Nebraska: The Run

Ah yes, the state-running train. If your memory is as fuzzy as my own, I had to go back in my blog to recall the last state I’d written about (Illinois, here) before being able to know where to start when writing this post. After our quick stay in Chicago, we headed through Iowa with only the briefest of stops in Iowa City (shout out to Prairie Lights Books for their excellent chai and lattes!), so short that a run was no where on the agenda, and then drove straight on to Omaha, Nebraska.

There’s a lot of rhetoric out there telling us coastal people to forget middle-America. I heard it today on the train: a man from Alabama who had just been to New Orleans talking to a couple who love themselves some NOLA and another couple who hadn’t travelled much discussing what in America was worth seeing and what wasn’t: the consensus was to skip the mid-west. After running in these states, I have to beg to differ. Here’s why:

I assumed Omaha would be flat: I was wrong. There were gentle hills, the complete opposite of steep. In fact, so flat were the hills you’d have never noticed the shifts in elevation had you not been on foot or on bike.

I assumed Omaha would be monochromatic: Wrong again. I was running in the outer area of the city, and it was lush with fields of green,  pumpkins of orange, stalks of wild colored corn, opaque cobalt skies and dark asphalt of the road that seemed enhanced by the spectrum surrounding it.

I assumed Omaha would be boring: Yeah, wrong about that one too. I saw low fields, a canal, farmland, residential communities, and commerce all on my five mile jog. While no one was offering me Ambrosia or waving a palm frond over me, it’s not like that happens in Bay Area, either.  I found a town almost more diverse in landscape than I’m accustomed to.

What I remember (randomly) about this run was worrying I’d get mud on my shoes and track it into my homestay’s house. My host was grandparents of a friend, who adorably kept trying to feed us and clucked over our needs (I didn’t realize my skirt needed to be pressed, but Grandmother did) – and who I feared the wrath of should I get their pristinely lovely home dirty.

 

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Needed This Yesterday

I needed this so badly yesterday:

 

Some days are just hard. Being under-employed can feel like a burden instead of a blessing – too much time to think, and thinking about sad things like getting older can lead to feeling like I’m not doing enough with my life. Feeling like I’m not doing enough with my life can lead to thinking that I’m wasting my life. Thinking about wasting my life can make me feel like life is moving really fast and I’m not going to get to see and do everything I want to unless I go go go but I’ve already wasted so much time, so is there even a point?

When I finally pulled my head out from within myself and made it to the gym, I felt like a million-billion-gagillion bucks. And this, my friends, why working out in the morning is vital – you can alleviate feeling like anything less than priceless early on.

Go sweat.

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Tight Pants Redux

Dudes. And dudettes. I learned something about tight workout pants: they are not all created equally! 

So, after reading my trials and tribulations on tight workout pants, my dear friend Liz (who incidentally is one of the main reasons I began running in the first place, though that’s a story for another day) mailed me a pair of stretchy athletic pants along with a card that involved two hedgehogs and some hearts. Awwww. The pants freaked me out at first – they looked small, they looked thin (like, “what if these hit the light weird and someone can see my underwear?” thin) and I looked at my boyfriend and said, “I’m not sure I can do this.” 

I opened the card and saw that there was a reference to buttons in it – I’m a huge sucker for buttons, and upon looking at the pants again, I saw they were cropped with three decorative buttons running up the side. #SOLD. I laid them out so I could take them for a run the next day. 

And on that run is where I realized these pants were lovely. Airy. Light as a feather. It was as though a soft, form-fitting silhouette decided to glom onto me in a friendly manner. They didn’t make me too hot. I was in fact not drenched in glowing sweat while wearing them. 

Yep, tight pants are a-okay on hot days, provided you’ve got the right pair. 

Big thanks to Liz, my favorite Nexus Burrito, for bringing this realization to light. 

 

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Tight Workout Pants, Activate!

One thing no one ever tells you about those skin tight workout pants things is that they. are. hot. Like, melt your face off while you’re running hot. Like, put them on and sweat buckets hot. Like, I went to spin-class and all I got what this bag of sweat hot. Hot.

Yes, I caved and purchased tight workout pants.

How it Happened

I had zipped over to an outdoor mall (California, folks, this is a major thing here) and while nabbing a gift for Brian, I saw a Lulu Lemon and thought I’d see what all the fuss was about. They had a sign outdoors promising a Clearance section (silent fist pump, yeah!) and I figured I’d stroll in casually, race to the back, and try not to look at anything else. Except I couldn’t find the Clearance section and got stuck at the normal priced area, embarrassed to admit to the hot, ship-shape women working the floor that I couldn’t afford their goods unless the prices were slashed. Price: $92.

I didn’t even try them on, opting instead to remove myself from the situation. Was $92 truly ridiculous? I run every day. If I loved the pants, I could foreseeably wear them for years. Assuming I only put them on every other day, or even every third day, I’d still be getting my money’s worth. Plus, LuluLemon offered a deal: wear them once, and if you don’t like them bring them back.

Um, that’s amazing.

Still. That $92 scared me, so I walked away and found myself in Gap Body, where I’ve never actually been. The idea was to check out their underwear prices (lo and behold, sticker-shock me had been annoyed to see the price of Victoria’s Secret underwear had gone up again) and see if maybe they were a little better (answer, yes). And Gap Body also sells workout clothes. Tight workout pants, in fact. For an extra four dollars, tight workout pants with pink stripes.

#Sold for $54 (along with five pairs of plain-Jane black underwear for $20, in case you had to know).

Practice Makes Perfect

After tumbling those new pink striped pants around in the washing machine, I wore them on a visit to my parent’s during the day before my first run. I wanted to practice being in public in skin tight pants before actually being in public in them. I also wanted to practice pulling them onto me, as getting them up felt like trying to stretch a too small piece of Saran wrap over a really large artichoke that you want to save for lunch tomorrow. Upon saying hello to me, my parents didn’t vomit in disgust, or mention that I looked like a hussy, so I decided I could run in them.

First Run

Nessa is one of my frequent running partners – she lives close by, is uber chatty, and likes running the lake. Perfecto-mundo, dude. So I ran down to meet her in my pants. “Fire legs!” she said upon meeting me. I’d been running for about five minutes and already wished I could take my pants off and thought she could see the sweat (though I’d purchased black pants purposefully to help aid in hiding any darkened fabric). I then realized she meant the pink stripes, and that the black was doing it’s cover-up job well.

As far as pants go, I admit the tight pants thing is pretty comfortable. They move with you, it’s almost like wearing nothing, but with a barrier so you don’t get heat rash. With the pants going down to my ankles, I deeply wished I had opted for the below the knee version which would likely have been less hot. But the heat. Oy, it was like being trapped inside a bearsuit. A really tight bearsuit.

What I’ve Learned Since Then

Well, obviously, don’t bust those tight pants out on hot days unless you are darn prepared to whip your shirt off midway through your run, or if you don’t get hotter than Hades on a regular basis.

But more importantly is where to buy those darn legging things: Marshalls. Seriously. I went into Marshalls (aka TJ Maxx, or basically Ross) and there were so many leggings of various sizes and lengths it was hard to believe. At prices that weren’t horrible. I wonder if that should become their motto: Prices that aren’t horrible. Has a nice ring to it.

 

 

 

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Discipline

Thanks to K for floating this across my desk (aka, sending it to me via email):

 

Especially after seeing what I look like interviewed on TV (and stepping on a scale this morning for the first time in a month), it’s time to remember this when those magical “Pizza” words are uttered…or when contemplating long naps versus long runs.

Get out there, friends.

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Runner’s Delight Goes Slightly Personal, Then Rallies

I got an email this morning from a friend that had the line I can’t imagine you not being able to swim or run like you do at at the end of the first paragraph. I was like, I know! in my head. Outwardly, and on the proverbial paper known as a screen, I said nothing.

Because the truth is, I have it good. I can still walk and jog and elliptical, and none of this is permanent. It feels permanent. But it’s not.

The permeating sense of permanence comes from a mixture of things. It’s not being able to run heartily or swim strongly and thus not being able to manage my anxiety appropriately. Not managing anxiety means more unresolved panic and thoughts that dash about regardless of rationality, and more thoughts means less quality sleep and less quality sleep means inability to focus and inability to focus means attention is taken away from my memory so my memory is bad and whatever almost-dyslexia I’ve had in the past haunts me and mixes up numbers and letters and dates and times even more. And when everything about the way I think and live is going all wonky-cakes, it’s impossible not to feel like I’m going to turn everything right-side up again.

I jogged for thirty minutes yesterday. I ellipsed for an hour this morning. True, I also slept for eleven hours Saturday night, then for another two as a nap, then went to bed hours before Cinderella would have been riding home in a pumpkin but whatever. I’m fine.

More importantly, I’m still me. My running needn’t define me. How I cope sans running does.

Three new goals:

1) Find a race to cheer on before my next doctor’s appointment.

2) Research and write a post that isn’t in the now

3) Keep writing about running in the states.

Go-go-gadget, not letting myself being taken down and out by reasonably treatable health related thingamabobs.

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Walking

So, the aforementioned stent definitely makes things tricky. It didn’t stop me from taking a jog on Friday afternoon with new running buddy (Hi Jon!) and honestly, I think having someone else around made it easier to forget there was any pain but considering the fruit punch experience afterward (inside joke that might be TMI even for me) it definitely meant jogging might not be the best choice. Thus, when a houseguest showed up for the weekend who was worried about my health, I agreed to walk.

Walking is totally cool. I mean, you get to take more photos of strangers and weird graffiti you see. And um…you can talk without being sweaty. And if you get tired you can stop and have a glass of sangria on the deck of a fancy restaurant. Plus you can wear cuter shoes when you walk.

Yup. Walking. No fruit punch concerns here.

I really just wish I was running. And I’m trying super hard not to be whiney about this point.

 

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Two Runs, One Chicago

Vegetables that go MIA when traveling America: any greens outside spinach, spring mix, and the ever present white-bread of greens, iceberg lettuce. Even in Chicago I couldn’t seem to get my kale fix on (though the town did boast a Chipotle, which Megs and I ran to with delight after a few days of having depleted our own stock of carrots and apples as means of healthy food).

What Chicago did have in spades was places to run! We were staying downtown with a friend of a friend of a friend, Kristy. The song lyrics Tres tres chic kept coming to mind as I’d gaze off her balcony at the sunkissed Sears Tower or as Megs and I wandered a very high-end part of town (so high end their water tower looked like a castle. Seriously). With two nights in Chi-town (um, that’s a cool thing to say, right?) I had two chances to hit the pavement.

First run: through town! How quickly neighborhoods fly by. As Chicago is mostly a grid system (meaning the streets aren’t all topsy-turvy curvy) and our homestay was close enough to the Lake that should I get lost, I could always use that as a compass to her home, away I trampled through into the city. Perhaps because it was daylight, perhaps it was simply the ‘hoods I was running, but darn it if the city felt very clean. I didn’t see much nitty-gritty, down ‘n’ dirty, rough and tumble anything. Rather, all was quiet on the Western front. Cars were polite to runners, coffee shops were full of coffee drinkers, and the concept of an idyllic urban area came to mind.

For my second run in Chicago, I decided to hit the Lake’s edge. If you’re savvy to how crosswalks work, you’ll be able to find an underground tunnel that takes you below the crazy highway and onto the cement cycling path. These tunnels are terrifying – much more intimidating than the city – so I sprinted through one and was happy to see sand, sun, and people exercising on the other side.

Apparently, there was a huge cross country meet of sorts in Chicago the same time I was visiting, as loads of lean, attractive, young adults in college-logos kept jogging by, occasionally stopping to huddle around a coach and a clock. As my iPod ran out of batteries during my run (I was accidentally out for an hour and twenty minutes as a carnival-like area piqued my interest and I ran around the amusement like area amused despite it being closed down) I wasn’t under-happy about being able to see real runners in action.

On this less city-like side, running was a lot scarier. Cars ruled the roadway, ignored pedestrian lights, and generally felt like they were terrorizing me (which was bass-ackwards from what I’d have expected after my urban jaunt). The path seemed to go on infinitely, and I was sad to know I had to turn around if we were ever going to make our next destination.

Regardless, two runs, and two thumbs up, Chicagoland. I’ll be back, and I’ll be running (once I get home and find me some kale!).

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Real Time Update

 

Wow. It’s been a long time since running hurt. Like, literally hurt to the point of making me nauseated after three and a half miles. But after some minor surgery last week, it would seem that while my lungs and heart are healthy and ready to roll, my left flank isn’t quite as gung-ho.

The day after surgery (it was minor, I promise!) I did light housework, also known as laundry, and even took a walk for a cup of coffee. Indeed, I did spend a few hours recouping from said walk by napping and lolling about, so I figured running was a litte ways off. My darling friend Erin had this advice:

Do remember that you can be a bit of a Superwoman. Now is not the time to be Superwoman. Now is the time to be Regularwoman. Yeah NO RUNNING. Regularwoman does not run. Regularwoman might take a short walk to get coffee, but only if she is feeling very VERY up for it. Regularwoman does a lot of resting and reclining and Regularwoman totally gets bored but she knows she needs to rest and heal so she just sucks it up.

While making me giggle a lot, Erin’s message didn’t go amiss. I promise. I just…I do better when I run. Boredom and laziness don’t suit me. They make me depressed and feel like the world is crushing in on itself, like the world is happening without me. Yes, basically I’m a four year old in terms of mental health when I’m ill, and can’t decide if the physical pain is worse or knowing I’m missing out is.

The day after my walk, I did indeed do nothing. I mean, I tried to get on an airplane and failed due to massive bouts of anxiety and sobbing in a terminal, but in terms of exercise, nope. I went right back home and got right back into bed and slept all day and night which I’m sure had nothing to do with the fact that I wanted to hide like an ostrich.

So the next day, I woke up early and felt not too bad. It had been 36 hours since I’d had any painkillers, and I was ready to try. On went my sweatpants, and sports bra. On went my running shoes and iPod. And out the door I went.

The first few steps jostled my innards, and I considered turning around. But my podcast, 99% Invisible, clicked on and the winter air was warm enough that I wished I’d worn shorts, and how was I to not continue moving forward? I jogged at a pace that most people walk at, and it took almost double the amount of time it normally does for me to go around the lake. But I made it.

And I once again have way more respect for anyone who starts running and is in pain for any reason. Running is hard, and being in pain while you are doing it makes it even harder. Seriously though, as long as you’re not hurting yourself, keep going. It’s better than doing nothing. Promise.

 

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Wisconsination

Traveling + getting a balanced diet + enough rest = biggest. challenge. ever. Megan and I are exceptionally good at drinking plenty of coffee and tea, but as for nutritional value and sleepytime…well, some days we hit our mark, other days not. We’re still pretty good about working out, though, and Wisconsin was no exception. However, this doesn’t really mean running in Wisconsin was fun…

See, we were staying with my adorable friends, Erin and Mike, in their adorable apartment decorated with zombies and literature (they’re both nerdy librarians), and their pad was in a residential area that screamed “You will get lost if you venture too far!” Both days I ran, I had a very limited time slot – thirty minutes – and I know when it comes to me and timing, if there’s a way to get lost and leave me running longer, I’ll find it. Thus, a practical solution was to either do 15 minutes out and 15 minutes back, or find a connecting area that allowed me to run in a circle.

Point to point was out as there were no easy points. But Mike suggested the hospital trail, a cement path that circled the hospital for maybe a total of 3/4 of a mile. I flicked on Savage Love and ran the hospital trail once. Ooo, a nice building! Why look, nurses walking! Oh hey, some creepy man possibly cutting shrubbery or possibly not. Hmm, a pond. And then the trail was over and I ran it again. Second time: Oh, that building again. Huh, no one is on the trail now. Oh hey, that guy isn’t creepy he just really is cutting shrubbery. Why are there no birds in the pond? And then the third time: building. Person. Creepy man. Pond. And the fourth time: This is good for me. This is good for me. I am a more sane person when I run. This is good for me.*

Dinner was a date with a local guy, Dan, at a pan-Asian place that seemed to forget I had ordered a meatless dish (maybe they were trying to help with that whole nutrition thing?) but all in all was delicious. At least there was good conversation and a pint of beer, which equated to falling asleep rather easily.

Next time I’m in Wisconsin though…trying that whole point to point run.

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*I did the same run the next morning, my mind starting immediately at the “This is good for me” zone.

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