Tuesday, December 21, 20041:38 AM - I guess Link is the closest thing I have to a holiday elfho ho hoHappy Holidays everyone! I am leaving this afternoon to visit my family on the East Coast for a week. Going home for the holidays is always interesting, so keep me in your thoughts, if you have a spare thought available. In the meantime, I will have some internet access, hopefully. I dunno if I will be posting in my journal, though... About a week ago, I won a design contest for Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, meaning that an island I designed will be used in their game and they are giving me more island design assignments, should I choose to accept them. I am really excited to think that thousands of pirates may soon be plundering and pillaging and colonizing the shores of my island (which I secretly call Emily, the Fearful Brontosaurus). But I might use my minimal internet time for landscaping rather than blogging. And you thought I was crazy for dressing up like a pirate and going to a party with a bunch of strangers. Arrr. Also this week, I reconnected with Michelle, a friend from high school who happens to be the only girl I ever dated. (She still seems a bit flustered to think that I had a crush on Legolas while we were doing things like going to see the Neverending Story 2, but I guess I was a bit slow to pick up on why people had girlfriends in the first place.) In all fairness, she's done some things in the past several years that surprised me too, not the least of which involves learning to smite her enemies with heavy weaponry. Michelle will be back on the East Coast too, so we will probably make time to be social and whatnot. Today I got to spend a brief hour with Serenity, one of my trapeze teachers from Vermont. She's teaching a quick workshop out here before Christmas, so I stopped by during lunch between classes. Even if my body was healed from all the running, my flight tomorrow guarantees that I couldn't schedule any of the workshops. :-( And since the news keeps getting better and better, my blisters are healing. They were really bad for a while, and I was downright concerned about one of my toes, but it seems to be on the path out of ugliness and into recovery. Keep me in your thoughts, and happy holidays! Wednesday, December 15, 20043:39 PM - this entry even has a couple minipics, don't miss itI woke up at 2 am, spiked my hair and added some purple glitter, just for fun. I put on my yellow AIDS Marathon running shirt and joined about 1100 other people who were all from our group to take a shuttle over to the starting line. In training, I had started with a slower group (Jack Foster, 13:30 mins per mile) then bumped up to a faster group (Alberto Salazar, 12:00 minutes per mile). When we did our 26.2-mile training run in San Francisco, I hurt my foot and had a possible stress fracture, and spent 4 weeks resting and icing my foot, hoping the injury would heal. For Honolulu, I decided I would walk alongside the Jack Fosters, who were an incredibly supportive group of runners. My plan was to walk the first 13 miles, the re-evaluate whether I would walk or run the last 13, or whether I would need to drop out of the race entirely. We started while it was still dark, at 5am. There was a huge crowd both in front and behind me, and after Halloween in the Castro a couple years ago, I was afraid that someone would get trampled. We wore little microchips on our shoes, so that our time would be accurate and wouldn't start counting until we crossed the actual starting line. We started out through the Chinatown area of Honolulu, with a few locals clapping for us, but mostly the streets were just a throng of runners. There were tons of Japanese runners there. The event was sponsored by Japan Airlines, and everything was in both Japanese and English. A lot of people ran in costume, too... there was a Pokemon, lots of Santa Clauses, a samurai who ran in blocky wooden sandals, and at least one Panda, to name a few. The first several miles were easy, because of the darkness and the excitement of moving forward. Early on, I saw the Alberto Salazar group, and they looked really strong and wonderful. At mile 6, we passed the portion of Waikiki where our supporters were staying. They were clapping and hugging runners as they passed by. I hugged a few people because that was more important than my finishing time. We passed by a park where many of our staff members were setting up the finish, but some of them snuck away from their duties to clap for us and hug us. Yay! The sun was starting to rise, and we started to head upwards towards Diamond Head (an extinct volcano). We had a nice slope over the side of it. At about mile 7, we passed a point where the winners were coming back towards the finish. First there were people racing in aerodynamic wheelchairs, zooming by as we clapped and cheered. Then we had a single runner (runner #1!) who not only won the race, he also set a course record. One by one the leaders started coming, and after about the sixth man, we saw the first woman. She got even more cheers than the men, and she deserved it, because she seemed to be in anguish. The first two women were very close, and I think it was very competitive at the finish, although I didn't see that because I kept moving forward. At about mile 11, I could no longer powerwalk at the pace that the Jack Fosters were running. I realize that running and walking are different activities, and I was not trained as a runner. I tried to run with the Jacks, but my foot had some remnant injured-ness and was having a sharp pain within 5 minutes. I let the Jacks slip away, and I was on my own in a sea of people, most of whom were running around me and passing me by. At this point, I got really depressed. We had just reached a part of the course where, for several miles, there were two lanes of traffic. I was headed out to the rest of the course, where the people on the other side of the cones were headed back to the finish, and they were at mile 21 or 22. I was envious of these athletic, uninjured people, and I wondered if I would even make it past mile 13, my re-evaluation point. I felt ashamed as I saw some of our yellowshirts coming back the other way already. I felt really inadequate, and the sun was starting to get warm. At mile 13, I had been on the course for about 3:27. I started to cheer and clap for the yellowshirts coming the other way. Most of them I didn't know, some were from Chicago, LA, DC, or even other SF training groups. Even though I felt bad and was starting to really hurt, I told them they were doing a great job and waved to them. As I did this, I felt my own attitude changing. Every once in a while, I saw someone that I recognized, and I gave them a hug or called out their name. Somehow, cheering for these other people gave me the strength to move forward. That long stretch continued for miles and miles, but by the end of it, I was commited to moving forward again. There was a little loop after that stretch, before I would be back on it (but coming back the other way). On this loop I saw a woman in our AIDS shirt, limping with her pantleg up. I stopped and talked with her... She had fallen on Diamondhead, 8 miles back, and was bleeding and bruised at her knee. She felt awful. I was able to get in touch with our program and point her to a medical facility. I know she wasn't able to finish, but to go as far as she did with the injury that she had must have been grueling. Even walking forward was terrible for me, but I realized that I could finish, because I hadn't fallen and I had trained for this for six months. I finally reached the long stretch again, but now I was coming back. I had no choice anyway-- this was the way back to the hotel. I continued cheering for yellowshirts, but soon there weren't many people coming back the other way. I was firmly entrenched among walkers. Sometimes I would walk for a while with someone I knew, either through training or through fundraising, or sometimes I would introduce myself to someone I knew. I was mostly alone, though. The smallest things continued to inspire me, like the woman from our training who always cheered with blue tinsel pompoms, or the high school girl who was handing out water and walked with me for a bit to ask me how to get taller. It seemed like everyone recognized my height and my hair (someone even recognized me on the train to the airport from Berkeley). At mile 23, I met Wendy, who I fundraised with. She's really awesome, and had stopped to help someone who had been getting nauseous. We walked the last few miles together. Approaching the finish line, I didn't get nearly as emotional as I had in San Francisco. We had made a pact to walk across the line, but then we looked at the clock, and if we ran, we would make it under 8:00:00. We SPRINTED (see pictures below). I could barely walk afterwards. Hobbling to the AIDS Marathon tent and then back to the hotel, it seemed that everyone was having a similar problem. Blisters, stiffness, all kinds of problems, but these things became badges of honor more than signs of weakness. Even today I am sore, but I can walk a bit more naturally. There are pictures below. Not only have we met our fundraising goal, but together, the AIDS Marathoners have raised $4.3 million to help people with AIDS. I don't think I can even describe the sense of accomplishment, both in finishing the marathon and in completing the fundraising. I really felt that people saw what I was doing and came together, one by one, offering their support so that as a group, we could make a difference. We have done it, and that is a very powerful feeling for me. Thursday, December 09, 20043:44 PM - Last entry before the big day...I don't have time to update the flash scrolly, but I think we only need about $190 more! Yay! The link still works, for people who still want to contribute. :-D So I've been promising forever, but I really really hope to have some kind of pictures soon. Marathon pictures! Hawaii pictures! Training pictures! Pictures of people taking pictures! Ok, I'm off. Wish me luck, and keep me in your thoughts December 12. Saturday, December 04, 20046:46 PM - the always use a thermometer for this sort of thing...Yes, I had to be all fancy and do it in Flash. In other news, my December schedule has gotten extremely busy. So much so that I think that today might be the last day I have to myself until the New Year. Scary! But I will have a little free time next Saturday in Honolulu, so if anyone can recommend anything fun to do while I am there.... :-D Thursday, December 02, 20043:00 PM - proboscis<teacher's pet> I just found out today that I got an A in the Film Theory class I took last spring. That was very exciting for me, because I've always felt that my grades in college weren't as exciting as they could have been. So in a way I've been able to reclaim some of the academic bliss that I used to feel when I would get 100's on spelling tests. Yay! Of course, it only took me six months to figure out how to get my grade report. I've been thinking about it again recently because the professor asked me to write an evaluation letter to be included in her file, which was very flattering. </teacher's pet> |
