Sisters

Sometimes my girls seem completely different from each other. Chloe is super clingy (STILL!) and Elise has always been completely independent, and they don't look anything alike. But when it comes to playing, they can be exactly the same!


Yesterday Chloe was running around in the morning with the doll stroller, stuffing everything she could think of into it and having a great time and for some reason I flashbacked to some pictures of Elise around the same age, wearing the same pajamas, playing with the same stroller, and having a ball, just like Chloe. Can you tell which one is which? (Of course you can. They look completely different remember?) Isn't it funny how sometimes the pictures stick more in your mind than the actual memory? Thank heaven for digital cameras, and cute girls!

A pig pickin' good time

Here in North Carolina they have these things called "pig pickins." Let me show you why.

We went to one on Saturday courtesy of the Duke Radiology dept. It was actually at one of the faculty's house/farm/fishing hole/basketball court/giant tract of land. Please let that be us at the end of this residency. Though the guy was kind of old too.

There was a hayride for the kids and lots of eating. Elise was pretty unfazed by the pig. I asked her whether she wanted chicken or pig, and she said pig. She's going to grow into a little Southern girl after all.

Playing together on the gigantic hammock

Elise and her friends, Trent and Aubrey. At least they know how to pose for a picture. Getting ready for the hayride with Daddy. I don't know how the tractor pulled so many kids!

An update on the apple situation

Is it normal to have eaten so many apples in just a week??

I blame Chloe. Elise just ate the last of the fruit leather this morning too so we have truly eaten that many apples. Notice how Elise likes to take a few bites and toss it back in the basket.

I heart farmer's markets

We went to a farmer's market after my stupid race on Saturday and maybe it was the disappointment from not officially winning or maybe it was our love for a good deal, but we found ourselves buying, amongst other things, this basket of apples (yes, it came with the basket, how cute is that?). Now, it doesn't look like that many apples. Sure it's more than you normally buy at a time, but would you have thought it was half a bushel of apples? Ok, I can tell you're still not impressed. People's knowledge of bushels not being what it once was, I'll tell you that 1/2 a bushel is 24 pounds of apples! We bought 24 pounds of apples. All at once. All because it came in a cute little basket. And it was $15.

When we got home I decided I needed to do something creative with the apples before we all got sick of them. So I decided to make fruit leather, because I just bought some for the girls and they were going nuts over them. I combined the apple cooking part of this recipe with the baking technique of this recipe and made a batch of blueberry apple and strawberry apple (I threw frozen fruit in the blender with the cooked apples). It was so easy, the girls loved them (see Elise shoving large amounts into her mouth at once below), and I feel like the best mother in the world, for at least a few minutes.

Elise antics

Elise is getting to that point where she doesn't really need a nap every day, though I still try and do it because I need every children-free hour I can get. The other day she came out of her room because she needed to go potty and after she went, she wouldn't go back in to sleep, but I had already planned on doing some yard work outside during that time since Chloe was asleep too so I told her she could play on the computer for a little bit and I would be outside. Of course she was thrilled and barely noticed me leaving.

Ben came home about an hour later, walked inside to change and immediately came back out and said I had to see something. My first thought of course was that Elise had started dismantling the printer or something, but I walked in to this sight. I guess she does need a nap more than she thinks she does!




We also discovered that she had got into Picasa, our picture software, and randomly started "touching up" some pictures. I think she's got a pretty good eye for detail! The pictures are Halloween. At first we thought the last picture was one of Ben's MRI pictures, but then we realized it was a close up of one of our pumpkins!

Blatant Discrimination, North Carolina USA

eNow I'm not one to really complain about things, or to blather on about my accomplishments, but something really irked me this weekend and I've already complained about it to everyone I know, so why not share it with the whole world now?

I ran a 10k on Saturday. It was only my second 10k ever and my first race in a long time so I was a little nervous for it. The race was down in Raleigh on the NC State University campus put on by the ROTC, so everything seemed pretty kosher. When I registered online it said the winner of the 10k would get $300. Now, not a lot of 10ks have cash prizes. Most of them are trying to raise money themselves so they don't give out any cash. So when a race has a cash prize it's kind of a big deal. I noticed the website did not say that the winner of the men and women would each receive money though so I pointed it out to Ben and he optimistically said, "Of course they'll each get the money. It wouldn't be fair if they didn't." I had my doubts, but I went along with it.

Along comes race day. I'm nervous but I run a decent race (43:05) and I know I cross the finish line as the first woman, though there were a few guys in front of me. Ben gets all excited and thinks I've just won us $300, I'm still not so sure, so he goes up and asks the race director if the women's winner gets $300 too and he tells Ben that the prize money is just for the "overall" winner, in other words, just the men. Disappointing and unfair, but not wholly unexpected. Ben does insist on us staying around for the awards ceremony since he wants to see me get at least something for winning. This means us waiting around for an extra hour waiting for everyone else to finish while our 2 girls start melting down as we gradually run out of snacks and drinks in the heat. Not our finest hour. And then, in the awards ceremony they break the prizes into age groups but again it's just overall age group winners, which is of course all guys again!

I don't want to go all Title IX* on everybody, but it doesn't seem quite fair to me that I didn't get a single thing for winning. Now, I don't run because I expect medals and prizes to be showered on me whenever I race. I run because I like it and I like to see myself improve from all my hard work. But if a guy is going to get $300 for winning a race and I'm not going to get a single thing for winning the same race, I think something's wrong with that. The best thing for them to do is at least split the money in half, or if they still want to be sexist about it, I'd even take a 60-40 split. I'm not greedy, I just want to be treated fairly here. Every single race I have been to always splits up the men and women and awards each accordingly. And last time I checked, the Olympics gave out gold medals to BOTH men and women (though they didn't even make the women's marathon an Olympic sport until 1984).

So, that's it. I'm still somewhat bitter a few days later but I'll get over it. There are more races to run and more important things to expend my energy on. Like my giant pile of laundry.

*A special thanks to my brother Josh for showing me it's ok to use nouns as verbs and that footnotes in blog entries can be cool.

"1 2 3 4" Elise style

As requested, some video of Elise dancing to the 1234 song. She imitates her pretty well, from the casual strolling in the beginning to the hipshaking and bow at the end. Occasionally screeching and interruptions in music courtesy of Chloe.

Earworms

I've been reading Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks recently. He's a famous neurologist who writes books about some of the more interesting cases he's run into it (One of his books is called The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. You get the idea.). This book was about the complicated relationship between music and the brain. The first case he recounts is about an ordinary guy who gets struck by lightning (seriously) and becomes suddenly obsessed with music. It completely changes his life: he hears it all the time, becomes obsessed with certain composers, starts taking piano lessons. His wife actually ends up divorcing him because she can't understand what's going on with him, and he ends up becoming a composer. Really pretty interesting.

Anyway, this post isn't a book review. A section of the book talks about what he calls "earworms," those songs that you just cannot get out of your head. I hate his choice of word for this phenomena, (It reminds me of those centipede-like aliens from Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, you know the ones that crawl in the crew's ears and take over their brains. At least that's what I think they do. My mind is kinda fuzzy on the plot, but those things I remember.) but I knew exactly what he was talking about. I think anyone with children has been stuck with various children's songs in their head, some worst than others, "John Jacob Jingleheimer Smith" anybody?

Elise absolutely loves listening to songs and this is her new favorite and it's my current earworm. I actually really like it too. It's a singer named Feist and she adapted one of her songs for Sesame Street and I've heard this version so much now I think I like it better than the original. Elise acts out the entire music video. I made her her own number 4 to carry around too.

So if you need a good song to have in your head all day, push play and enjoy!

My hero

Well, we've been home from Ironman Louisville for a week now and a little bit of the excitement has worn off, but I want everyone to know how proud of Ben I am for reaching his goal. I think of myself as pretty tough, but I can't even fathom all that he did to get through that day, not to mention all the hours of training that go into that. I know that everytime I'm struggling through a hard workout or find myself dying at the end of a race, I'll think of Ben struggling through those last miles and find the strength to push through it like he did.

The girls and I had a great time running around Louisville. We didn't get to see Ben as much as I wanted to, but it was a thrill to see all the other dedicated athletes and help cheer them on. Everyone we met was so nice to me dragging the double stroller around with both girls. We all definitely survived and will live to race again!

"Only those who will risk going too far . . ."

This has been a life-long dream for me, and I would like to thank the following people without whom it wouldn't have been possible:

Juli for being my inspiration.
Elise and Chloe for being my motivation.
John and Michelle and Mom for motivation again.
Coach. Seriously. Who knows how much time and energy he devoted to preparing me.
Dan who got me into cycling finally.
Team Pink who started it all.

Pre-Race:
Breakfast of ~1200 calories at 4:30 (2 ensures, 2 chocolates milks, a waffle, some eggs, and some Gatorade). I got to the great lawn at check in time at 5. Dropped my transition bags, lubed my bike, and was off to the swim start. It was a 15 minute walk, and when we got to the dock there were already hundreds of people in line. Got to rest and visualize for 90 minutes.

Swim 2.4 miles:
The swim start was a time trial, and not a traditional mass start. My plan was to get in early, find someone swimming faster than me, and draft off them for as long as I could, then repeat. Unfortunately, no one passed me during the entire swim--my speed is a curse. The channel was pretty packed (i.e. swimming over some people) until the turn around, then we were in the body of the Ohio river and there was lots of room. I added some time to my swim due to my inability to swim straight, but that is normal for open water swimming. The river was fine to swim in--not dirtier than some lakes I've raced in. And the current wasn't strong at all. I settled into a nice comfortable pace early on and kept telling myself not to go too fast. Coach's last words of advice were to not push it on the swim.
Swim time: 1:03:18

T1:
Coming out of the river was great. The crowd was enormous and noisy. It was a lot of fun. The great lawn was amazing. Right on the bank of the river, ironman flags and tents and inflatable arches everywhere. I got my bike, saw my girls cheering, and was off.
T1 time 3:31

Bike 112 miles:
My plan was to go 27 miles easy, 27 miles moderate, push miles 54-84, and hold the pace for the downhill 28 miles. I went easy for the first 25 miles or so, and found myself riding with some strong cyclists--I wanted to stay with them and kicked my pace up to a strong steady effort (sub lactate threshold, but harder than moderate). I basically held on to this pace for the rest of the ride. The ride was nonstop rolling hills, some of which were very large. They were relentless. But the hardest part of the ride was the wind--very strong gusts. Again, relentless. I saw the girls at mile 38 and 64 which was awesome. At mile 80 my quads were screaming--I had overexerted myself. Mile 80-90 was a grindfest. I told myself to ease up, hit the nutrition, and save whatever I had for the run. That helped as miles 90 to the finish were actually pretty good (the downhill grade helped as well).
Bike time 5:29:26 (20.40 mi/hr ave)

T2:
It felt pretty awesome to be off the bike. The crowd was amazing again. And I'm off. T2 time 5:25

Run 26.2 miles:
It was 92 degrees and humid. Heat index of 98 degrees.
I wanted to hold 8:30 min/miles for the first half then pick it up at mile 13 if I were feeling good (oh man, that makes me laugh in retrospect). That plan quickly degenerated to trying to complete four 6 mile runs at 8:30 pace with absolutely no thought whatsoever of going faster. The first 12 miles actually went really well. I was feeling good and keeping a good pace. The pain started at mile 17 which is when I crossed the line (that is ironman talk for hitting the wall). This was a pretty dark time of the run. It took all my will to continue to run through the pain (and I actually had to stop and walk a couple of times between miles 17-18, which infuriated me). At mile 18, I drank 8 oz of chicken broth to get some sodium and by mile 20 I was actually feeling really good. Mile 20 is also the last turn around, and all I had to do was run back into town. From 20-21 I picked up the pace and probably ran ~8:45 mile or so, thinking all the while of my awesome time. Then at mile 21 it happened: my diaphragm cramped up severely. Apparently my body was done. My diaphragm hurt so exquisitely that I could not breathe and I quickly slowed to a walk. Even walking did not alleviate the pain to any degree. I was also tingling in my lips and fingertips, and a couple of times started to get dizzy, but kept on walking. I tried to start running again every few minutes to no avail. Eventually I sat down hoping to get rid of the cramp with a few minutes rest (since even walking was aggravating it), but that didn't work either. I eventually just resigned myself to walking in. I tried to start running again at each mile marker, but by mile 23 my legs had entirely cramped up making running impossible. Anyway, I walked to the finish frustratedly watching my sub 11 hour performance tick away. One can view my run splits degenerate from 8:20 miles to 9, then 10, then 15! I started running (it was actually kind of a death-shuffle) at mile 26 and forgot about the 0.2 remaining miles, but oxygen or no oxygen I had to finish it running. Running down the finishing chute was one of the more amazing experiences of my life--completely indescribable.
Run time 4:35:25

Total Time: 11:17:03

Overall place 170
Age division 19/166

Impression: I was very pleased with my performance. I had some nutritional issues, without which I might have finished about 30 minutes faster. But Ironman is a cruel mistress, and given my first-time status, and the conditions of the race, I definitely did the best I could. I consider it a special experience to have pushed myself far beyond my physical limit (next time I just need to increase that limit). As Hemingway would say, the Ironman broke me, but did not defeat me.

It was awesome.

That's Dr. Ironman

Only pictures for now. I'll do an official post later.



Finish line video