Race Report: AHHS Run/Walk with the Band

Race: Alamo Heights High School Run/Walk to the Beat 5K/10K
Distance: 5K
Goal Time: 38-40 minutes
Actual Time: 39:09 (12:38 min/mi)

This race was definitely a blast from the past.  I signed up for this run in particular so I could support a local high school band program.  This was apparently the twenty-something-th year they've had this event, which makes sense due to the higher per capita running stores around Alamo Heights than in the rest of the city.

I timed my arrival to be cutting it kind of close.  I was getting tired of arriving at events forty five minutes to an hour before the event.  I got to this one at about thirty minutes to start.  It was enough to pick up my packet, gear up, and make the parade over to the start line.

You heard right- PARADE!  The AHHS drumline (three snares, one quints, three bass drums, two cymbals), lead the pack through the neighborhood to the start line.  I decided to walk in step with them.  They weren't playing very tight and they had some tempo issues.  But since it's a few months out of marching season, I assume they were just out of practice.  I'm pretty certain my high school drumline wouldn't have done much better.  Walking over to drum cadence put me in a nostalgic mood.

I met up with a forum-friend on the Runner's World Beginner's forums.  Scotty is a cute man who wears a bright "I Beat Cancer Never Give Up" singlet at all the events he does.  His first comment to me was, "You're taller than you look in your picture."  I get that a lot.  I was fortunate to be added to his gallery of Great Legs after meeting up with him at the starting line.  See his race report here!

The start caught me by surprise.  The drumline suddenly burst out with a fast cadence that I liked for the first ten seconds I heard it.  After that, there were two small groups of band students playing along the course.  The first was a trumpet quartet that played a StarWars theme as I passed.  The next was a brass group that played Rocky which was appropriate for the big hill right after where they were camped out.

The course itself was fairly hilly, but more low rolling hills and an overall positive grade then a whole lot of steep inclines.  Apparently the 10K course was much worse, including the HILL from HELL.  I was glad that my poor planning and execution earlier in the week meant that running the 10K would be a very bad idea.

Again, I went out way to fast to start.  It's probably due to not having any mid-week runs as the reminder of what my pace should be.  That faster pace feels really awesome though.  It feels natural, like my body is taking over function from my brain.  "Don't worry about it.  I got this." My heart just can't keep up.  I need routine back in my training routine.  Maybe I'm on the verge of a training breakthrough.  Maybe 12 (or 10!) minute miles are only a couple months out of my grasp.

This weekend's race reinforced the desire to be more consistent and prescribed with my training.   If I can just wake up and knock out a 39 minute 5K, what can I do at something I train for?  Maybe I need a more tangible end goal. My next race is in two weeks, and it's another 5K, this time at Incarnate Word.  It's the first race in this year's Alamo Series.  Ooh! I feel challenged already!

International Women's Day

I love being a woman.  People would probably consider me feminist.  I think I raged on it a lot more in high school, but haven't done a whole lot of thinking about it recently.  I feel a little obligated to represent women in a lot of what I do on a daily basis.  I work in a male-dominated field, and am currently one of two women on a team of sixteen.  My culinary classes are also male dominated, in both students and faculty.

Tomorrow, March 8th, is International Women's Day (IWD).  I heard about it from one of my favorite people  to follow on Twitter, Padmasree Warrior, who is Cisco's CTO (and one of the top 5 women to follow).  According to Wikipedia, the holiday started in former Soviet countries as a kind of blend of Valentine's Day and Mother's day in 1909.  The United Nations declared 1975 International Women's Year and has sponsored International Women's Day ever since.   2010's theme as designated by the UN is "Equal rights, equal opportunities: Progress for all." 

For the rest of this blog, I will be sharing articles on women's issues.  They're listed below by topic.  If you have an article that you want to share, let me know and I'll add it to this list (with credit, of course)!

Women Displaced by Armed Conflict
"Women displaced by armed conflict – often living alone with their children – are frequently exposed to sexual violence, discrimination and intimidation." International Committee of the Red Cross

Gender Equality
"One of the first lessons that girls often learn in elementary school is that boys are better at math." Scientific American.
"70 per cent of the 1.2 billion people living in poverty worldwide are female." Red Cross
"Men are from Earth, and So are Women." Anarchist Writers

Women in the Workforce
"Manuela Maier was branded a bad mother. ... Her crime? Signing up her 9-year-old son when the local primary school first offered lunch and afternoon classes last autumn — and returning to work." New York Times
"Why do Indian women keep quitting their careers for marriage?" Priya Ramani
View a Live Feed of Women in Particle Physics CERN
Pledge for Ada Lovelace Day FindingAda.com
Kathryn Bigelow is the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar with The Hurt Locker.
Tips for a Top Career - Padmasree Warrior

Reproductive Freedom & Health
"Today, more than half a million women living in poverty will die from pregnancy-related causes and the vast majority of these deaths are preventable." CARE USA
A review of Monique and the Mango Rains includes discussion of the midwife profession and genital mutilation in Mali.  Amanda Gignac, The Zen Leaf

Other
Proven Steps to Advance Women Around the World New York Times
Womanity  Girl Geekdom

Waking Up Is Hard To Do

So the start of March kicks off a tweaked schedule for me.  So far it’s not working out so well. 

The plan was to switch up my workout time from lunchtime to early in the morning, which means waking up earlier than I already do.  Monday’s cold turkey attempt to wake up one hour earlier than normal was brilliantly unsuccessful.  Tuesday’s attempt to wake up half an hour earlier than normal was an improvement over Monday – only one snooze used.  The attempts the rest of this week back up the alarm until I get to the wake up time I need.  That’s been more successful, but in the meantime I still haven’t been to the gym this week.

For the last couple months it’s been a real struggle to get myself out of bed.  My brain will be awake, but my body rebels against movement.  It feels like it takes a force of nature to get me to move.  Does anyone else get like that?  Like it's almost an insurmountable obstacle to get yourself out of bed?  It makes me feel like I have lost control of myself, an idea that scares me. 

The point of being hyper-involved in lots of disparate activities is to keep me distracted from the day-to-day dull ebb and flow of being a twenty-something.  Maybe I’m too involved and I need the rest to recover from everything I’m doing.  Maybe I have too many aspirations and can’t accomplish everything concurrently.  Then why an I even more lazy if I don’t have “too much” going on.  I need the stress in order to be productive at anything, but recently it seems like the gap between enough stress to be productive and enough stress to be incapacitated is too small to find a life in the middle.

I want so much out of life and I don’t want to give up on anything I currently have going on.  It would feel like I’m letting myself down.  So then is it a question of how much do I want it?  What am I willing to give up in order to accomplish my goals?  Am I willing to give up the extra hour of sleep every day? I know it’s a girl thing to have every thing I’m doing so intimately tied to everything else so that if I don’t have success in all of my goals, then it feels like I’m a failure.  Worse still is the idea that I didn’t do enough. 

I see so many working moms who are successful at work, get dinner on the table, support the kids' after school activities, leave time for their spouse, and achieve amazing physical feats all at the same time.  I know one such person who reports that they go to bed around midnight and wake up at four.  If I only had four hours of sleep I would not be lovely to be around.   Right now I need seven to eight hours of sleep and a Grande Americano before talking to anyone civilly.  How do they make it work? Some say it's something you acquire through parenthood and takes years of practice to be able to juggle so much.  How do you ever get used to that little sleep?   If that's something I want in the long run, shouldn't I practice some of the juggling now?  What does it mean if I can't seem to keep all the balls in the air? 

“Enough” is one of my least favorite words, right below “should.”  

The Demonica Series by Larissa Ione

Okay.  I admit it.  I read romance.

This was probably the first series I knowingly read that can be classified under the romance genre.  Larissa Ione's Demonica Series (Pleasure Unbound, Desire Unchained, Passion Unleashed, Ecstasy Unveiled) in particular is also paranormal, so it lines up with the fact that I normally gravitate toward fantasy fiction.  I struggled with if I should review this in such a public forum, but then the lovely Amanda reminded me that romance is a very popular genre and widely read.   Backing up her insight is the fact that the most recent in the series, Ecstasy Unveiled, was on the USA Today and NY Times best seller lists for the three weeks following its release at the end of January. (I couldn't find it on the lists for week of 2/25: USA Today, NY Times.)  This was my favorite cover of the four.

The series follows a set of brothers who are Seminus demons.  This particular breed of demon strives to procreate through incredible charm, "f- me pheromones," and individualized talents meant to ensure impregnation.  Each book of the four follows one of the brothers in his struggles to find a mate to stave of the insanity that follows a stage of development that occurs at the 100 year old mark.  They have to balance keeping their close brotherly bond, saving the world, and getting their respective girl. 

Each book bounces around between several points of view for some of the key players in Ione's world, though stays primarily with one particular brother and his mate.  I loved that all of the women portrayed in the series are fiesty and incredibly capable.  They were strong women that held their own ground, even in the presence of  "f- me pheromones."  All the brothers have their particular hangups, but they all appear to fall in love with the heroines really quickly.  I'm assuming this is a device that is normal for romance writing since I don't have another reference for comparison.  It just felt quicker than the fantasy I usually read.

The "good parts" were incredibly graphic and occurred every few pages, but suited my tastes just fine.  I don't have any formulated thoughts on what such scenes should or shouldn't be or include.  So for my taste, I can enjoy the artistic fade out as well as the nitty gritty sweat fests.  I don't think I could read this type of book exclusively, but maybe every once in a while for a quickie (pun intended).  The story line between the "good parts" in the first two books was somewhat forgettable.  in the third and fourth books, I breezed right through the "good parts" to continue on with the story.  It might be that I read the series out of order (2, 3, 1, 4) but it felt like Ione just got better at putting all the different story threads together.  Seeing Ione develop the story and her talent over the course of the series helped me see the difference between an okay story and a enthralling one which I hope to help me in my writing.


Tattoos comprised a major theme central to the definition of the Seminus breed.  It makes me think about getting a tattoo again.  Torture and BDSM were also common themes.  I took it as something you would expect demons in romance novels to do.  There had to be a "bad" influence there somewhere, right?

Reason #2 to love my nook: Don't have to worry about the embarrasing covers when reading in public!  So I'm still a little embarrassed by the romance covers and wouldn't want to read one of the paperbacks on a subway or anything.

I also just realized that Kim Harrison's Hollows series (that I loved) also counts as a paranormal romance by virtue of the fact that it has some genre awards.  The "good parts" in the Hollows are much less graphic than the ones in Demonica, and Hollows has usually only one scene to that effect.  So maybe I need to read more in this category in order to figure out what is normal and what isn't for the genre.  I might even take my Naiads story and try my hand at writing some romance.  If my main character is a water nymph, then it goes without saying, right?

So I renounce my previous thoughts that romance is something less than other genres.  Now I need to go apologize to my mom for making fun of her for reading romance.

February Wrap-Up

The year is flying by so quickly! Already another month gone.  I have a warm fuzzy feeling about February, but I think that's because it ended better than it started. 

• Read 4 books: He's Just not that Into You, and three of the four books in Larissa Ione's Daemonica Series.  I muscled through three-quarters of Love in the Time of Cholera, but I definitely was trudging along. I think Amanda has the right idea and it should be abandoned.  My perfectionist nature doesn't want to let it go unfinished, but I really don't want to go back to it.  I just finished the fourth book of Ione's series, so a review of that will go up soon.
• Made lots of progress on the debt home front.  Car is paid off and now attacking the second mortgage. Still fortunate to have gotten a raise with the current economy. I need to be more cognizant of how I spend my money. So I'll be watching that closer in the upcoming months. 
• Wrote more words this month!  Another 12k to the total.  I was trying to make it to 15k and finish the NaNo Novel, but that didn't happen.  I think 12k is a good goal number.  10k was too doable, and 15k is a little further of a stretch than I had thought.  Again, I did a fair share of the words on the blog, still around 55%.  I'm so close to the ending of the NaNo novel that it's irritating. 
• Raced well!  The first trail run was a success, though I'm still hurting from the second trail run. I have learned my lesson: be much more discerning when signing up for another trail run.  Looking back at my training log, I was less consistent this month. A couple weeks were good; a couple weeks had nothing. My schedule is getting tweaked a bit starting in March, so I'm hoping that will help.  
• I upped my artsy quotient this month with a concert at Luna and seeing Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead with the girls.  I'm now re-reading Hamlet because I'm not sure how I feel about an actor's take on their character and want to formulate my own opinion before I comment on it.  Look for the review soon!
• Cooking skills were definitely worked this month.  Valentine's Day dinner was a blast.  Homemade doughnuts went over well at work!   Loved making salads in class; mine turned out awesome. I killed at making the sauces in class. I am not doing a very good job of feeding myself.  I tended to eat more fast food than real food.  That goes along with my spending comments above.  My sister has given me a new mantra to help with this goal: "Cut that s**t out!"  
• Had a little breakdown in the middle of the month, but got through it.  I think it helped me grow some and realize some things.  I'm a hyper-planner and a dreamer, so I'm dreaming of life a few years from now.  It's not really conducive to living in the moment.

Again, a month well lived.  I realize now how much I actually did in February- and how much fun I had at the movies, runs, write-ins, girl chats, everything.  The time between drags and stalls, but looking back, those bright lights are going to be the things I remember.

I know there are still more bright lights to come this year.