"En toma" Week Ending 8/21

40 miles on the dot this week. not great, but running is certainly different when you have hills to climb. because i live in the downtown of a city now, i also don't have to drive anywhere and i love it. so, despite not running as much as i'd like, my legs and feet have needed some time to adjust to walking for 3-4 hours every day.

of note: i ran 11:54 for 2 miles. downhill, of course...but definitely a different feeling going that fast for a little while. not usual for me, at all.

the bottom photo was taken from my apartment on the 18th floor (in a country where tremors are a weekly occurrence, another story). currently, the student population of chile is still on strike, protesting the high cost and low-quality of it's university education system relative to the rest of south america. as i'm sure i've mentioned before: this makes my position as an english professor sort of unstable right now and i may not have an income for another few weeks. which sucks. but it's also been nice for getting around the city, sleeping and drinking a lot of cheap, amazing chilean wine.

some big racing went down in both the midwest and the west-west... eagerly awaiting the race reports.

hope all is well out there in real-lives of the blog-world.

"La Virgen" Week Ending 8/14

Well, after 27 hours of travel, 2 layovers, a frozen nap in an outdoor bus terminal at 3am and shit loads of airplane beer...I have arrived in Talca, Chile.

I moved into an apartment with a friend. Currently, I await the end of a student strike so I can start clockin' them dollars. Make that plata.

In the meantime, I went to the coast and I've been running up and down a lil' hill here. There's a statue de La Virgen at the top, so it makes the 2 mile climb and the ensuing suffering all that much more symbolic and fun. It's time to start training in earnest again, as the santiago 80k is in october and I can't think of any reason to make it hurt worse than I'm sure it already will.

I hope everyone is doing well. If you want to come run in patagonia, come on down and visit. Mi departamento es su departamento.

30 ish miles this week? maybe? i lost a lot of time packing and flying.

Nostalgia Wax On

Read this!

http://madamdonut.blogspot.com/2011/07/baby-we-were-born-to-run.html

This is a blog post from my friend Lora, who ran the Great Lakes Relay with me. Even though we were to be teammates, I only met her the morning of the event.

She put up a great piece of writing about the relay and about running in general that has me clutching my beer extra tightly and staring up into the night sky extra meaningfully.

Highly recommended.

With just about one day left in the U.S. and a lot of crazy shit going...I feel compelled to say:

I love you. Yes, you.

Registered.

ULTRAMARATON DE LOS ANDES 2010 from Aventura Aconcagua on Vimeo.

http://www.ultramaratondelosandes.cl/

...and thus, my life has direction and meaning once again. not to mention, Aerosmith.

"Orbiting the planet. Way out" Week Ending Whenever.

Ok, fine. Things have been admittedly especially unfocused lately. Here's a breakdown of my life for the past few weeks, leading right up to when I move south in a week:

8:30am-12:00pm - teach.

12-6 or 7pm- bike shop.

7-10pm - bartend.

10pm-??? - beer.

It's been very unpleasant. I have a newfound appreciation for just how little sleep a body needs to continue moving through the motions of life. As exhaustion sets in, my life soundtrack has become a weird, buzzing hum that sits just below consciousness, occasionally setting my teeth into a fit of grinding. Great times. I did this on purpose because I know I'll need the money in Chile, but I'm beginning to wonder if the extra money is worth arriving in a new country/new job looking like a drowning victim.

Smelling only marginally better.

46 miles on the week. All quality workouts, except for the weekend when I jogged through a field of poison ivy and stinging nettles with an old friend and then followed that up with a sand dunes run with a dude who grew up down the street from me and i hadn't seen in a decade. we were both weaving-drunk when we set out on the run and we ended it sober. so that must have been a good one?

i truly hope everyone is feeling good. the summer has flown by. holy shit.

I am very pleased to discover that Dave has recovered well and is back to destroying worlds and I am very unsurprised to discover that Lucho is fucking tough.

Kill on.