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May 26, 2008

buffalo half race report

See last year's report here.
And the year before, when I ran the full.

A quick rundown this year, as we are gearing up for a family day of hiking at Salmon River Falls.

This year, the Buffalo race was about two things: J running her first half, and D working her ass off to qualify for Boston.

And while the weather was beautiful (blue sky, cool breezes) and J did wonderfully in her first stint as a half-er, in retrospect it seems like the day was doomed for disaster for lots of other runners.

The course was lovely as always, well-prepared at the water stops even for the slower runners like J and me. The race itself, for us, was relatively uneventful. We finished in under J's goal time (2:30), running the 13.1 in 2:28. This was an achievement, considering J has never run this distance AND we made a pit-stop in the marina around mile 5.

We finished and walked north to the hotel, showered and put our feet up for a few minutes before walking back south to the finish line to meet D. I was afraid we left the hotel too late and that we would miss her: a BQ time for her had to be somewhere between 3:45 and 3:50 (she's on the cusp of an age group, so 3:50 would have qualified her next year). She had trained incredibly hard the past several months, and even had dropped several pounds (which is quite amazing since she was a veritable rail in the first place). I was certain that this would be her year for a qualifying time.

We made our way to the barricades at the finish line, and I watched runner after runner cross the line between 3:45 and 4:00, thinking that because we hadn't seen D cross yet that we'd missed her already, and hoping hoping hoping that that was the case.

As we waited, I saw one runner barf his guts out upon crossing the finish line (thankfully it was all Gatorade and nothing too nasty), watched another runner be carried across the line between two friends, and witnessed several people crying.

And no D.

At 4:05 I began to worry that she was still out on the course, crippled or otherwise badly compromised, and tried to remember her number so I could find an official and see if she'd been picked up. Soon after I began my plan to find her, though, she came running through.

J ran into the chute to meet her, but I hung back. I knew she had to be devastated, and I saw her face scrunching up a little as she was talking to J.

My heart completely broke for her then. I didn't know what I was going to say to her, and everything I mustered up in my head sounded hollow and ridiculous.

The thing I ended up saying was probably the stupidest, though: I raised my hands above my head and said "Wineglass!" to her, indicating that I was thrilled that she'd have to run the Wineglass with me in October to try to qualify again.

Her look was murderous. I hung my head, immediately wishing I could take the words back. She sputtered something about a husband asking his wife to have another baby as the doctor sewed up her episiotomy.

My gaffe was quickly forgotten as we made our way into the convention center to get D some pizza. As we wandered around the guts of the hotel, trying to find our way out, a woman sitting on the floor, alone and wrapped in a mylar blanket, asked if we could get her back to the hotel.

"You *are* in the hotel," I told her, since the convention center and hotel were essentially one big monster building.

"I can't find my boyfriend, and I'm lost," she continued. I looked at D and J, who looked down at the woman. She shook and there were lines of salt streaked down her cheeks.

"Sure, we'll show you out," I said, and D and J bent over to pick up her water bottle and untouched cup of beer.

As we took her from the convention center to the hotel, we politely asked her questions about where she was from and how she did. She, too, had had a horrible race. She told us she'd came in 10th at the marathon in Eugene, Oregon only a couple weeks before, but that this race had been hell. She said she'd thrown up at the finish line and then immediately was disoriented and sick. I asked her if she wanted us to find her a medic but she said she just needed to find her room.

As we approached the main elevators, she said she could find her way from there. She asked our names, and we told her, and she thanked us profusely. I pulled her bib number strip down so I could see her name, and it was Michelle Chille an elite runner.

At any rate, we left the race a little melancholy, sad for D and sad for Michelle, all of us just kind of wanting to go home.

D's race report is posted at her blog. When J posts her report, I'll offer a link as well. Sadly, I no longer get to post my friends' race reports here, as they all have their own blogs now.

Posted by mryonker at 11:01 AM | Comments (5)

May 19, 2008

the run-down

If you read me through an aggregator, you might not have noticed: I'm doing a lot of my updates through twitter now. I know I have quite a few readers who actually come (go?) to the academom site itself and read that way, so those visitors will already know that the current action is in the sidebar, not in the content box.

That doesn't mean I'll stop posting here (although the thought has occurred to me that it very well might be time to close up shop--more on that in a later post). It does mean that many of my updates are not getting through to all readers.

So, my life in some tweet-sized bites, for those who have missed the twitter side:

I finally feel like is OK to make an official announcement: I did go on the market this past year, and I did indeed get a job. I'll be at York College of Pennsylvania in the fall. I'm thrilled--so much so that I still have to pinch myself to make sure it's real.

I don't have a nightmarish job-market narrative. There were some funny (both ha-ha and strange) parts, but nothing was particularly dramatic or hellish.

B and I spent the last two months getting our house ready to sell. I think if I have to look at another paint brush anytime soon, I'll throw myself into the bushes. But the house looks really really great (thanks in large part to B's parents, who traveled up several times to help, and my parents, who took my kids over spring break so we could refinish the floors).

We got an acceptable offer on our house just 12 days after it went on the market.

The key to keeping the house "ready to show" when there are three children in said house: put all of their toys and half their clothes in storage.

Date we'll officially become Yorkers: last weekend of July.

On tap for this summer: Frankstock 2008 in June (family reunion) and my mom's 60th birthday blow-out bash in August; two events which require me to get my guitar-playing chops back.

I am suffering with chronic fatigue. I've not been diagnosed, but the past couple weeks have been hard. By about 11 am I'm sleepy and coffee is pretty much ineffectual. I picked up some vitamins and I'm going to try to cut back on the junk to see if that will pep me up a bit.

This week is the "get ready for Buffalo" week. As in years past, I've spent the week before the Buffalo marathon intent on sleeping at least 8 hours a night, (good) carb loading, and drinking tons of water. This year, while I'll only be running the half, will be no different.

Posted by mryonker at 03:49 PM | Comments (4)

May 08, 2008

the goat

We finally ran it. And now I'm moving away, and if I want to run it again, I'll have to drive for 5 hours.

*sigh*

Posted by mryonker at 08:32 AM | Comments (2)

May 06, 2008

#500

Hi everyone!!!

This is post #500 on ye olde blog academom.

I have written 500 times here.

Hole. Eee. Sheet.

And since you're here, I'm sending you away. Please consider buying my house. It's beautiful and perfect and I don't want to leave it, but I think moving the house to York, PA would be cost-prohibitive.

Posted by mryonker at 08:34 PM | Comments (5)

May 03, 2008

skip this unless you're writing a diss

As I've been working through this PhD, I've noticed a bit of a pattern: I like each phase a little better than the last. I thrived in course work, but suffered a little at the end of each semester when I had to spend a couple of weeks trying to make sense of 14 weeks of discussion and reading notes to build a paper.

Then came exams, and I decided that I liked exams better than course work. My rationale was this: the exam phase was all reading. That is, I could read, and read, and read as much I wanted to, and I was reading what I was interested in because my exam areas were *mine*. I made them, and I was invested in learning about them, and I reveled in the reading. Of course, at the end of it all (and it took me about a year-and-a-half from start to finish) I did have to write, but it was like ripping a band-aid off super-fast. The writing of the exams inhabited such a small time-portion of "the exam process" that it isn't what I remember about it. I remember, fondly, the reading.

Now it's the dissertation, the book-length researched argument. I've been writing on it for almost a year now (holy crap. I'm going to ignore that small detail). And I do love it. Because I feel like this is what I've been waiting to do since I got here: to revel in some thick writing-making.

To be sure, I didn't always know that I've been waiting to do this. In fact, I think I just realized it in the last few days, when I was given a small directive by my advisors: make a little more sense, please--the chapters are not fitting together yet.

And after some mildly-frantic heuristic-making and outline building, I realized what the problem was: I'd been hoping that all the stuff I'd written so far would fall logically, neatly onto the minds of my readers in such a way that the argument would delicately but obviously appear in their brains without me having to actually, uh, argue it.

I had no thesis. No over-arching claim or theme even, to show readers what I was getting at.

Part of me said, "Well, you were saving it for the end!! Here's four chapters of interesting material, here's chapter five that is the grand finale of 'How It All Fits!!'"

And the other smarter part of me said, "Hello? Is anybody in there?? You've been trying to get your OWN STUDENTS to EXPLICITLY ARTICULATE their own claims for weeks."

So: what have I learned?? Dissertating is about making an argument. And it's about NOT making an oblique, creatively meandering maybe-argument. It's about a little bit of structural repetivity, a little bit of data-making and data-analysis, a little bit of gathering and summarizing existing scholarship, and a whole lot of showing how it all fits together. It must fit together.

And then: whatever the fit is, or however the fit works, is the argument.

I imagine that partially why I've resisted articulating an explicit argument is that attendant to such writing is responsibility. If I'm going to make an argument, I have to stand by it. I have to be invested in it. I have to allow it to be important to me. I must connect myself to it. I must commit to it.

And as a student (and my profs and advisors will all concur), I'm not much for commitment. There's an authority move that happens when one commits to an argument that I'm only now becoming a little more comfortable with. I have to acknowledge that I am smart enough, entitled, even, to make an argument. And the humility of my student-hood, the presence of a bunch of really brilliant people that I work with and among, sometimes make my being "good-enough" a hard thing to admit.

What I realize now, just now, is that I have to make that allowance (even if it requires a little pretending) in order to get this project finished. I have to allow myself to be able to do it; I have to admit that I'm smart enough to do it.

I am, dammit. I am.

Posted by mryonker at 09:09 PM | Comments (4)