the lengths i'll go for a t-shirt
6 miles!
Darin, fully asleep, said, "Move over?"
Clearly, we're used to our big ol' king size bed.
I woke up at 5:45 and dressed quickly for the race. Rob made coffee that I had to drink quickly, lest it complete its task of burning a hole through the bottom of the cup. "Caffeine really improves performance," Rob told me. I never eat or drink anything before running, so I had nothing to compare it with. We also ate some slices of a wheat loaf Laura had bought at a farmer's market.
The drive to Santa Cruz was uneventful, though Rob was amazed at the level of traffic. Much higher than on the days he drove to Scotts Valley for work (going anti-commute).
We parked in the multilevel garage all the signs pointed to and rode yellow school buses down to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. We arrived at about 7:30, so while there were some runners milling about, there weren't nearly as many as would be there. We managed to use porta-potties without having to wait in line, for example.
Volunteers working the race carried signs that read "7 minute miles", "8 minute miles," and so on. They lined up at various places along the main drag and the announcer asked us to line up with our race pace. Rob and I decided to go with 8 minute miles and so we took our places.
What idiots.
The other 14,000 people there for the race wanted to be as close to the start as they could get, no matter what their pace. There were good reasons for that, as we found out. So what we ended up doing was putting ourselves way back in the pack, when we didn't need to. I won't do that again, let me tell you. Sometimes it just doesn't pay to follow the rules.
One of the problems with the Wharf-to-Wharf race is that 14,000 people are barrelling down roads in Santa Cruz. In San Francisco, you've got wide enough streets. In Santa Cruz, you do not.
So we were packed in with all these other humanoids and we basically had to go at their pace. There wasn't any room to scoot around the sides, the way you can at the Bay-to-Breakers. You go with the flow.
(Other problems: despite race rules to the contrary, runners ran with baby strollers--highly annoying, when there isn't enough room to swing a cat. And walkers walked wherever they wanted, instead of getting over to the right the way they should have.)
The Wharf-to-Wharf has a lot of hills. If we do this again next year, I'll have to do more specific hill training. I didn't do so good on the hills, for the most part--I think I slowed Rob down a lot. He said later that I was slower than he was at the beginning, but toward the middle I picked up the pace and went fairly steadily, but the start/stop motion of the runners on the hills really messed with my pace.
On one big hill, the biggest I think, Rob decided to play psychological mind games with me to get me to go much faster up the hill. "You're going to have to [deleted] for a week!" he said. I gave him a sidelong glance. No rush of adrenaline to my feet. He tried a few others. Nothing.
"Going up this hill is so much easier for me! Doesn't that piss you off?" he said.
Well, yeah, actually.
I started sprinting up that hill. I went faster than I've gone...well, maybe forever. It took Rob a while to catch up to me.
"You paying for that?" he asked.
"And how," I told him, exhausted. But I kept running, albeit at my normal pace.
Throughout the race we compared heart rates--we were usually pretty similar, except mine was about 4 or 5 beats faster. We stayed around 170 beats. Rob told me when he started running he was so out of shape that after 30 seconds his heart rate would be at 180. So his fitness has definitely improved. I wish I'd had a heart rate monitor from the beginning so I could see how things have changed.
During the race we talked about what our next race was going to be. I've been thinking about doing a marathon. Rob wasn't too sure he wanted to start training for a marathon--he's been too much of a slacker for that. (Despite that, he's still a better runner than I am, dammit.) So we decided to look into half-marathons.
At the end of the race, a man stood there handing out flyers for a marathon in Lake Tahoe. Included is a half-marathon. Rob and I decided that this was Meant To Be, and so we're going to start training for a half-marathon. I've told him this means he has to get up to a 15 mile run before the half-marathon. (It's recommended that you go longer in a practice run than the distance of the race you'll be running.)
We went down to the beach to get our Goodie Bag. There were letters posted: S/M, L. I'm so dopey at the end of a run I said, "We have to line up by last name?" Rob said, "No, by sexual kink." We got Ls; I don't know what that means.
We took yellow schoolbuses back to Santa Cruz and wandered around a bit trying to find the garage. My sense of direction was shot. Must have been the overcastness. Santa Cruz is usually socked in by clouds; I don't know how anyone can live there and not be depressed all the time. But lots of people go out of their way to live there, so clearly there's something I don't know.
During the drive back from Santa Cruz, I suddenly remembered what I had dreamt the night before and decided to tell Rob about it:
DIANE sits up straight.
DIANE
I had another Kevin Spacey dream
last night.
(pause)
But in this one we were just hanging
out together.
ROB nods understandingly.
ROB
(paternal)
Well, you know, Diane...relationships
go through phases...
Rob and I determined that there were more pancakes in our future, so we showered and changed. Darin and Greg showed up--they'd just come from breakfast at, natch, the Pancake Place. Greg took off, not wanting to face any more round disks of pancake batter, but Darin dutifully accompanied Rob, Laura, and me back there.
We all ordered special-order banana-chocolate-chip pancakes, which are now my new favorite pancakes and all I will ever order in the future.
When we got home, Darin and Rob went back to playing Starcraft. I immediately lay down for a 2 hour nap.
When I woke up I walked out to the living room and said, "Let's go get some ice cream." I'd already blown my sugar-and-fat intake for the day, and a dish of ice cream was not going to affect one whit what I had for dinner. Also, I wanted to go back to Lappert's, which had pretty good ice cream.
Darin and Rob were still playing the game, so Laura and I took Nutmeg over to Lappert's and got ice cream. Nutmeg didn't actually get any ice cream, of course; she got to lick the bowl after Laura was done. (Since I had chocolate ice cream, she did not get to lick my bowl after I was done.) Children adore Nutmeg: one little girl walked up and said, "Can I pet her?" When Laura said yes, the girl put her hands on Nutmeg and caressed her.
When we got home, I surfed the web until it was time to go to dinner.
Rob, Laura, Darin and I met Greg at Kabul Afghani Cuisine for dinner tonight. Greg said Jimi and Renee might show up, but they didn't. Kabul is the home of the big food: skewers of lamb or chicken with piles of rice and a traditional bread. Plus some kind of pumpkin dish that Darin and Greg really like, and aushak, which is a large, flat ravioli in a slightly sour meat sauce.
Greg and Darin told the story of the Secret About Box in System 7.0 and all the havoc and bad feelings it caused when it was discovered. Nowadays, Secret About Boxes are factored into the shipping schedule.
I'm quite sure I did other things during this weekend and did not spend all my time going from meal to meal. It just feels like that.
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Rob, Laura, and I gossiped quite a bit about people still up here, people Darin and I haven't seen for ages. (Darin doesn't gossip, by the way--he simply has no interest in talking about people that way. None. I've never met someone so non-interested in discussing the whys and wherefores of other people's lives. I'm not always entirely sure Darin is from this planet.)
Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com