South TX Safari

In Botswana I wrote every week and felt like I had something to share, but now that I’ve settled into a hum drum adult life it seems like things just aren’t that exciting but I think I’m completely wrong. The mass email I got the most positive comments about from Botswana was about waiting in line at the post office, and how much more day-to-day can you get than that? So it’s simply a psychological phenomenon of changing perception. Yesterday I went for a run around Lady Bird Lake and had a man in his 50s or 60s in full running gear skip towards me…yes skip, you would NEVER see that in Nac but somehow it fits into the Austin landscape…perception.

So for Thanksgiving we made the trip to find our oh-so-scattered/distant Texan cousins in the hopes that they’d share some jellied cranberry sauce with us (Which reminds me that for some reason I missed cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving! Must go back and repeat it really.).

South TX really should cash in on the eco-tourism trade, and not the game farming/lets go shoot an imported African deer trapped inside and enormous fence, but the kind where you go and look at animals ...odd concept I know. Folks get sooo excited about seeing an impala or two, why not some of our south TX species instead? Around Hebbronville I saw javelinas, Mexican eagles, a fox, a lone coyote, a stunning herd of deer, and what I was most excited about wild turkeys. It was like being in a game park and would have been easy to forget that we were simply cruising down a lonely stretch of very straight road. If I’d had a camera my album from the weekend would have looked a little somethin’ like this:

Rantings/Runnings of a Mad Woman

Forget Remember, remember, the fifth of November…from now on I’m always going to remember the 11th. On November 11th I ran my first half-marathon. Why you ask? Because I couldn’t find a triathlon that fit into my schedule and I figured running is waaay harder than swimming or biking, so the half marathon’s actually a bigger challenge. Sometimes my logic astounds me.

Better yet somehow I talked two friends into joining the madness with me. Well actually I talked three into it, but Gillian proved that she has more sense then the rest of us combined and decided against it in the end. We spent Saturday night in a hotel 0.3 miles from the Alamo (thank you Trang you brilliant woman), woke up to a 6am wake up call, stumbled into my fancy new socks and then to the starting line, and KA-BOOM cannons exploded in front of the Alamo. Forget some piddely little shot-gun start, this is Texas!

13 miles is a looooong way. We went through poor neighborhoods covered in litter, rich neighborhoods with historic homes, back and forth over the river walk, through downtown twice, through the Mission state historic park, and ended in the Alamo Dome. When I was in England I ran 13 miles with my Dad and had the insane idea that it wasn’t so bad and that I could do a full one. At little after the 9 mile point when the half and full courses split all illusions of wanting to do the full marathon evaporated (along with gallons of my sweat leaving me covered in salt). I couldn’t have been more grateful that I only had 4 miles to go, and those poor folk had to face 17 more miles!

After 1 hour and 52 mins of running I raced across the finish line, stumbled into the arms of lovely volunteers who hung a finishers medal around my neck, removed my timing chip for me, and handed me bottled water.
Memory is a fantastic thing. I groaned for three days after the race as I tried to sit/stand or climb stairs, but as soon as the pain faded I remembered the sense of accomplishment and started talking folks into the 3M Half Marathon in January. So who’s in?