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March 29, 2008
getting the goat
Since I've been in CNY, I've avoided, religiously, the Mountain Goat, a ten-mile race that takes runners up Syracuse's most painful hills.
Every March I get the glossy brochure in the mail. Every March I look at the elevation graph and the course map published on the website. Every March I decide that such hill-running-nonsense would be absolute torture and misery.
I'm not sure happened this year (D?? you want to weigh in and remind us why we decided that *this* would be the year??), but not only am I registered to run the Goat, as it is affectionately called, but also have signed up to participate in the weekly training runs, that introduce runners, slowly, to the hill-hell they have to look forward to.
This morning was the second training run.
And just let me say: I LOVE IT. I love running the hills of Syracuse. I think I might actually be out of my mind. I'm not sure if it's the idea of going for a run with 300 other people, or having a no-pressure training run be manned with volunteers and water stops, or if it's simply the change of scenery from my own tired, still gray, still snowy Parish village runs.
But whatever it is, I am back in love with running.
Posted by mryonker at 12:22 PM | Comments (3)
March 28, 2008
what I'm eating
I know that if I was a blogger worth her salt I'd consistently post pictures of what I'm eating. But I'm also old-fashioned like my 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Steinacker (or Steinbrenner, or Steinbergen-something) at East Butler Elementary School in Dwight, Nebraska. She berated her class of 7-year olds in 1983 that "not all books have pictures; in fact, smart kids can make the pictures in their HEADS, and you should be at the point where you're making your OWN pictures, not letting someone make the pictures for you."
/disclaiming preamble
1 ripe avocado. [Locally, the best are at Price Chopper right now, though you can't go wrong with Wegman's either. Stay away from Wal-Mart avocados. They will always make you sad, with their seemingly firm-yet-yielding resistance. You will bring them home and cry to find their innards brown and stringy.]
Mash the avocado with a few globs of cottage cheese and a generous generous sprinkling of garlic powder. If you have no cottage cheese, you can stick an ounce of cream cheese in there instead, though I'm trying to cut back on fat* so I'm doing a lot of substituting cottage for cream these days. Also, "generous sprinkling" of garlic powder is a bit of a euphemism; I tend to cover the top layer of the mash with garlic powder completely.
Spread on toasted whole wheat pita bread. Eat over sink. Use finger to squeegie remaining avocado from the bottom of the bowl.
*Yes, I know how fatty avocados are. But it's a plant, and in my world plant fat doesn't count.
Posted by mryonker at 09:12 AM | Comments (8)
March 26, 2008
small but significant epiphany
This morning I got the old mat and bolsters out to do the "home practice" sequence out of this month's issue of Yoga Journal. The 9 asanas are meant to help relieve sinus pressure, which I am experiencing.
The first, child's pose, is an easy favorite. I shut my ears to Thomas the Tank Engine blaring in the background, ignored the cat nudging and purring into my neck, forgot--briefly--the toys and crumbs that surrounded me on the living room floor. I felt a smile grow inside me. "I really really should do this more often," I thought to myself.
The second is an old standby: down dog. I moved into it slowly, and found that I could neither straighten my legs NOR could I get my heels to the floor, as I am normally able. I sighed into the mat, tried my best to keep my arms extending and my back flat, and let go after MAYBE 30 seconds. (It was probably more like 10.)
And as I worked my way through the sequence, the rest of the poses eluded me; I worked into a decent shoulderstand, but several seconds into my headstand, the crown of my pointy head began to scream. My hamstrings cried out as I attempted to lower my legs into plow. My knees wouldn't abide reclining hero, which I normally can easily drop into.
Etc. Ad finitum.
I sat back on my mat and tried to remember the last time I practiced. I couldn't, save for the semester-long class I took a YEAR ago.
What was shocking to me, in the main, was that I've left and returned to yoga pretty regularly since I began practicing as an undergraduate. I've gone for months without getting on the floor, but have, as a rule, never had to re-train myself back into the flexibility and strength that (it seems like) I've always had. Down dog? No problem. Plow? Throw those legs back there!
And today it was like I was working with an alien body, not mine. It was telling me things I've never heard: "Nope, not enough room here to do that," and "Wow, this is really sending some DISCOMFORT to the ____ (insert random body part)."
As I sat on the mat, I wondered: has my body emerged officially out of youth and into something less-youthful? Granted, my body exhibits the marks of the less-youthful: stretch marks from child-bearing, varicose veins, arthritic toes, facial wrinkles, gray hair, and "old-people" bumps on my legs; however, I chalk much of those effects up to hard living: the veins and toe problems are from running, I'm certain. Many of the effects are hereditary: early gray runs in my family, as do the small "leg bumps" (which in all honesty are "moles gone wild").
And many of you might be chuckling, wondering: "She's THIRTY-TWO. She has THREE kids. And she's just now thinking that she may be done with being youthful?"
It might be that I spent so much of my real youth acting like a grown-up. I look at my students today and think: holy crap. When I was HER age I was married. When I was HER age I had 1 (or 2) kids already. I didn't have a moment in my life where I looked around me and thought, "Hm. Yes? Yes. This is it. I am an adult now. I am GROWN UP. I am leaving my youth behind." Even as I left hospitals with babies, even as I earned graduated degrees. Even as I celebrated a first, then fifth, then tenth, then twelfth wedding anniversary. Even as I went to a large conference this past winter, wearing a jacket and sensible shoes, to interview for the most grown-up jobs I could ever want. Even as I then visited campuses. Even as I negotiated and accepted a job offer. Even as my own daughter, who is now ELEVEN, confronts the edge of pubescence herself. I still, still, did not feel "grown up."
Until this morning, when I couldn't get my legs behind my head anymore. Well. I suppose everyone gets a wake-up call.
Posted by mryonker at 11:56 AM | Comments (5)
March 24, 2008
beat down
Either I am catching what B stayed home sick today with (mild fever, headache, general malaise), or I am withdrawing hard from this being the first day (in many many) that I've denied myself coffee.
I drank a Pepsi in late afternoon, hoping to fend off an impending caffeine headache, and it seems to have worked.
However, my shoulders and neck ache, my throat holds a persistent yawn, and I'm chilly.
Blecgh.
Posted by mryonker at 07:40 PM | Comments (2)
March 19, 2008
speedwork
J and I drove to the local high school track this evening for our first round of speed work. It was an easy enough 6X400, with walk breaks in between.
Nothing I do lately seems to run at a fast clip. Diss writing is slow like honey, and I get a decent page out per day if I'm lucky. Getting the house ready to sell is, again, excruciatingly slow. Grading this stack of lit reviews from my advanced research class* is taking for damn ever.
But today, even though the track was still 3/4 covered in snow (so we ran 100 meter repeats), I was fast. Fast enough for my thighs to numb up like they do when I push a little. Fast enough for my lungs to burn and my windpipe to rattle. Fast enough for the pounding of my feet re-set the rhythm of my breath, for my eyes to water, for my mind to be utterly, inescapably present.
I left the track wishing we could have gone longer, faster. But it was getting dark, and the stack of lit reviews needed grading, and kids needed rides to various places.
*This advanced research class, in which I am essentially teaching methods + scholarship-in-action, is, I think, my favoritist class I've ever taught.
Posted by mryonker at 10:39 PM | Comments (2)
March 14, 2008
it's the little things
My favorite quick morning distraction: comparing the 10-day forecast of where I am now to the 10-day forecast of where I will be.
Posted by mryonker at 08:04 AM | Comments (0)
March 13, 2008
I've got to find another place to work
Aside from the fact that I am constantly bloated with muffin carbs, and from the fact that I really am in no position to be buying a $3 chai and a $1.50 muffin every day, I should really find another place to work because I always invariably end up, somehow, next to a couple who bow their heads to publicly pray--outloud--before they eat their grilled focaccia sandwiches.
I end up feeling equally annoyed and ashamed. In circular fashion. Annoyed that I feel ashamed that I didn't give thanks for my own muffin--though god knows he'd just be telling me not to eat it, anyway. And annoyed that I would feel such a thing in the first place. Ashamed that I feel annoyed--ashamed that I would expect anyone have to censor themselves in my presence.
I should just go to the library. Their server blocks iChat, which keeps me off the IM. No one is really talking at all there, so I won't have to worry about eavesdropping and hearing stuff that isn't meant for me. I only have to walk quickly past the new releases* section and NOT look to see if they've got the new _Runner's World_.
I just can't drink coffee, or anything at all, there. And I need something to do with my hands and face intermittently while I'm writing, or else I can't think of anything to say.
*The last time I worked at my public library, I walked out with an armful of books, one of which is Hack , a book written by a woman my age who quit her office job to drive a cab in NYC. And she started blogging. And she got a book out of the deal. It's a fairly quick read (1.5 nights for me, and I'm slow), and it gets a little repetitive near the end, but I'm fascinated by the new phenomenon that is "blog-then-book-deal."
Posted by mryonker at 10:39 AM | Comments (5)
March 12, 2008
word count + whinge
24,851/60,000
41%
My Zokuto word meter, somehow, does not work anymore. I put my numbers in and hit "enter" and nothing happens, except that the fields reset. It makes me a little sad, because I loved to impress my non-writerly, non-dissertationing friends with numbers and progress.
It is spring break this week, and I've kept my sitter hours as well as enlisted the kind help of some other friends so that I've gotten a few large hunks of hours to write and work. I've also re-instated the nightly writing whilst H is at the studio.
Progress, while it is not what I'd like it to be--not what it feels like it should be given the hours I'm devoting--is apparent. Chapter 3, the data analysis chapter, has taken three different iterations at this point, and I've finally settled on what I'd like to see happen (or on what I think will be an approachable set of arguments based on my findings). Part of my problem in writing this chapter early on was that I felt like I should know and be able to anticipate every claim, and that as I began (and began again), I needed to properly set the chapter up to essentially foreshadow those claims. What I found myself doing, though, was writing paragraphs full of thesis statements, something I have been overly-conscious of ever since cgb noted that I'm inclined to do so.
I finally took the think on paper advice and made it my own, which is not only keeping me writing, but also keeping me from feeling like I have to know what I'm going to say (fully, unequivocally) before I say it. It's helping.
What's not helping is March. I am ready for sunshine and blue skies and daffodils. Instead, I'm at the kitchen table in the only natural light of the house, and even that is meager and grey. I have my legs wrapped in one blanket, a second draped around my shoulders. It has, I think I can say, snowed every single day of March so far. T, my brother who recently moved south into the city of Syracuse, came over for dinner and to help us with some drywall last night. He couldn't believe how much snow we still had piled on our streets and both sides of the driveway (there's not much snow left in the city).
While I did run in the Tipp Hill Shamrock race last weekend, I still have very little motivation to go outside and run in the cold nasty. And I'm feeling the effects of sitting in a chair for 5 hours a day: my right thigh is sore from where the hard edge of the chair presses into my hamstring. My neck is stiff, and my wrists are cranky from leaning on the laptop keyboard. I know. Wah wah.
I suppose I could be happy that the weather is crappy; if it were nice I'd most assuredly be complaining that I couldn't be outside to enjoy it more.
Posted by mryonker at 01:41 PM | Comments (4)
March 07, 2008
shameless commerce
If you're a runner and a blogger (or otherwise-online-type), you can win a pair of great Oiselle Lesley Knickers over at Fitness for Mommies.
I myself am looking for some running mojo during the ides here in CNY. And since I have no dinero, the shameless blog-post-for-possible-personal-material-return.
Posted by mryonker at 09:38 AM | Comments (1)
March 05, 2008
please learn from my mistakes
H is on her third pair of pointe shoes this year. My fingers are near-bleeding from sewing in the elastic and ribbon. The woman who fits H for her shoes reprimands me every time because I don't make H sew them in herself. But *I* can barely push the needle through the thick elastic--how can I expect her to do it??
I complained, half-jokingly, that H is setting some sort of record for her studio in going through shoes. The saleswoman, a retired ballerina herself, looked at me aghast. "Professional dancers wear out a pair of shoes in about eight hours of use, and in ONE ACT of a performance..." She shook her head slightly at me, as if to wonder how stupid I could be.
Quite stupid, apparently. Here's more proof (aside from having cultivated in my daughter a taste for the most expensive hobby a young girl might have): On the way home from pre-school on Monday, Little J complained of intense thirst. It had been his day for snack, and so we happened to have a half-gallon of chocolate milk, about a 1/4 full, in his backpack. While I knew chocolate milk--or milk of any kind, really--is no thirst-quencher, I still allowed him to swig milk out of the gallon jug. Luckily he did NOT spill milk in the car, but now he refuses to drink milk out of a cup. He'll wander into the kitchen randomly during the day. I'll hear the fridge open and the cap of the milk come off. Then I'll hear him *thunk* return the jug to the fridge and *whump* shut the fridge door. And then he'll wander back out of the kitchen, a small milk-trace on his upper lip.
Gross.
Edited to add: Now he just passed me, walking from the kitchen into the living room, the jug of milk in hand. Great.
Posted by mryonker at 10:57 AM | Comments (3)