10th anniversary

In early 2011, Barack Obama was president, the shuttle Discovery took its last spaceflight, Auburn beat Oregon for the college football title, The Hunger Games books were bestsellers, and the iPhone 4 had recently been released. I was 40 years old. And I started running.

Like I say in my About Me section, I don’t really know what possessed me to start running. But it was an intentional choice–I bought running shoes and some athletic clothes, and I downloaded the Couch to 5K app, probably on my iPhone 4.

I think my first race was the Cap 10K in March, and then the Chuy’s 5K in May. I could run 2-3 miles at a time by then, albeit slowly. I remember being frustrated by C25K because the assumption was that after completing the program, anyone could run not just a 5K, but a sub 30-minute 5K.

Nevertheless, running was the first activity I really stuck with for any length of time. By the end of the year, I was still at it. I added the Livestrong 5K, Rescue Run 5K, and Turkey Trot 5-miler to my race total. I don’t have any real records of these–I often signed up for the “untimed” versions of races (they were usually $5-10 cheaper) and I didn’t have a Garmin or any kind of tracker.

But something clicked, and running had become part of my everyday life.

I remember taking my running shoes on a road trip to the Grand Canyon and getting in a mile or two in the national park. I went to D.C. and ran my first race with J–a nighttime 5K in which I was happy to not finish last.

Late in the year, I had some hip pain and took a few weeks off. My family ran the Jingle Bell 5K without me. But I didn’t abandon running. As soon as I was healthy again, I came right back to it. And it’s been that way ever since.

Happy tenth anniversary to me and running.

Weekend at Bernie’s

I don’t even know what day it is anymore, or what I’ve been doing the last week and a half. But that’s pandemic life in a nutshell I guess–I’ve been working back on-campus, and I’ve gone running most days.

One day, a friend and I got lost went for a trail run. I’d been out here before with the dog, which is how I knew there was an old VW bus out here. But it took some trial and error (LOTS of error) before I found it again.

I also ran around the neighborhood with the dog a few times. I met my Tuesday Rogue group for workouts at least twice. I watched the Inauguration–and the amazing women who performed. And I laughed hysterically at the good-natured Bernie-photoshopped-everywhere memes.

On Saturday I Frankensteined a long run route again (this time to add a potty stop) and saw some flamingoes who appear to have their own Quaranteam.

And the OG Quaranteam had coffee with Bernie.

On Sunday, I learned that San Antonio, which had been allotted way more COVID-19 vaccines than Austin, had set up a website to actually schedule a vaccine appointment (I am legit 1b, not trying to cut in line). Unlike Austin, where people could sign up to get on a list to be notified about appointments eventually.

But they release appointment times only periodically, so I sat at the computer refreshing the page like I was trying to score concert tickets, or get into a full college class. But I didn’t have to refresh too many times–I was pretty quickly able to schedule an appointment for Monday at 5:20. The drawback, of course, is that the Alamodome is about two hours from my house, or an hour and a half from work.

My teammate covered the second half of my last period class, and I hit the road about 3:30. Northwest Austin to Central San Antonio hits a lot of traffic hotspots, but I really only got jammed up once.

Y’all, San Antonio has its act together. Every 30 yards or so, someone directed me along a series of checkpoints from the parking lot entrance to the arena, through the temp check and paperwork check as I progressed down the concourse, then to the nurse who administered the shot. Then the obligatory 15-minute wait for adverse reactions, after which I scheduled my 2nd shot in three weeks. And that was it. I drove for 90 minutes each way to spend maybe 30 minutes from the time I entered the parking lot to the time I exited it. Even knowing I have to do the whole thing again in three weeks, it’s worth it.

As I left, I realized it was only 5:45 and I suspected traffic out of downtown San Antonio was less than ideal at that time, at least based on Austin’s standards. Since I was only a few blocks from the Riverwalk, I decided to venture over there and have dinner at one of the restaurants on the river. Afterward, I walked a couple more blocks to the Alamo because why not?

The 2012 San Antonio Rock and Roll race was my first half-marathon, and I don’t think I’d been back here since then, so it was nice to have a leisurely visit before I drove back home. Bummer I wasn’t wearing a race medal this time though. Just a Band-Aid.

Tuesday, my upper arm was pretty sore. Way worse than a flu shot, but not as bad as a tetanus shot, if you’re looking for a gauge. This week is the Rogue K Series 5K, and I’d kind of talked myself out of running it on Tuesday, especially only 24 hours after getting the vaccine. But at the last minute I decided to give it a shot (no pun intended) knowing I could bail and try again on Thursday if it sucked.

I ran pretty well. I mean, it wasn’t a PR; it wasn’t even that great of a pace compared to what I could do in the Before Times. But all things considered, it was not terrible. I haven’t decided if I’m going to try again Thursday–the weather is supposed to be quite a bit cooler so I may go over to the middle school track and give it another shot just to see what I can do. My arm feels pretty normal again and I haven’t had any other side effects, so there’s nothing really stopping me.

Except laziness. Which I have in abundance.

2021: more of the same

Compared to the snow last Sunday, this week was pretty uneventful.

Austin’s COVID numbers are so bad, the school district urged families to keep kids learning at home, and only small numbers of teachers remained at campuses. This way, kids who really needed to be at school (especially those who require special services or interventions) could attend with lower risk to everyone. This meant I stayed home not just on Monday’s snow day, but the rest of the week as well. So after four days on campus, I’m back to teaching from my spare bedroom, at least for a little while. I am grateful for this, since the vaccine situation seems to be a disaster and it may be some months before I’m able to get one. Sigh.

Tuesday’s workout was :30/:60:90 hill repeats. Two groups were meeting together, and it felt kind of crowded, but the temperature was perfect and I nailed my clothing choice. A few of us split off to run on the other side of the street, and I had a great workout.

I spent much of Wednesday dealing with technical difficulties–I had to go up to school to retrieve some materials I needed to teach from home, and I barely made it back in time to start my last class. After school I tinkered with my video setup, and then I had to tackle my new personal laptop. My old one wouldn’t hold a charge, and it kept freezing and crashing. But getting my email set up on the new one–sheesh, why is this stuff so complicated? It took hours.

Thursday, I ran three miles with the dog, and Friday was a rest day.

Saturday’s route was a nine-mile loop; my plan was to run that once and call it good. But I Frankensteined the route a bit to avoid a stretch of road I don’t like, and then I took a shortcut that lopped off another half-mile. So by the time I was close to where I started, I was only at 7.5 miles so I tacked a bit on to the end to at least finish with eight miles.

It was in the 30s and felt good, but I felt sluggish and walked a lot. Blah.

I’m still running solo, and while we’d drifted away from the Quaranteam phone call (I think we’re all having some COVID fatigue) a few of us have resurrected it. So I have that to look forward to, anyway.

Sunday should have been the 3M half marathon. Since 2013 I’ve run 3M every year except one, so missing it made me sad. Not that I minded sleeping until 8:30, but still.

Last year’s 3M half was the last road race I ran. This year, I ran a mile with the dog instead. We also had lunch in the park and walked the mile loop afterward. It was nice.

In other news, Quaranteam signed up for the Trans Texas Virtual Run. We’re doing the Texas Two Step, which runs (virtually, obv) East to West and then North to South for a total of 1,513 miles. There are a bunch of medals and shirts involved, naturallly.

Right now we have four people on our team (name TBD), which means 378.25 miles each. We can have five on a team, which would reduce our total to 302.6, but I don’t know if we’re going to pick up a fifth teammate before the February 1st start date. We have all of 2021 to finish, but even with four of us we should finish by the end of April.

Speaking of a bunch of race shirts, I went through my closet (and my kid’s closet) and collected 60 (!) race shirts I never wear.

I’m going to have them made into a blanket from Project Repat, so I spent the better part of Sunday evening organizing and cutting them apart according to PR’s instructions. It was a bit difficult, emotionally, to cut them up! But they’re just taking up space in my closet and I know I will get more use out of them this way. I mean, I need to keep a blanket in my car for coffee tailgates, you know. 😉

FYI, if you’re going to order one of these, look for discount codes online. I found one that took off almost 50%!

Snow and other oddities

I won’t lie. There wasn’t a lot of running happening last week.

I went back to work in-person for the first time since March 12. I did the Rogue workout from my house on Tuesday. Thursday I ran efforted 3.5 miles after work. Friday was a rest day. And Rogue training has dialed back quite a bit–since the JFR Ks races begin with a 5K in January, long runs are only in the 10K range. As tired as I was, 10K was about all I could manage on Saturday. Quaranteam coffee afterward was much more fun.

Sunday, things got weird.

I’d crashed early the night before and slept probably 10 hours. When I woke up, it was raining–I could hear it dripping off the roof. But within the hour, it switched to huge snowflakes. Which is crazy, because this is Central Texas.

Around 10am I decided to go for a run in the snow since the roads were still pretty clear. When I got to the park 1.25 miles away, snow had already completely blanketed the grass!

It snowed and snowed and snowed.

Typically in Austin, we get a dusting of snow every few years. It hardly sticks, and it’s gone within a few hours. But sometimes school gets canceled when it snows in the afternoon, then wet roads turn into ice. Even then, condtions usually clear up–we almost never miss more than one day of school at a time, or in a school year, for this kind of weather. I mean, the district calls them “bad weather days” not “snow days” for a reason.

When I was in high school, Austin got a HUGE snowstorm, around seven inches of snow. I remember schools closed for something like three days. We didn’t get THAT much this time, but I am pretty sure the 2021 snow was the most we’d had since the Blizzard of ’85. So we spent a lot of the afternoon outside, wandering around the neighborhood and freaking the dog out.

Late in the afternoon, however, the power went out. We’d had a fire going in the fireplace all day, so we were warm enough, but it was starting to get dark and we weren’t sure what to do about dinner. Fortunately I had a book on my iPad and was able to entertain myself. The power came back on around 8:00, I think.

Meanwhile, temps were near freezing, and there was slushy snow everywhere. Almost all area school districts canceled for Monday; a few went with a two-hour delayed opening, but the majority just canceled completely. Except for the district where I work. They decided it would be a 100% remote learning day.

Which is fantastic if everyone is prepared for it. But I was not. I had returned to campus on Tuesday–with my laptop and whole complicated two-screen setup. And I typically don’t bring my laptop back and forth each day–I really try to keep work at work unless I’ve seriously procrastinated and have grades due or something. So I didn’t have my laptop or any other teaching materials–and it seriously annoys me that the district EXPECTED us to be working at home, through the weekend, and therefore had our laptops at home already.

So here I am today, with Zoom on my personal iPad and attendance on my phone. I suppose this afternoon I will find a core workout, maybe run a mile as well. So yeah.

Good riddance 2020

Finally, the last week of 2020.

We didn’t have an official Rogue workout on Tuesday, but a bunch of us met up at one of our usual parks and improvised. From the start, I was not feeling it at all, but I muddled through almost four miles and called it a day.

It rained almost all day Wednesday as a cold front came through. During a break in the rain, the dog and I went out for three miles. It felt a whole lot better than Tuesday night.

The rain continued into Thursday, so the dog and I wrapped up New Year’s Eve with 3.4 miles in even colder rain. It was an oddly specific number, but it got me to an even 1108 miles for the year.

On New Year’s Day–Friday–a couple of Quaranteamers met up at the Starbucks. We planned to run 5K but my route overshot that by a little bit, and we ended up with 3.35 miles. It was windy and cold, but the sun was out and we had fun.

I typically don’t run on Fridays so my legs are not tired out on Saturday morning, and this week reinforced that concept. I completed eight miles, but did it the hard way. Not only that, a few of us were operating on an outdated map, so we missed the first water stop; a few folks also missed the second one. Fortunately it was 34* so it was less critical than if we’d had this problem during the summer.

I didn’t run on Sunday, but I did walk the dog twice, a mile each time.

So now it’s 2021.

My employer offered vaccines to about 900 at-risk staff this weekend, but I was not one of them despite receiving accommodations to work from home all last semester. And Texas removed teachers from the 1b tier of vaccine rollout. At the same time, Austin/Travis County continues to see a spike in COVID cases while hundreds of at-risk staff (including those like me who were passed over for the vaccine) must return in-person tomorrow. So for the first time since March, I will have to remember how to juggle work, commute, and home life. And wear normal clothes.

Wish me luck.