Ilanarama!

So hey! Yesterday was my birthday! It was a pleasant day in a low-key way, but the best thing about it was that I went on a NINE MILE trail run. That's the longest I've run since my stress fracture back in April, and makes for the most distance in a week since then, 31 miles. (My "running week" runs Monday through Sunday.)

And today I registered for The Other Half Marathon in Moab UT, which incidentally (the 2009 race) is where ( the photo I use for my 'running' userpic came from. ) It's a beautiful course through the Colorado River canyon, a well-organized race, and there is free local microbrew at the finish. If I run the Winter Sun 10K in December (which I plan on), then since I also ran Canyonlands in March, I will have the "triple crown" of races put on by this organization; this will get me a guaranteed entry to Canyonlands next spring, bypassing the lottery. Finally, I always share a room with a friend from Grand Junction and we make a bit of a party weekend out of it.

On the other hand, after a summer of no running while my metatarsal healed, I'm totally not in half marathon shape. Or at least I'm not by my own current standards. ( I'll be more prepared than I was when I ran my second half marathon, but I feel less prepared - I suppose because my definition of 'prepared' has changed over the years. )

( Tuesday, August 2: in which disaster (aka a Portuguese Man-Of-War) strikes )

( Wednesday, August 3: in which we get on and in the water )

( Thursday, August 4th: in which I am a total slug )

( Friday, August 5th: in which we go diving again )

( Saturday, August 6th: in which I play at being a mermaid )

Way more pictures (42 of 'em, mostly underwater photos) at Flickr

Thus ends my vacation travelog, finally! You can see all four parts of the Ecuador section by viewing my Ecuador tag. You can see all 80 photos and one video from Ecuador at Flickr by viewing my Ecuador photoset.

Again, the images are laid out in pairs, so you might want to make your browser window nice and wide. Lots of photos, but there are even more I uploaded to Flickr but didn't put inline here.

( Wednesday, July 27 (Tena): in which we get wet )

( Thursday, July 28 (Tena): in which we get wet )

( Friday, July 29 (Tena to Papallacta): in which we get wet. Are you detecting a pattern here? )

29 photos at Flickr

I'm going to post these bit by bit as I assemble them, and then put up an index at the end with links.

( Saturday, July 23 (travel day): in which we travel long distances quickly, and short ones slowly )

( Sunday, July 24 (Quito): in which we take a walk in the park )

( Monday, July 25 (Quito): in which we get high )

Just the photos (these plus nine more) at Flickr. I'll be adding to the Ecuador 2011 set as I put together my trip report.

I spent last Thursday night at a county planning commission meeting, which started at 6pm and ended at about 10:45, and I was there for the whole thing, and...I wasn't bored. Not a bit. Which is weird, because in general, I hate meetings. But this one was interesting and infuriating, in turns.

I went because, at the monthly meeting of the county Democratic party (which I didn't attend, because I hate meetings, but Britt did, because he's on the executive committee) a couple people mentioned that the new county comprehensive plan (a policy document which outlines growth and resource management guidelines for the next twenty years) was being reviewed in several-chapter chunks by the planning commission, and the Tea Party types were showing up en masse and effectively drowning out the few liberal voices during the public comment period.

The comp plan has been in process for nearly two years, and I attended one of the public meetings and answered a survey on it; and anyway, when the draft plan was put up on the county website, I liked what I saw, so I figured I'd just go and give my "I like this plan!" opinion, to counter the anti-progressive types.

Before the part of the meeting that would deal with chapters 5-7 of the comprehensive plan, the planning commission had its regular business. Some people who knew this deliberately showed up late, and others were visibly bored (reading ebooks or texting), but I enjoyed it: at worst it seemed like democracy at work, and at best it was better than a movie made from a John Grisham novel.

The planning commission is a board of five county residents appointed by the county commissioners. Typically what happens is that the county staff presents a petition by someone, and their findings and recommendations; the petitioner speaks, the public is allowed to speak, and the board asks questions at each step. Finally they discuss the petition and vote on whether to allow or disallow it, and any conditions they will impose.

For the most part, this went quickly and smoothly...but then came ( the John Grisham novel. )

Finally, at nearly 8pm, the comp plan review began. And I was flabbergasted! I had thought that they would take citizen input first, and then, based on that, evaluate the plan. But instead the planning commissioners went through the assigned chapters and hacked the plan to bits. That is, they removed everything that a liberal, such as me, would approve of, and occasionally inserted language asserting the primacy of property rights, business owners, and farmers and ranchers, and constantly complained about how the government is overreaching and ought to be smacked down.

( Whatta bunch of tea-brains. )

( Here is the letter to the editor I wrote the next day: )

I'm going to miss the next meeting - next Thursday - because I'm going to be out of town. (I'm going to ECUADOR! Whee!) But I've been reviewing the draft plan chapters that will be covered then, and sending an email to the county planner, who hopefully will pass it on to the planning commission. (The planning commission chair said that they accept public comment by email, but there's no obvious place to send it, alas.) I've put the final two meetings on my calendar.

I always hated meetings. They're boring. Except somehow this one wasn't. And I imagine the next ones won't be, either.

At this rate, I'm gonna end up applying for a seat on one of the county citizen boards. Ulp.

All across the ______ 
               [noun]
_____________  ______ the man who
[plural noun]  [verb] 

__________________ Mad Libs.
[verb, past tense]

(No relation.)

I started out writing this post in chronological, logical, first A then B order, but I don't want you guys to get bored and miss the points, so, in an effort not to bury the lede, as it were:

1) If you read this journal, don't have a Dreamwidth account, but would like one (either for commenting here or elsewhere, or for using it as, you know, a journal/blog/feed aggregator/social networky thing), I have a metric crapton of invite codes! Choose one, go to the account creation page, and make your account. (Then comment here and tell me you did it, so I can cross off the code you used.)

( Codes )

2) If you don't have and don't want an account, I encourage those of you with logins on other blogging/social networking sites to set up your OpenID on Dreamwidth and comment with it. If you have a login on Wordpress, Blogger, LJ, Google, Flickr, Yahoo, or a bunch of other places, you can use that login here with OpenID. The advantages of doing this, as opposed to leaving anonymous comments, are that a) you can have replies to your comment automagically emailed to you, and b) I can give your OpenID "access" (as I do with nearly all regular DW accounts which subscribe to me) so that if you are logged in, you can read my locked posts (not that I make many, but I can imagine making posts I don't want visible to J. Random Passerby). ETA: And c), which I forgot to mention, you don't need to answer a CAPTCHA "prove you are a human" test, which I have enabled for anonymous commenters because I get occasional commentspam.

I know some people have had trouble logging in with OpenID, so ( here is a quick primer: )

3) Of course, you don't need an account to comment here. You are always welcome to comment anonymously, although I'd prefer you leave your name so I know who you are.

( tl;dr about how I use this journal )

A couple of days ago I succumbed to peer pressure - in this case, the 'peers' were my online running buddies from RWOL, many of whom are Facebook friends of mine, who were all talking up the Houston Marathon in mid-January. This year it's the day after the Olympic trials, so a lot of people are planning to go to watch the fast elites zip by on Saturday, then run a flat and fast marathon on Sunday. The other draw is that it's a lottery entry - but this year, the first 2000 people to sign up with a certified sub-four-hour marathon time, which I have, were guaranteed entry...so I did.

I'm still wondering whether I did the right thing. There are definitely pros and cons:

Reasons to and not to run Houston

TO	NOT TO
Perfect timing - can heal up, then backpack and hike and stuff in August and September, then train hard October through December before the snows hit. And ski afterward!	SEVEN MONTHS AWAY. I could die of waiting.
Known to be "flat and fast."	In other words, "boring."
Watch the Olympic trials!	For what, 30 seconds as the racers zip by?
Will see some of my online running buddies I haven't seen since Boston, and meet some I haven't met in person yet.	Will miss others who have picked different fall/winter races.
Lots of crowd support, which is always fun.	About twice as many runners as I really feel comfortable with. And no chance for an AG award.
Britt's not likely to want to come to Houston, so I get to spend all my time hanging out talking running with other runners, which would bore him silly.	Britt's not likely to want to come to Houston. I'll miss him!
Relatively cheap flight and hotel. And I already paid the entry fee.	If I'm gonna spend money to travel somewhere, why not go somewhere niftier?

I've signed up, and paid, but I don't actually HAVE to go, of course. I don't have flights yet - that's probably the most expensive part, and that will probably be the deciding point. It's kind of strange to think about running a marathon when I can't even walk without crutches yet. But it's nice to have something to focus on, to plan for, so I don't get mired in the unpleasant now of injury.

Speaking of which, back to the doctor next Tuesday. Hopefully he'll tell me everything is healing up well and fast and I can ditch the damn crutches and start running again. It's such a pain to function that I probably walk on my bad foot more than I should - if I want to get a cup of tea, I can't carry it into my office unless I cheat, for example, and since it doesn't actually HURT, especially if I walk carefully and put the pressure on my heel rather than my toes, I do a lot of cheating.

BTW, today when I got out of the pool and limped back toward the locker room on my crutches, a ~10 year old boy offered to open the locker room door for me. I thought that was super sweet (although in retrospect, maybe he was just hoping to see nekkid girls). Actually, he screwed his eyes closed when he opened the door, so everyone could see that he was NOT PEEKING, and I thanked him profusely, because getting through the locker room door is the toughest part of my workout, I kid you not. I kind of wished that I was really a fairy godmother in disguise, like in all the stories, so that I could wave my wand (cunningly disguised as a crutch) and reward him for his kindness to a poor old injured woman.

I made Kahlua ice cream the other day (a suitably vague point of time which encompasses both mixing up the batter on Wednesday afternoon, and ice-creamifying it yesterday) and it is yummy! If this were a real cooking blog I'd have lots of delectable photos to make your mouth water, but I couldn't find the camera, and anyway, you all know what ice cream and its ingredients look like. ( But the recipe and some meandering comments are under the cut. )

This Sunday is the Colorado Marathon in Fort Collins. I'm not running it. :-(

This was going to be my serious shot at sub-3:30. I had a good training cycle and despite a disappointing finish at the Canyonlands Half, I was feeling fairly confident. Then, three weeks ago, my left foot started to hurt. I took a day off, and it didn't feel better. I took another day off, and then (with some trepidation) went backpacking. (I knew Britt really wanted to go, and I wanted to go, too. I made him carry most of the stuff. It didn't seem to make my foot feel any worse, but it didn't feel any better, either.) I took the rest of the week off. I ran a quarter mile and realized my foot still hurt, so I ran home. And then I called my doctor. A week after seeing her, I saw a podiatrist.

Long story short, my foot is in a "post-op boot" which is a sort of sandal thing with a rigid bottom, to keep it from bending, and I'm on crutches for the next three weeks. The podiatrist thinks it's a stress fracture, even though it didn't show up on the x-ray (they often don't, but he advised against the expensive MRI, which is better at seeing them, since he was just going to treat it the same way). I am to keep my weight off my foot as much as I can. Hopefully in three weeks I can start slowly exercising again, although it may be several months before I am running. I will miss spring backpacking and rafting. Phooey.

I know, first world problem. Lots of people can't run at all. But I HATE BEING ON CRUTCHES. It is difficult to accomplish ANYTHING other than SITTING ON MY BUTT. Grr. Even cooking dinner is a major pain. I'm gaining weight and I'm getting cranky. And I lost my $125 marathon entry fee, and a small (under $20) cancellation fee for the hotel room. (Not to mention the medical costs I'm facing...I have a high deductible health plan and it's all coming out of pocket at the moment.) And my fitness is wafting gently out the window; it will take all year to build back up again to where I was (just like it took all year to build back up again after my bout of peroneal tendinitis).

The podiatrist's office is making me custom orthotics (another $300...), and hopefully I won't keep getting injured. But boy, am I bumming.