magazine and opened it to a big article on the Berlin Marathon.

Berlin.

Marathon.

My immediate reaction was Oh yeah, I wanna do that.

I haven’t been back to Berlin since I was there in 1986. I’ve kept saying I want to go back, but it was always easy to put off, and then I got together with Darin, who is not particularly comfortable with countries where he doesn’t speak the language.

At the time I read the article, I hadn’t gotten back into running. The idea of running a marathon seemed completely ludicrous. And yet…

Running a marathon isn’t completely ludicrous any more. (In fact, as Rob puts it, “We could probably run one right now, just on sheer orneriness.”) My running buds, Rob and Nina, are not that into the idea — continue running for four (errr…five…maybe five and a half hours)? So I’m in it on my own. Although Nina wouldn’t mind going on the training runs with me. And Rob wants to do at least one 30K (18.6 miles) trail run. And it’s really cool to go on these runs where a lot of participants are doing 50K (31 miles) runs up gigantic hills and without getting a medal when they pass the finish lines.

And then, one of my favorite bloggers, the Born Again Gym Bunny, has decided to do a marathon. Three guesses as to which one she’s doing.

It’s a sign, I tell you.

Except schlepping the entire family halfway around the world so that I can run around the streets of Berlin seems just a teensy bit crazed. (Not to mention: expensive.) And the idea of going to Berlin by myself… well, I couldn’t be there for particularly long, because I can’t leave Darin with the kids for too long unless he takes off of work.

Maybe it’s just a completely crazy idea and I should just do something simple, like the LA Marathon. (True, with all this hill running, I should be up for the SF Marathon, but… no.) But I want to do a marathon this year. This is the year that the odometer rolls over and my warranty expires. This is my version of giant party.

Evidently they close the registration for the marathon in August, unless it fills up before then. So I guess I have a while to decide and work out the logistics.

I woke up this morning at 5:30 am, when Sophia crawled into bed with us. I had the alarm set for 5:50, so I didn’t bother going back to sleep. I got up, got dressed to go running, and was still slightly late to my running appointment with Rob and Nina. I had water and a Luna bar before the run.

After the run I made Pillsbury cinnamon rolls with the kids and ate two. Not the healthiest breakfast, but fun once in a while.

I didn’t snack in the morning, because today is the day I help out in Sophia’s classroom.

Darin was home sick today. When I got home I took the remaining rice out of the rice cooker, the leftover chicken leg from the refrigerator, and two eggs and cooked up some fried rice for us.

About an hour later, I was on the couch, completely exhausted and asking Darin if he had the strength to pick up Sophia from school. I’ve stayed crashed all afternoon, with no energy. I ate a dish of cottage cheese to see if that would perk me up a little.

Just in case I needed a dramatic representation that in fact I actually need to make sure there’s protein in my diet and not so many of the sugar carbs just so I can stay awake, I got one today. No rice at lunch! More protein in my breakfast! Or else I will feel like hell all afternoon.

Many moons ago — or maybe like a month; time is flexible — Rob IM’d me and Nina and said, “Laura and I are going to be camping near Pacifica the weekend of the Pacifica run. I’m going to do it. You two in?”

“But Rob, that run is just a week after Angel Island!”

“Your point?”

Nina and I conferred amongst ourselves — we couldn’t get a chat room to work, so the three of us had six IM windows open for this discussion — and decided, What the heck, why not.

This morning I woke up and got on iChat to check on my fellow runners. Rob was there and stayed long enough to say, “I’m sick. I should not be out there today.” He’s been coming down with something since the Angel Island run and evidently it blossomed when he decided to have a small vacation.

Nina and I agreed we were going anyway.

The forecast called for partly cloudy. The coast turned out to be completely cloudy and somewhat foggy. At one point while driving over Highway 1 to Pacifica visibility got very, very poor. “We’re going to be running in this?” we asked, wondering if there was going to be a whole new dimension to one of these runs. The fog lifted at lower elevations, however, so that turned out not to be an issue. There was also a wee misting of rain, but we laugh at rain; rain would be no problem.

We had signed up for the 21 kilometer run, which would be the longest confirmed run either of us had ever done, flat or hilly. 21 kilometers is slightly longer than 13 miles. We would start with a 9K loop that had two hills in it, followed by the 12K loop that went up a much steeper mountain.

Midway through the 9K loop I realized I had nuthin’. I was continuing to run up this trail by sheer force of orneriness and not from any internal spark. How not into this was I? I had tied my hoodie around my waist and the pressure of the knot against my stomach made me retch. I figured when we got back to the parking lot, before we started up the 12K loop, I would tell Nina I was bagging the rest of the race. She would either continue without me or we’d call it a day at 9K.

We stopped in the restroom and I told her I was considering bagging the race.

She didn’t respond. She did not acknowledge my sentiment in any way. Instead, we went over to the runners’ food table and had a mango-flavored Gu. And then we headed up the 12K trail.

She told me later that if I had said a second time that I wanted to stop, she would have stopped, because she’d been thinking about calling it quits too. But she figured if she continued on, I’d continue on, and we’d do the run whether we wanted to or not. Smart chick.

The 12K loop was so unbelievably hard that as I sit here and think about it I cannot believe I actually did it. There were three sections: a longish foresty hiking trail that switchbacked up the hill; a rocky section lined up the center by a giant fissure; and a yellow rock fire road that led up to the North Peak. We made it up the first section by doing the “Grandma shuffle.” We made it up the rocky part by going slowly, looking carefully for somewhere to put our feet, and getting out of the way of the harder-core runners who were barreling down the hill at top speed. And we went up the yellow rock road as best we could: sometimes we shuffled, and sometimes we walked as fast as we could.

The rain started coming down in noticeable amounts during this last section and this was no “wee misting” any longer. I was completely soaked through and my hair zinged out in the full ‘fro. I had left my hoodie down at the starting line when we’d stopped between loops, so I had no second layer and no hood for my head. That kinda sucked. But now I’ve really run in the rain. I’m not sure I want to try running in the snow.

Much of the way through the 9K and 12K loops we kept running into this guy from Arizona doing the 50K route. He’d driven in from Arizona for this race. Nina and I were amazed. We have trouble enough imagining driving to Marin County for a race, and this guy went 700 miles for one. He asked us whether we’d done other mountain races around the country and we had to say, “Uh, no.”

On the way down (which always takes so much less time than the way up; it’s just not fair) I stopped us in the middle of the rocky section. “Okay, time to enjoy the view.” Because we certainly couldn’t enjoy the view for a second when we were moving; one false step and wham! : twisted ankle. Hell, we came close enough to twisted ankle watching every step we took. We enjoyed the view for 10 seconds, and then we continued on down the hill.

When we hit the forest trail part my body just moved into high gear. We had been moving for so long at that point that I felt as though I could run forever. (I wonder if that’s the fabled Runner’s High.) There were a couple of muddy spots where I nearly slipped and fell, but it was so easy just to keep going. That kind of flying feeling is definitely one of the best things about these runs for me.

We talked about how having trail running shoes on the sort of muddy, slippery terrain we’ve been running on would be a boon. Yes, we’ve spent money on road running shoes, but we’d actually use the trail shoes. Trail shoes have deeper notches than regular shoes do — no use for road running, but they might make hitting this mud a little less scary. We agreed that It Was Time to take the plunge and increase our athletic wardrobes.

At the end we sprinted the last hundred feet to the finish line and cheered as we crossed the banner. We told Wendell and Sarah (the couple who run Pacific Coast Trail Runs) that we had just done the longest distance we’d ever completed, flat or hilly. I was completely elated and glad as hell that Nina had taken the lead and had us finish the race.

We immediately went to the refreshments table — in my opinion, the entire point of doing these runs is to eat Pop Tarts — and we were talking about the run when Wendell and Sarah came up to us. “In honor of your achievement today, particularly on such a hard course, we’d like to give you this award,” they said, and they handed us each a coupon for free trail shoes!

I squealed. Nina squealed. I may have jumped up and down. We thanked them profusely. If this wasn’t a sign that getting trail shoes was the Right Idea, I don’t know what would be. I managed to get my sheet completely wet by holding it against my shirt, but it dried out again in the back of my car. Sometime soon it’s off to REI to try on the various available models!

We were aching and tired as we limped off to my car and prepared ourselves for getting in. Since this was Darin’s car, which he keeps very clean, we sat on towels and had plastic bags on the floor for our muddy shoes. Then we drove to Starbucks to get our celebratory, and necessary, cup of coffee before driving back to the South Bay. The barista asked if we’d just run a race. Then someone else asked if we’d been out running in that terrible weather. I couldn’t figure out how everyone knew we’d just come from a race until I got back to the car and looked down — maybe the big number on my chest might have given it away. It’s amazing how zoned out I can get after a run. And yes, I operated a motorized vehicle nevertheless.

Now I’m lying on the couch completely achy and sore but feeling great. Usually I get an all-over tired when I’m running but my legs don’t feel especially exhausted. Not today: that 12K loop did my legs in and I’m going to feel it in the morning, no question. I’m not sure doing two trail runs in two weekends is such a smart idea, but I don’t care. I am having the best time doing these things. These are way more fun than any road race I’ve ever done, even if I get the humiliation of a 9-year-old running in front of me for the first 9K (which happened). But you know: some 9-year-olds are in very good shape, and good on her anyhow.

I almost can’t think about politics these days, let alone write about it, because it’s so awful I can’t stand it. I realize this is why the situation continues to deteriorate: people like me can’t work up the energy necessary to, you know, do something about it. The only thing I’ve done lately is to call up Sen. Feinstein’s office and say, politely, to the intern answering the phone, “What the fuck was Feinstein thinking saying there would be no Alito filibuster? Filibuster him, damn you.” Okay, I used little to no profanity. But I was thinking it.

Anyhow, today’s bit of insanity, which displays just how far down the rabbit hole we are right now, comes from Rep. Bob Ney, of Ohio (via Atrios):

Ohio Republican Chairman Bob Bennett said Thursday that he’d ask Rep. Bob Ney to resign from Congress if he were indicted on felony charges.

Bennett stressed that Ney, R-Heath, has not been charged with any crime and that the party backs him for re-election.

…Asked if Ney planned to step down if Bennett urged him to do so, Ney said: “I would say if he asked me to step down that he’d better look in the mirror because glass houses break easily.”

An elected Congressional Representative isn’t claiming innocence; he’s saying, “Yeah, I’m guilty, and if I go down, I’m taking people with me.”

And, you know, this isn’t particularly big news.

Of course, in a time when the President had not only admitted publicly to high crimes and misdemeanors but has said he’ll do it again and again, and Congress isn’t really doing much to hold up their end of the Constitutional bargain… I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised.

Friday night I pinged Rob. “Did you see the weather forecast?”

He IM’d back: “I’m hardcore. I’m going anyway.”

Nina too agreed she was going. Never say I don’t respond to peer pressure: I was in too.

The weather forecast called for a 70% of thundershowers Saturday morning, which was of interest because we were scheduled to do a 16K run on Angel Island. 16K, for the metric-challenged amongst us, is 10 miles.

And, what the hey: 70% isn’t 100%, right?

(Evidently the organizers of the run got so many inquiries about any effects the weather might have, they put a big banner at the top of the page: RAIN OR SHINE!)

The bummer about the Angel Island run was that you had to be in Tiburon at 7:50 to catch the special ferry over. Which meant to be on the safe side we had to leave the South Bay at 6am, which meant getting up at… well, I decided Nina would just have to let me eat in her car and I could wake up that much later.

I was at Nina’s by 6 and we hit the road. We got to Tiburon in plenty of time. As the runners stood around, waiting for the ferry, a giant flash lighted up the sky. Heh. Guess that prediction went straight to 100%, huh? I wondered exactly how bad the rain was going to be for this run.

None of us chickened out, despite the fact that Tiburon has approximately 4 cafes for every resident in case we decided to wait. The three of us agreed that this run was the sort of experience that you don’t especially look forward to and you complain during, but afterwards you have a really great time yukking it up while discussing it.

And we were all appropriately layered: I had on my long Lycra pants (mostly to preserve against elements, because they’re not any warmer than my normal Lycra shorts), a long-sleeved running T, my running hoodie, a fleece sweater, and as a topper my General Magic rain jacket. I was prepared.

What amazed me was the number of people on the ferry who were basically in a Lt. Dangle special: a tank top with shorts and that’s about it. Were they insane? Hadn’t they read the forecast? They were going to freeze! Of course, later on I figured out why this outfit was not as crazy as it appeared, but at the beginning I couldn’t imagine how these people with zero body fat weren’t going to have hypothermia.

When we got to the island it was colder and a little rainy but nothing terrible. We put our belongings in the plastic bags the organizers had on hand and then waited for our group to start. First off were the 50Kers and 25Kers, of which there were a fair number. (These runs are getting very popular.) Then off went the 8Kers. The last bunch, the 16Kers, assembled under the square white awning that served as the starting line.

And suddenly the rain came drenching down.

You have never seen 50 strangers huddle together in such a small area before.

I may or may not have said, “Oh dear.” Running in this would be no fun at all.

After a few minutes of the downpour (during which the people at the front row of the awning kept moving to the back, in order to escape the rain being blown on them), the rain finally tapered off and the 16Kers got started.

We definitely did catch a break: the rain never showed up again, at least not with any real force. In fact, I understood why so many runners had showed up in their short clothes, despite the cold. I got hot in a hurry. Early into our first lap, I shed the sweater and the rain jacket. If I’d been going like the hammers of hell, like the high-performance runners, I’d definitely have been overheated in my get-up.

Betcha they were cold when they finished, though.

There were three 8K circles around the island: the 8Kers did one, the 16Kers did one each of two, the 25Kers did all three, the 50Kers did each one twice. You ran up a very long flight of steps — a quarter of a mile? maybe more? A distance long enough to make me think, “Aha, this is why one might wish to do bleacher runs” — followed by another quarter of a mile or so up to where the circles broke off from one another, and you followed the colored flags to the right path. Sometimes the paths were very narrow, and at some points the ground had simply broken open, as though an earthquake had shifted everything around and not put it together again. There was lots of mud and lots of very large puddles. When you finished your lap, you went back down the very long upward path to the steps, and back to the starting line. Then you turned around and did it again.

At first we did our best to avoid the mud and water, gingerly tip-toeing on the side as best we could. After a while though, we were definitely all, “Fuck this,” and we’d go straight through the center of it. We were sparkling clean, though, compared to a lot of the harder-core runners, who had mud up to their asses. These people were coated in mud. I was actually kind of envious.

When we finished we made a beeline for the food area — soup and chili! Pop-Tarts! — and Rob took out the thermos I’d given him for Christmas, especially for events like this. He had made 32 oz of Americano in the morning. Nina and I whipped out our coffee cups to share in the bounty. The warm soup and coffee helped immensely. Also: Pop-Tarts.

We took the ferry back to Tiburon and walked to Nina’s car, where Operation Keep Nina’s Nice New Prius Relatively Clean kicked in. I put the beach towel I’d brought over my seat. Then, at her trunk, I took off both my shoes and my socks (which is why the socks are stuffed into the shoes, above) and wrapped them in the plastic bag from the run. My feet were a little dirty (mud knows no boundaries) but the towel stretched to the floor.

The rain in the South Bay when we drove back was much worse than anything we’d had during the morning. “Boy, we dodged a bullet,” I said.

And we were right: despite being a very long and tiring run, it definitely was the sort of experience that it’s fun to share. The idea that a little thing like a prediction of thundershowers wasn’t enough to get us to cancel is definitely progress on the Committed (and possibly Committable) Runner front.

§

Despite growing up in San Francisco, I’d never been to Angel Island before. My God, it’s beautiful. What an excellent place for a picnic and a reasonably easy hike. (None of the circles around the island were especially difficult; it was the getting to and from that were the killers for me.) Pacific Coast Trail Runs does an excellent job of finding gorgeous spots and putting on great runs. I am so totally addicted to these now.

§

As one 50Ker lapped us — meaning he’d already done his first 8K and had now on his second lap caught up to us during our first 8K — Nina said, “I want to do a 50K sometime, don’t you? But there’s no way.”

To which I replied, “If six months ago you’d said I was the kind of person who’d willingly go run 10 miles in the rain and mud, I’d have thought you were nuts, so anything’s possible.”

§

The absolutely positively best thing about these Pacific Coast Trail Runs — besides the obvious beauty of the locations — is the other runners. Whenever we passed by other runners, whether in a tight up-and-down squeeze on those stairs, or having a 50Ker blow past us on one path, is that there are always shouts of “Great job!” or “Looking good!” or “Go! Go!” I don’t know if runners do this during marathons, but I don’t recall any of this during a road race.

Probably during a road race everyone’s focused on doing their personal best, whereas at a trail run you’re more or less focused on finishing.

§

To Rob and Nina: I couldn’t get the photos off of my phone! Evidently the phone’s Bluetooth connection doesn’t allow for file transfers or something.

I own an iPod. Darin got me a very nice 15 gig one for my birthday in 2004. Once we finally figured out how to use the iTrip play-through-the-radio attachment, it became a permanent fixture in my car.

I have an iPod Shuffle. Last year Steve* gave every Apple employee one as a thank you for a great year. Darin said, “Are you going to use that? Because if you’re not we should give it as a gift to someone.” I tried it out, and it’s become a permanent part of my exercise habit. Have tunes, will do boring cardio workout at gym.

My brother-in-law has worked on iPod for years. Darin worked on the iPod before it came out. My running bud, Rob, worked on iPod for four years, up until a few weeks ago. (And he never told me about the video iPod, the bastard.)

I know plenty about iPod. I know who’s working on iPod (though none of them will tell me what they’re working on — Darin and Mitch don’t even tell one another what they’re working on, and they’re brothers). It’s old hat to me, right?

I have an iPod Nano in my hands, and I can’t stop playing with it. It’s so small. It’s so cute. Look at the screen! It’s so thin and tiny — and yet can fit so much music, so many podcasts!

I want to go running right now, just so I can try it out.

Apple is amazing at creating plug-and-play electronic crack. So why haven’t they taken over the world? Jeez. It’s so frustrating sometimes.

§

Darin knew way ahead of time about the MacBook announcement at MacWorld. And didn’t tell me about it.

My friend Otto IM’d me: “So Darin knew and didn’t tell you? Divorce!”

Me: “No, no. A fully tricked-out MacBook, that’s what.”

Apple was nowhere near this controlled when I worked there. It seemed like everyone had the Mercury News on speed-dial. These days, Darin tells me about something, he gets fired. (I’ve decided it’s better to hold off on knowing and get the MacBook eventually, instead of collecting unemployment.) It’s better for the company, obviously. I’m just amazed they’ve managed such a veil of secrecy.

What’s hilarious is, whenever Darin and his brothers — only one of whom works on iPod — discuss the iPod, iTunes, or downloading, in the middle of whatever it is they’re saying they’ll throw in, “Don’t steal music.” I wonder if they have hypnotic programming sessions where everyone learns to say that.

* Seriously, if you’ve got to ask “Steve who?”…

I bought myself a seltzer bottle for Christmas. Isn’t it pretty?

At first, I couldn’t make it work. Then I noticed the cartridges not only said “Cream” but also said NO₂ instead of CO₂. (I had those cartridges because that’s what the chick at Williams-Sonoma sold me, okay?) I took the cartridges back, got the ones labeled “Soda,” and discovered they work much, much better.

Normally I drink carbonated water mixed with a slug or two of Torani syrups, available in nearly every flavor you can think of (and even more, if you buy the full-sugar ones — currently i use the sugar free ones flavored with Splenda). I hope adulterating perfectly good water with syrup removes it from my “glasses of water per day” total, but I can’t say that with certainty.

The best thing about making the bottle of soda is, of course, adding the CO₂ to the water. You add the cartridge to the cartridge holder, carefully screw it in… and when the seal on the cartridge is pierced, WHOOMP! The water bubbles up. Then you shake the bottle a few times (to distributed the CO₂?) and you’re good to go.

Now that I have used the seltzer bottle (successfully), I can give you a side-by-side comparison of how the bottle stacks up against a bottle of carbonated water (say, Crystal Geyser) bought at the store:

Clearly in the short run it’s much more cost-effective to keep buying the carbonated water at the store, but I much, much prefer using the seltzer bottle. It tastes better, there’s no sodium, and best of all, I’m not filling up our recyclables container every week with four or five bottles.

So if you’re like me and a)like carbonated water and b)like to make your own Italian sodas with Torani syrup, I highly recommend picking up a seltzer bottle. There are both cheaper ones and bigger ones out there, depending on your needs.

Evidently JT Leroy, child prostitute and AIDS victim, never really existed. John Scalzi thinks this is no more than convoluted ghost-writing. Susie Bright feels much, much differently about the situation:

For readers, famous author JT Leroy’s hoax — that “he” is really a “she,” that a middle-class 40-year-old woman has been impersonating the life of a lumpen gutter-whore child — must make for great reading. Memoir, shmemoir, right?

But if you’re an author, an editor, a publisher — or worse, a friend — to someone who bullshit you up one side and down the other, it’s not cute. It’s not irrelevant. It’s a cruel con, straight up, and the whole writers’ community suffered for it.

She goes on to describe her relationship with JT — apparently Bright got (and published) JT’s first work — and clearly she and a lot of other people were taken in. I feel really bad for her: I know how hard some online journalers on the ‘net took it to find out other journalers were frauds, and there was no money, time, personal contacts, and business to fuck up there.

Of course, there were the online journals set up to detail leukemia victims, or what have to you, in order to get money. And a lot of people were hurt by that too.

The most hysterical detail Bright relates is the last plea she got from JT:

Then, in October, JT wrote and asked me to help fundraise for his son’s private French immersion school, Lycee Francais La Perouse, the most prestigious and expensive grade school in San Francisco.

THUD.

I had just come from a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser before I opened my mail. JT’s plea to support his dream of higher education seemed… just plain high.

In the years since I first knew him, JT had made film and book deals galore, with celebrities fawning at every gesture. I felt like writing him and asking if he’d like to donate to my gas bill, which is suffering more of a hit than Lycee Francais’s current endowment fund.

But I didn’t write back. I didn’t want to say I felt ignored and used, because I felt silly that I had ever thought it was anything more than that.

Lycee Francais La Perouse? Hahahahaha. The lil’ street hustler sure had moved up in the world.

§

I seem to remember reading a long time ago that James Frey was a big fraud — in fact, I was surprised to see on Amazon he’d been chosen by Oprah. Perhaps the difference now is that The Smoking Gun has the proof?

Do yourself a favor and go read an excellent post from Annalisa on how today is the day — not some point in the future, but now.

Okay, it’s not an exciting speed. Hell, it’s hardly even counts as moving. But this morning Rob, Nina, and I did 4.68 miles in 52 minutes.

We’re getting faster.

Well, Rob and Nina are already faster — they sped way ahead of me for the final ten meters or so, damn their black souls to hell — but compared to the last minute-per-mile we had figured, I’ve started to speed up.

That’s one of my resolutions this year, by the way: to get back to a 10-minute-mile. One of the great things about fitness resolutions is that even before you achieve them, you already have the next level in your sights. A little faster, a little farther, a little harder. Do a trail run one year; hope to do it a whole hell of a lot better (or easier, or faster up the hill part, or whatever) the next year.