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Edda in her Halloween costume. Jeremy was the person who came up with this idea. It was a nice Halloween.

I ran a marathon! But first, let’s start on Friday (which is part of the story!). I needed to go into the patent office in order to get a new badge and redo a certificate on my laptop (if you live within 50 miles of the office, this is a once every 3 years type of thing). I decided to take the Metro in because I hadn’t ridden the Metro since the beginning of the pandemic and I thought it would be good practice for getting to the marathon on Sunday because the patent office and the marathon start (Pentagon) are relatively close. When I did commute to the office regularly 2007-2009, it would take me 90 minutes from opening the front door until my butt was in my desk seat. But on Friday, it took me almost 2.25 hours. I misread the Metro alerts and didn’t realize the entire yellow line was shut down until I was trying to wait for a yellow line train. So I had to backtrack back into city center – so I probably blew about 20 minutes right there. I knew that the stations past National airport were closed entirely, I had to take a bus shuttle to King St station – the bus shuttling ran well and without a hitch – I managed to make my morning computer appointment without a problem. Then I met up with Andy, who unbelievably is one of the few people who is working on campus (during the pandemic, they made a strong push for everyone to sign a telework agreement – so I think the office is like 80-90% teleworking now, Andy held out and didn’t sign it!) and we met up for lunch. He is awaiting his retirement date – there is a little countdown clock sitting on his monitor… We had lunch at my favorite Thai place, which was so so quiet! Like weekend quiet. I’m not sure how they are staying in business… We had a great time chatting and eating. Then I retraced my Metro steps backwards to get home. I did stop by the marathon start station to familiarize myself to the start (there was signage up already and parking advisories) and I made a quick stop to the newly renovated Air and Space museum to check it out ahead of family visiting (I’m working out various attractions for them to see while they are in town.)

On Sunday, I got up really early and was on the Metro before 6am. They were running the Metro early for the marathon. I’m so happy I did the Metro test run on Friday because I didn’t make the same mistake I did on Friday and it was super clear I would have because you’d think that all the people were going to go to the same place, but this was not true! At Metro Center, the fuller train was going the wrong direction. I had to stop and confirm with another runner – we’re going to Pentagon, right? He’s like – yeah, that’s right and then we both wondered where the other people in the other direction were going. Anyways, I thought I had left plenty of time for everything, but it ended up that it felt like I didn’t wait very long at the start line before starting. I met up with the 5 hour pace group and the two women pacing were hilarious – one from Minneapolis and the other from NYC and they were both very experienced marathoners and pacers. Like well over 100 marathons run and over 10 years of pacing experience. So I had no doubt about their abilities and therefore, was a relief to me – I didn’t have to pay attention to my watch at all and I didn’t. I ran with my new found friends. I also ran with a young woman named Molly (also wanted to finish at 5 hours) who had unbelievable course support, her family had flown in, her boyfriend made signs, it was fun to see them on the course (sometimes before Molly saw them). It was a gorgeous day. I ended up being dropped by the pace group at about the 22 mile mark (the pacers were very good at trying to pep talking, but alas, I had pretty much hit (unknowingly – only known after the fact looking at the data – my max heart rate and I know that cannot be sustained for very long) and then shuffled/jogged my way to the finish line. I didn’t walk, but at the end I was going as fast as some of the walkers. I ended up with a time of 5:08 which I’m completely satisfied with.

Notes on training (for me, mainly and can be boring for others):

So my longest, long run in training was 18 miles on the C&O canal at 11 min pace (based on my Garmin). This was a completely doable, though challenging, long run for me. Paul suggested for this marathon, that I take it out at that pace and see how I feel. I felt like that was a bit too ambitious because the MCM is not a flat course. It starts off with big hill at the beginning and then a few smaller hill/bridges at the end – the last 4 miles. So with the 5 hour pace group, the pace was going to be 11:27 per mile. But the thing with the marathon is that that’s the per-mile-marker pace. As a runner you always run slightly more than a mile per mile marker. This is because the mile markers are measured to the shortest distance which is not following the middle of the road, it’s running tangents which I know I wouldn’t be able to do well. So the 11:27 pace, correlates to a slightly faster training pace of probably 11:15 ish pace (I didn’t do the actual math). So I did that pace for 22 miles and then I had to fade. The little hills at the end of the course were too challenging for me. I ended up, by my garmin, running 26.83 miles at a pace of 11:30. I know this counts for exactly nothing, but my garmin registered that at 26.2, I came in at exactly 5 hours, and this pleases me as I train to my watch, so I spent the last 8 minutes running the extra distance.

Notes on the weather:

A week ago, I thought the forecast was going to be 40 and raining and this is the absolute worst weather to run in. I was resigned to this fate. Jeremy was a bit more proactive and wanted to find me *just the right thing* and went out and bought a lightweight (expensive) rain gear just for the occasion. He said, if I buy this, then it won’t rain. And it didn’t. It was a gorgeous running day. Freezing cold at the start. And then ever so slightly too warm in the full sun on pavement – but I couldn’t have asked for anything more beautiful.

Notes on pacing:

So went I was stumbling the last few miles in, I was hoping to stay ahead of the 5:15 pace group because if they passed me, it meant that I should have started with them! But I managed to stay ahead of them – which begs the question, should I have started with them and felt better and then picked up the pace and gotten a better time? This is the first race in my memory (though my memory is bad) that I’ve positive split, I generally like to negative split races (where I run faster the 2nd half). But I often like to negative split too strongly which means I should have started out faster. So would I have gotten a faster time if I started with the 5:15 pace group and then maybe at the 1/2 point started to progress? Jeremy thinks no that it was too much time to make up too far into the race and well past my training distance, I think maybe? I’m not sure. Maybe it would have felt better at the end (though I kind of enjoyed in the strangest way the little shuffling at the end, because what is a marathon without an absolute struggle at the end?). Jeremy also still thinks I’m not eating enough. I started eating gummy fruit snacks at mile 6 and then a package every 3 miles at 80 calories a serving. It kind of makes me feel ill to eat the sugar – I never feel hungry during the race and I kind of have to force myself to eat the fruit snacks. I dunno.

Am I going to do it again?

Maybe. It’s a soft finish time, I know I could do better with a bit more training and a faster course. We’ll see. Right now I’m going to rest for a while.

I’ve been listening to audiobooks. Sometimes podcasts drive me crazy – they are always telling me to do stuff or trying to sell me stuff. I’ve listened enough to have my favorite narrators – I recognize voices. There is a very popular narrator who I dislike which is unfortunate because she narrates so so many popular books. I like to listen to mystery books. Here’s the one I’m listening to now. Such the opposite of Dickens.

One of the biggest things I learned through running is that you have to rest between efforts. That you can do enormous and unbelievable things (for me!), but you have to be steady at it and you have to get enough rest while you are doing it. I did not realize this when Paul started coaching me in running many years ago.

To train, I do run almost every day (I don’t run days I’m working at the hospital) which sounds crazy to a lot of people, but what they don’t know is that 5 out of the 7 days, I don’t run very hard. I run really, really slowly. Like I can daydream-about-chocolate-cream-pie the whole time slowly. And then the other 2 days, I work pretty hard and have to concentrate only on the running. Paul did program weeks of training just like that for many years (off, easy, hard/intervals, off, easy, easy, hard/long) before I quite understood what an easy day meant. The first couple of years, I ran my easy days too hard because it feels so good to run hard. It just feels great & amazing and you are running faster than you ever thought you could and it’s a lot of fun to run fast. I’d also over reach on the workouts. I’d run the workouts faster than Paul wrote them out for me. It was a lot a lot of fun while I could keep it up. But I was tired a lot, I was injured a bunch, I could not sustain the effort over a long stretch of time (meaning a good buildup). I remember once just having to stop training a couple of weeks before a race right when I was suppose to be peaking because I was exhausted and couldn’t run any more and had to sleep & rest and this took me weeks of sleeping to feel not tired again. I was overtrained. But this cycle, I was careful to sleep enough and to add in rest days if I felt like I needed them, to compensate for travel or extra stress. I did not overreach on workout days and this resulted in a nice, steady build since May-ish where I’ve run at least 10 miles every weekend for four or five months and probably at least 13 miles every weekend for the past 2.5 months.

Now that I’m older and wiser (lol) – my body and mind are more tired and need to rest more and I want to be able to run for a long, long time – no matter how slowly I go, it’s why I’m so beholden to my sleep and my very easy running days. Also important is the rest between seasons, I’m quite looking forward to after the marathon, where I can not run so much and sleep more. I’m also much, much less stressed about what pace my watch says I’m running – which often says Doris, you are running slow. As far as I’m concerned, my body works well and I feel good running. Not everyone is so lucky. I am still excited/nervous for the marathon. It could go well! Or it could not go well! Both are ok for me.

This is also the first week of my part-time schedule which just happens to coincide with the taper for my marathon. I’m resting a lot -sleeping and napping. The past few years have been difficult for so many reasons, I’ve worked a lot, I’ve grieved a lot. It’s nice to take this time to rest and recover (I used to, but no longer count travel/vacation as a time to rest and recover, it is neither restful nor recovery-ful, it’s just a different kind of stress). It’s nice to ease up on the relentlessness of everything – I was losing it there a little. Srsy, an email would pop up and say – hey can you fill this thing (totally normal & regular thing) out for Edda’s school and I would go into a funk that was very hard to get out of for the rest of the day. Every little thing was making me cry or upset or something! It was not good.

We go to sleep pretty early (we aim for 9:30, but it’s usually 10. I hate seeing the clock go past 10 pm). I usually fall asleep quickly (my sleep problems are early waking), but Jeremy uses his Kindle to help him sleep. He reads in a dark room and then when he’s sleepy enough, he gently lets the book fall to the bed and closes his eyes. He enjoys not needing to turn off an extra reading light. The book that he picks needs to be pretty specific – not too exciting to prevent the sleepiness, but not too boring to not want to keep reading. It’s usually non-fiction about transportation or urban planning. I’ve not known him to be a great fiction reader. But recently, he’s gone through the entire Dickens oeuvre, culminating in Bleak House which he finished on Sunday night. But it broke his rules – it was too exciting so he stayed up until 1 pm on both nights! I kind of can’t believe he stayed up late reading Dickens. Most people binge was episodes on Netflix. My husband stays up late reading Victorian era novels.

We had a long discussion about the word Dickensian and which one of Dickens’ novels was the most Dickensian. Apparently being Dickensian involves: an orphan, a stage villain, a beatific virgin, a ludicrous spinster, a wily cockney factotum (?, had to google that – an employee that does all kinds of work), a shabby genteel sponger, a bachelor philanthropist, a sadistic schoolmaster, a devious lawyer, a spirited cripple and a child destined for an early grave and Bleak House is 10/10. He loved this book.

This resulted in an unusually behaved husband. A little grouchy, and a little daytime sleepy. I was walking in/out of our bedroom yesterday afternoon to find Jeremy sound asleep. Snoring with the dog nestled under his arm – also apparently snoring. Both blissful and happy.

Everyone is fine and no one was hurt. Vince was in a car accident late Friday night/early Saturday morning. He was not driving. This happened on the freeway coming home from a concert from Berkeley back to Davis. I guess the driver of Vince’s car stopped suddenly-ish and they got rear ended. The damage was enough that both cars had to get towed away. The police officers were kind enough to drop the kids off at a local Denny’s so other people could come pick them up. He texted us soon after the accident happened at 4:30 am, but we didn’t get the text until 6 am when we woke up and then we were able to FaceTime him while he was headed home from the Denny’s in another person’s car. He did have some concussion-ish symptoms and we tried to encourage them to route to the nearest ER, but they went home and then went to urgent care the next day and got checked out and cleared to just take the next few days easy and to come back if they feel worse.

Vince was feeling well enough to go to a Halloween party – he worked hard on his costume.

We spoke to another aftercare place on Friday, they were very nice, but they center their program on community outings such as hiking, bowling and swimming and, they admitted, that they were having a tough time hiring staff and didn’t think they could accommodate Edda’s needs right now.

Jeremy rode 75 (!) miles on Saturday. Gorgeous weather.

I decided a few weeks ago to go part time (about 60% time) at my desk job and that starts today. I put in for a year, but I think, realistically, it’ll last until March/April of next year. I’m taking my own sabbatical, haha and boy do I need it. I’m intending to work at the hospital a day a week during that time and then I’m going to try to work on an exit plan for the nursing and to then go back to full time at the patent office. To celebrate, I made a chocolate cream pie, which was devoured at Sunday night dinner.

So Elka went into heat on Friday. She’s just about 10 months old now. I can’t remember Ruby’s spay surgery, we must have done it before her first heat. Maxi came to us at four months already spayed, we didn’t do that surgery, the rescue did that already. The rescue we got Elka from wanted her spayed at the 6 month mark, and I probably signed papers that I would do that then, but our vet recommended that we wait until Elka was a year old before spaying (for better orthopedic maturity), though she was totally open to having Elka spayed at 6 months and said they did a lot of spays at the 6 month mark. So we elected to wait after her first heat to have her spayed. Also, I’m kind of curious…what is a dog in heat like? I didn’t know! So I waited. I bought some heat diapers? or maxi pads? underwear? for her at the 6 month mark and waited some more. And then on Friday we got to use them! So exciting, lol. I got these, very pretty, citrus pattern – three pairs with little absorbent areas and a hole for the tail. Elka doesn’t fuss too much about wearing them. I had taken Elka to the dog park on Tuesday (before all this bleeding) and I think all the other dogs knew that she was about to go into heat because there was way more humping action than usual. Jeremy laughs every time he sees Elka wearing her underwear. I’ll just see him walk into a room and he’ll look over at Elka and chuckle and say, she’s so cute with her underwear! I think Elka would make a great mom, so I am a little sad she will not have children. I also thought Ruby would have been a good mom too. Maxi would have lost her mind, all those puppies trying to touch her – she would have not known what to do. But this is pure speculation, I have no idea what they would have done.

Also on Friday, Scarlett came over to spend the weekend. This led to a not quiet night. Scarlett, who has lived with us for many months before, wasn’t used to having another dog in this space. So she would not settle on Friday night and we had to sleep in different rooms and split the dogs apart. But now they are fine. Scarlett’s parents got married this weekend, so they are busy.

After complaining about being home together all the time, of course, Jeremy headed into work on Thursday. I think his group has decided that Thursday is the day to meet at the office, although I think it hasn’t been formally set yet and remains complicated as people have changed all their childcare routines to be more in line with the at-home-all-the-time model. But! Jeremy enjoyed talking to the group members who did show up and had impromptu meetings and discussions that were helpful. Work from home is great and terrible at the same time.

The high attendance in the office was because there was an event in the late afternoon/early evening which everyone wanted to attend, because, why would you not with very fancy heavy hors d’oeuvres. (Jeremy procured a cookie for me which I ate happily for breakfast the morning. Not the best pre workout there is.)

I asked Jeremy the day before if he was going to Metro in or bike in and he said he was leaving early and biking in and would be late coming home. He came in at 10:30 pm which meant that he was biking on the canal in the pitch black (with lights). And it was cold! I was already asleep, still trying to sleep off the vaccine, and I barely noticed him come back into the house. I woke up this morning completely refreshed. My watch told me that I was back at 100%! That’s me. 100% ready for anything. lol.

I got my covid booster + flu shot on Tuesday (the last one in the family, everyone else got it weeks ago), I timed it to match my taper in my marathon training – to do it early in the taper, but not too close to the marathon itself. I could have waited until after the marathon, but honestly, I have a whole stack of medical things that need to be done that I’ve been postponing until after the marathon including my shingles shot, the delightful colonoscopy, my mammogram, etc that I didn’t want to wait too long for these shots. Also, I need the flu for working at the hospital and I think the deadline is the end of October? Anyways, it was my first time getting Moderna for no particular reason and my watch could tell that I got it (I have a Garmin watch, not an Apple watch). I had the shot at 11:30 am and then suddenly at about 3 am at night, my watch could tell something fishy was going on. Usually on a quiet day, it stays mostly blue. On nursing days, it does go into the orange a lot, but there are breaks into blue here and there, but this orange is steady and unrelenting. And it lasted through the night last night as well – I was stressed out while sleeping. I did take the day off yesterday and slept, but today, I feel pretty good. I’ll go for a run.

Vince is having a fantastic time at school. A delight to behold, honestly! Joy for me to see him doing well and having fun. There is something about being a junior that is MAGIC. I miss him! Other families have their kids close by at UMD and I can be jealous that their kids drop by and say hi. But it’s ok. He’s living the dream out in California (in this windowless room in the basement of the ChemE building, hahaha.)

I feel as if I’ve been neglecting this blog! Sorry! I’ve been have a tough time of it recently. Not for any particular reason, just still adjusting to this new phase of life, with Vince grown up an out of the house and the rest of us trying to figure out what to do. We are still struggling to find an aftercare program for Edda, it seems daunting, but I know it will be this way until something works out and then it will be fine. There are many leads, but there are wait lists and organizations not on the Medicaid waiver program that we are on and various other sundry problems, it just makes it seem ominous when Edda reaches 21 and we will no longer have the support of the school system. So this is a downer for me. Although, we did find a weekday caregiver (who deserves a blog post of her own! She is hilarious!) who we like and seems to like us. Right now, Edda’s teachers are an invaluable source of support, like a spring of water in the middle of a desert, I don’t know what I would do without them.

Jeremy and I find ourselves in each other’s company a lot. Like a lot. We enjoy each other, there is no question that he is still my favorite, but it is bad in many ways. The pandemic settled on the house and feels like it didn’t lift for us. Jeremy is home working. I haven’t been at the hospital much recently and, although I feel like the nursing job has run its course and mostly want to stop, I’m loathe to give it up because it I did give it up, I’m afraid I’d never leave the house! The house is comfortable and large and we have our own work spaces, Jeremy makes beautiful meals and we laugh and sigh and cry together (ok, mostly me, Jeremy is not a crier), we are very content in the house. But it’s kind of isolating in a way that is unclear to me how to fix. It’s not as if we can go willy nilly out, we are bound to the house (kind of) by Edda and neither of us wants to leave the other alone for too long to be there for Edda. So we are three. Or actually 4 if you count Elka. Or maybe 10,000 if you count the mice in the attic.

Recently, I discovered that I have a grey streak in my hair. I kind of love it! I need to cherish it and show it off before the rest of my hair is grey and you can’t tell there is a streak.