Merry Christmas

Oh the weather outside is frightful

But the scotch is so delightful 

And since we've no place to go

Let it snow!

Let it snow!

Let it snow!

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house 

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, 

In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;

The children were nestled all snug in their beds; 

While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;

And mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap, 

Had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap,

(You know the rest)

“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

To the farm and back (26.2 miles)

So after we got back from the dive trip, I continued my running taper. Unfortunately, my hopes for my knee were dashed and it continued hurting sporadically. I must have irritated my iliotibial band when I hurt my knee and running on it was not helping. I considered not racing, but I really wanted to run THIS race. Instead I resolved to wear Sonny's knee brace and to take it easy, to not worry about my time or speed at all. I shifted my focus to simply finishing and not doing permanent damage. The day before the race I alternated between being supernaturally calm and completely panicked. It was fantastic and I'm sure Sonny loved me very much for it. I spent a few hours making sure everything was perfect and that there would be no surprises or stress the next morning.

Flatlay!

In the morning, I awoke before my alarm. I actually managed to get some sleep which surprised me. I was so excited and nervous all at the same time. I may have bounced on the bed a few times. I ate my normal breakfast - banana, strawberries, yoghurt and muesli. I also had two cups of coffee. Then I got dressed and Sonny drove me down to Orapu on the bottom end. We got there pretty early and so we sat around in the car, watching as the other runners arrived by car, shuttle, and taxi. Eventually, the race director arrived and so I kissed Sonny for luck and went to check in and get my bib. We got a race briefing (don't get lost, take it easy, this is a hard course), lined up, then counted down and we were off! I stuck true to my plan and did not sprint straight up the hill at the start like most of the other racers. I've run most of this course before, so I knew what was coming, how hard this was gonna be. I stayed easy and relaxed.

Photo credit: Leonie Wise (http://leoniewise.com/trailblazer-2015)

The first part of the race wound around the bays near Orapu then climbed back up to the top of the hill. After 5K, I was running on the longest road section at the top. I passed the first aid station, but didn't stop as I was still fine. Next was a very long steep downhill on pavement. On one of my training runs, I totally trashed my quads and could barely walk afterwards so I focussed on good form and light feet.

All these photos were taken on training runs, I didn't stop during the race

Eventually I finished the road section and started on the hardest part of the race. A section of trail that goes up and down three huge hills. Its pretty, but painful. I walked the steepest uphills and made up time on the downs. My strategy seemed to be working as I caught up with a good pack of racers who had taken off at the start. I passed a few people and then ended up leapfrogging with a girl about my age and an older gentleman. I would fly by them on the downs, but they kept running the ups and so would pass me again.

This cool jungle section is where I caught up with the main pack. I kept expecting T-Rex to burst out the first time I ran here.

At the top of the first hill. That tree covered hill to the right is my next obstacle

Yeah thats a rope. Its so steep you need to to help pull yourself up

After one of the more fun downhills, I stopped at an aid station to get my water bottle filled. I knew I had a hard climb ahead (see above), and wanted to make sure I had enough water. It was here that the girl I had been leapfrogging finally caught up and so we ran with each other for a bit down Poderi Crisci's driveway. She almost missed a turn that wasn't very obviously marked, but luckily my familiarity with the course came in handy and I corrected her. Eventually we turned up the track that heads straight up the second hill. She pulled ahead of me here when I slowed and walked again. I let her go, focussing on running my own race. I trudged up, over and down the hill, then started climbing the final hill - Trig Hill. At the top, I caught up with another racer and I passed him as I raced down Trig Hill toward Onetangi Beach.

Next time, I'm picking a FLAT race

At the aid station at the beach, they had slightly flat Coke. It looked amazingly good so I drank a cup. It was magical! I felt immediately better and revived. I bounced along the beach, until the course turned back toward Rocky Bay and the Sports Park - the halfway point and eventual finish. But first I had to climb 187 steps (!!!!) and then run through hilly vineyards with no shade. It was starting to get pretty warm at this point, and I soon lost my awesome Coke mojo.

Pretty vines

Hilly vines

I did however, make it to the Sports Park. Sonny was there, cheering for me as soon as I came around the corner. It was definitely a boost! I was overheating though, and feeling a bit crappy, so I stopped at the aid station there, under the shade of the tent, and drank some water and some more coke. I also re-applied sunscreen since I could feel my face burning. All this took some time and a bunch of the people I passed re-passed me here. I wasn't too fussed, I knew I needed this stop. Eventually, I was ready to get going again. I headed out down the Sports Park driveway to the second half of the course. The worst was behind me, all I had to do was a few more (smaller) hills. I plodded on, enjoying the scenery, lost in my own brain. It was hard, but I never once doubted that I was going to finish. That was the biggest surprise of the whole thing for me. I thought the hardest part of the day would be mental, that I would have to battle my head for most of the day. Surprisingly it never happened. I was tired, sure, and I hurt, but I always knew that I could do it.

The next piece of terrible was climbing up Vintage Lane, which is too steep to legally be a road. There was no shade, the sun was pounding on me, and I had to trudge up this terrible terrible hill. I even had to stop for a bit and catch my breath and get my heartrate down. Eventually, like all terrible trials, the hill came to an end. I headed down one of the last sections of trail. I knew I had to go up and down through a few more hills and then I would be at Rocky Bay. After that, I would hit Whakanewha Regional Park. At that point, I would have about 10K left. My plan was to try and pick up my pace at that point, and race the last bit. I figured I wouldn't hurt my knee if I pushed for just the last bit, plus I know the trails in the part really well. I run in the park all the time, and the trails there are wide, nicely groomed and very runnable. 

I was almost to Rocky Bay and just short of my 10K push point when I came upon the girl I had been running with earlier, crying on the side of the trail. I stopped to see if she was ok, and she asked if she could borrow my phone to call her partner. She was having major stomach issues - cramping and vomiting and was thinking about quitting. While I dug out my phone, she explained that the same thing had happened to her a few weeks earlier while running the Queenstown marathon. She had been forced to drop at 33K and this was supposed to be a make-up race. When I finally got her my phone, she called her partner. He gave her a bit of tough love, and basically said, are you sure you need to quit? She hung up and was starting to cry a bit again. I had a half second where I considered leaving her and pushing for my race but anyone who knows me knows it wasn't going to happen. So instead I told her I would stick with her, and together we would finish this race. She wasn't sure, but I said I would at least stay with her until the next aid station as no one could come and get her in the middle of nowhere on this trail. She introduced herself as Victoria, called Tors. As we walked along, I asked her what she had been eating and drinking. She had been eating ShotBloks so I knew she wasn't hypernatremic. I encouraged her to drink water, based on what I had read in my obsessive race report readings, it might help.

We plodded along together, and eventually she did start feeling better so we started running when we could and walking when she needed to. I kept telling her exactly what we had left of the course, trying to make it sound as easy as possible. It was nice, needing to take care of someone else made me not even notice how tired I was, or how much my knee was starting to hurt. I needed to be strong for Tors, so I was. Eventually we made it to the top of Trig Hill, with only 2K left, and all of it downhill. The race photographer was there, and she took a picture of us running. Just after we passed her though, she yelled Oh no! and said the picture hadn't worked. So we stopped to let her take another (not like we were setting landspeed records here).

Note the "Oh god, we're both so sweaty" spacing

The last downhill! All I had to do was run down a steep driveway, then around another vineyard, then over a bridge, around a corner and BAM! Unfortunately, this is where my knee, angry from all the stopping and starting finally gave up. I had a hot poker stabbing me in the knee, no matter how perfect my form on the downhill. I told Tors to go on ahead, but she said, "no way!" and returned the favor. I limped and hopped my way to Sports Park. We came around the corner and there was Sonny again, cheering and jumping up and down. He yelled at me to kick it in, but I had nothing left. Instead he took this fantastic shot of me:

This is my everything hurts and I'm dying face. Thanks Sonny for capturing it.

But, just like the rest of the race, I trundled along and eventually there was the finish line, complete with cheering peeps. We crossed, and immediately flopped down. Then I got back up and had some more magic elixir (Coke) and water. Tors ran off to the bathroom to puke one last time and I failed at introductions between her partner and Sonny. I was tired though, so I feel no guilt. I got my medal, and god it was a glorious feeling.

42.2 K, 26.2 miles, or the distance from my childhood home to our farm and back

When the results of the race were posted, I realised that I was only 10 and 5 minutes behind the 2nd and 3rd women. Makes me wonder if I mightn't have gotten myself a place and a bottle of wine award had I followed through with my plan. Oh well, instead I helped someone not have to quit two marathons in a row. I can't even imagine how terrible that would have felt.

Whats next? Maybe another marathon with Sonny - he's jealous and wants his own shot at the big ol' marathon. Maybe a 50K? Its only 8K more!

Helium!

In the midst of my marathon training, there was one tiny wrinkle. Sonny and I needed to get our Trimix dive certifications re-done. There are two ways to do this: send in your dive log with the appropriate number of dives done at that level of difficulty (deep with a perfect deco profile) or go on a few dives with an instructor to prove you still can complete all the necessary skills and drills. Since the past few years have been both very busy and a bit more financially strapped that we'd hoped, we did not have enough dives to go with option 1. Therefore, we tried to schedule a time with Jamie from Tech Dive NZ to do our re-cert. Sonny's PhD put some restrictions on when this could happen, and then exam marking got in the way, and the next thing we knew, the end of the year was approaching and we had two possible time slots - the week before my marathon, or the week after. I was understandably concerned, but knew we needed to do this. I eventually decided to do it the week before because in the long run, I had paid more money for the Trimix, and didn't want to screw that up by being so exhausted from the marathon that I couldn't do what I needed to do. So, the first week in December, we packed up the van and drove north to Tutukaka and the Poor Knights!

Our favorite place to stay, they have a dive gear rinse shed!

The first day we went out just us, for a "shakeout" day where we practiced our ascents and other drills. We got to dive Northern Arch on a great viz day, and though we had to stay shallower than 32 m (105 ft) as we were on Nitrox, it was still a fantastic dive. Unfortunately, I have no photos as we didn't bring the camera for the course. We got in our practice drills though, and hoped that we would look smooth and totally awesome in front of Jamie the next day.

Some well deserved relaxation at the end of the day

We were up bright and early the next morning. We met Jamie and got our gear ready, then analysed our gas - both our back gas and our deco bottles. Today we would be diving on 32% Nitrox again while we did drills and proved to Jamie we could handle a perfect deco profile. If we did so, then the next day we would execute a real Trimix decompression dive. All these different gases mean lots of tanks!

Poor Fawkes was a bit loaded down...

On the first dive, Jamie stressed us by forcing us to swim farther and faster than we normally do - with an extra sling tank! The end result was we both got some hypercapnea or CO2 toxicity. This is a common danger in diving, and easily affects divers working harder than they know. It makes doing the simplest tasks very difficult, and causes tunnel vision as poor Sonny found out when Jamie stole his stage bottle right off him! I discovered a cool side effect of all the running, and wasn't affected as much. We managed to complete our simulated decompression, but it wasn't very pretty, and our buoyancy swings were more than we wanted. Jamie promised on the second dive he wouldn't make us swim as much, but instead he planned on making us perform valve failure drills while deep enough that we were severely narc'd. We made it through, but I honestly couldn't have told you what I did or why I did it after the dive. Our ascent drill was better, but I made a mistake this time, and didn't send up an SMB even though we surfaced in open water. Unfortunately for me, this is one of Jamie's pet peeves, and so I heard about it. Luckily, he said he was satisfied we could dive using trimix the next day!

I really wish we had photographs of the next day's dives to show. It was easily THE BEST day of ocean diving I have ever done. Our first dive was again at Northern Arch, but this time we got to go down to the bottom of the arch, at 42 m (138 ft). I was having the time of my life, looking up at all the other divers 20 meters above me, while schools of fish swirled past. The rocks at the bottom of the arch hid several rays and eels, and the entire arch is encrusted with sponges, fans, anemones, and other things. We didn't do much swimming at all, mostly because I just wanted to sit in awe of the views right there. I may have even cried a little bit. Our deco was fantastic UNTIL we accidentally miscalculated and didn't stay the entire 1 minute at our 15m stop. Crap. Oh well.

The next dive was at a site I've never been to, Ngaoi Rock. Its a smaller conical rock that juts above the surface, then below the water it drops away into a gorgeous wall with one long  finger pushing out perpendicularly into the sand. Open water divers mostly circle Ngaoi Rock, and spend some time on the upper reaches of the wall. As we could go deeper, we dropped straight down over the wall and then cruised along the finger. I was leading and I had to keep a close eye on our depth as the finger goes all the way down to 60m (200ft). When we hit 45m (148 ft), I turned us around and we went back up the other side of the finger, slowly decreasing depth. Its hard to describe what made this site so beautiful. The huge wall behind us, reaching 100 ft straight up, with what looked like peaks thrusting toward the surface in a sporadic line. The thin serpentine finger curling out before us, like some strange highway with white sand - flat and monotonous - on either side. Our decompression was done slowly paddling around the cone, peaking into the crevices or gazing straight down at the sand nearly 100 ft below. I pretended I was skydiving or a superhero, flying next to a mountain range. It was kinda the best. :) There were no errors and it was a textbook dive. What a fantastic end. To make things even better, we found out that thanks to Dive Tutukaka's loyalty program, we each have a free dive!

We packed up and slowly started heading south toward Auckland. We stopped in Waipu at Pizza Barn for amazing pizza and craft beers. I used a cool new app to find a freedom camping site close to Auckland where we slept soundly then woke up early to go pick up the dogs. What a great trip!

SO GOOD

Pretty little free campsite

The only bad part of the whole trip was when my biggest worry came true. During the first day, the seas were a bit rough, and so the boat was pitching around a bit. At one point, I almost lost my balance and in trying to regain it - with twin tanks on my back - I wrenched my knee a bit. It hurt a bit, but not too terribly. However, over the next few days I could feel it simmering angrily. I was hopeful that some ice and NSAIDs would solve it, and that I wouldn't affect my running.

still here!

Well, it has been awhile, huh? We are still here in New Zealand. Sonny is waiting on his oral examination, and we finished up our last semester working as tutors. We are currently applying everywhere for everything, trying to decide what's next. In the meantime, however, I thought I better give the more neglected blog some attention.  Life has been busy lately, full of fun times and challenges and we were just too busy living it to write about it. Some experiences though, I want to be sure I remember, so I plan to document them here. I'll start with the more recent events, then we'll travel back in time to July so I can attempt to capture the pure awesomeness that was my trip back to the States with my family.

I spent most of this year running and training to run a marathon. I also tried my hardest to walk that line between telling enough people about my goal to ensure I was held accountable, and not being one of those irritating people. Something like this...



I picked a marathon on Waiheke for two reasons: 1) it was the cheapest race I could find and 2) I thought it would be a nice way to say goodbye to my home of the last six years. Plus, it makes training easier when you can run the same trails as the race. Waiheke Island is gorgeous and full of lovely trails, but those trails are never flat. In fact, the entire island is NEVER FLAT. I (and the local running club) have to do all speedwork on a single 1 km loop in Blackpool because it is the only substantial distance that is flat. Running all those hills is great for leg strength, but not the best for average pace. Trying to fit running in around work was also not the easiest, but I did it. Some pics throughout my runs below....

My favorite training partner since Sonny quit on me due to knee issues

The hill to get up here is straight up, with a handrail added because its so steep. I was panting

Weird winter lighting

There are leaves on these trees now

Matiatia cloaked in the remnants of a fog bank

This was a 25K run, and the last long run I took Lilith on. She started limping after about 18K and I had to call Sonny to come get her. It would help if she would not sprint everywhere at top speed. (Palm Beach in the background)

The lovely Onetangi Beach on a late spring day. Part of the marathon ran along the beach, so I did lots of training along them as well. Plus running along beaches, when the sand is hard-packed is just fantastic

Life lately...

We've been extra busy this semester as Sonny is in a race to finish his PhD and we are trying to work as much as possible to pad the savings. However, we are still trying to get some fun in so as to not be dull boy (and girl).

Today Lilith and I met up with her sister Layla and her owners Wayne and Jean. It was very funny and slightly unnerving to watch the girls play fetch together. Genetics are quite amazing. They make the exact same noises when excited and play the same game of moving the stick only a centimetre closer when told it's too far away to throw. 

We took a break from marking last Sunday and went diving at our local, Enclosure Bay. We ended up spending 90 minutes underwater! We used our twinsets to swim all the way out to the outer reef and played around there. We will have to bring our underwater housing and camera next time as there was lots of fish life, far more than we have seen recently in our Waiheke Dives. Unfortunately, Sonny's dry suit is leaking so he was a bit cold. I was toasty warm the whole time with my 300 gram undergarment. 

We were both really hungry that evening. I had some leftover meat sauce from lasagna, but pasta just didn't quite feel like enough. I had been thinking about my mom on Mother's Day, which made me think about taking her out to dinner which made me think about all the delicious Italian eateries in Iron Mountain. That's when I had the idea to recreate some of my favourite meals. I didn't have time to cook prime rib, but steak and spaghetti and salad with Parmesan cheese I could do. Totally decadent but we'd just burned a ton of calories and who needs arteries anyways? Maybe someday I'll attempt a Roman Holiday!

Xiaochukeng track

Last weekend in Taiwan, so when a couple of colleagues invited me to go with their friends on a trip, I did not even think twice about it. We (Chialing, Chinghung, Xiaoyu and his girlfriend, Jiaho and I) are going to join Chialing's friend on this short trip. It is a old track call "Xiaochukeng" that joins a town, Hou Tong to another town, Jiou Fen. Along the track, there are supposed to be some old houses that were left behind.

The weather prior to the trip was not that great - it had been raining all week, and we were worried that the trip would get cancelled. Fortunately, when the day came, we had lady luck on our side..not only was there not a single drop of rainfall, but the sun was shining brighter and the day was warmer :)

We took the train (cost us NT40 each) to Hou Tong which was about an hour from Taipei city. The town was famous for its roaming cats. There were cats all around the train station, in the shops, along the roads etc. It may be hard to tell in the pictures because most of the cats were in the shops having their breakfast! The plan was to walk through the mountains from Hou Tong to Jiou Fen, which was just around 3km. So, it was going to be an easy, scenic walk.

Along the way, we passed by bridges, waterfalls, old houses, temples etc. There was even an old, abandoned high school. However, it was so broken down, and the only structure left was a wall and a couple of benches. You could just barely see that there was a flag post next to the wall. Over time, the flag post had given way to nature, and it had plants creeping all around it. We reached the top of the mountain in about 2hrs, and took the chance to take some great panoramic views of the town at the foot of the mountain.

After a couple of hours, we were near Jiou Fen. The cheery blossom trees along the track to Jiou Fen were blooming! Hannah and I had been to Jiou Fen. It was the inspiration for the anime "Spirited Away". We did not manage to visit the theatre the other time, but I was lucky this time! The theatre was opened - it was an old theatre where they used to feature films during days when the miners were here. After wandering about the old streets which Jiou Fen was famous for, we went for lunch and snack - of course, there was smelly tofu, and not forgetting fish balls and yam dessert. By the time we were ready to go back to Taipei, we were all full and happy. The train ride back to Taipei was uneventful as we slept all the way from Rui Fang train station to Taipei Nankang train station.

Oh yeah!... Not forgetting to thank Xiaoyu for bringing and displaying the wonders of using his newly bought selfie stick! :)