travels, races, and other musings

5k with a cold I came down with a cold on Saturday night with a scheduled 5k race on Sunday morning. Sunday morning I was feeling a little crummy, but not too bad so I decided to go for it. Besides, I had talked Roger and Dru into this one so I didn't want to bail out (plus I already paid and picked up my race packet). We arrived and picked up our timing chips. I'm really horrible at sticking those things on my shoes. They always flop around. How many races at this point and I can't get the stupid timing chip on right? It was pretty cold (about 45 degrees) so we were all wearing long sleeves. Dru and I wore capri type pant things. Basically ankle-length loose running shorts. She didn't have warmer running gear so I loaned her some of mine. We tried to keep warm by doing some fast walking around the track where the race started, then we stretched a bit before heading to the start line. I had a hanky stuffed in my pocket that I had to keep pulling out to blow my nos...

My First 10k I made it through my first 10k yesterday. My original estimation was 1 hour and 15 minutes and I made it in 1 hour, 12 minutes, 37 seconds, which I'm very happy with. I actually don't have all that much to say about the race. Basically I just kept running! I tried to run fairly conservatively so that I would ensure I had enough energy to make it through the whole 6 miles. Between mile 4 and 5 I had a strange burst of energy and ran quite quickly for a few minutes, which felt really good. At the end, when I came towards the finish, I ran as fast as I could and gave that last bit of energy to a sprint. Here are my split times using my GPS watch. I tried to hit it right at the mile markers, but you'll see some are slightly off (in particular, I got distracted at the water stop at mile 2). Mile 1: 1.01 miles in 10:23 minutes, 10:19/mi average Mile 2: 1.09 miles in 12:46 minutes, 11:41/mi average Mile 3: .93 miles in 11:18 minutes, 12:12/mi average Mile 4...

London and Home We woke up on Saturday morning in London and I was still feeling awful. I dragged myself out of bed, took a hot steamy shower and we headed downstairs for breakfast. I thought I had booked us in hotels with included breakfast in all our European locations, however, apparently breakfast wasn't included in our London hotel and they wanted £11 each for continental breakfast. We decided with me not feeling well that we didn't want to run around trying to find breakfast in the cold drizzle so we gave in and ate at the hotel. We decided to head out to the Tower of London so we took the tube. When we arrived, we found that they wanted nearly £15 for admission and since we weren't going to spend too much time there, we decided that was too much and opted to jump back onto the sightseeing bus again. After awhile we hopped off and found a bite to eat for lunch before heading back to the hotel to check out and take the long tube ride back to Heathrow. It turns ...

London So I suppose this isn't the Italy travel journal any more since I'm about to tell you about London, but Italy was the bulk of our vacation so I'm sticking to my title. We had to get up really early to make our 7:50 AM flight to London. I was feeling no better than I was the day before. In fact, I felt worse. The taxi picked us up at 5:45 for our only taxi ride of our vacation. At 45 Euros it certainly was an expensive ride, but there was really no other way to get to the airport that early in the morning. We arrived at the airport in what, I'm sure was record time. On the way, the Colosseum and the Baths of Caracalla went by in a blur. We also drove past what looked like an aqueduct. What we were told was a 30 minute drive was actually 20 minutes, but the taxi driver drover like a bat out of hell. He was insane. Thank goodness we had seat belts (though evidently he didn't feel the need to wear his). By the time we got to the airport and waited in line ...

Rome Our second day in Rome dawned and I had a sore throat. Uh oh. I just barely skirted a sickness before we left (I either wasn't sick or kicked it). Well, maybe it was just a dry throat. We planned to spend the morning in Vatican City at St. Peter's basilica and the Vatican Museum. We took the metro down and started in St. Peter's square. It was actually much smaller than I had thought it would be. I remembered seeing the images on TV of all those people crammed in the square (though it's actually round) after the pope died. It is a large area, but there were just so many people! It wasn't so busy when we were there, thankfully. We got into the line to get into the basilica. We had to go through a security checkpoint. It had to be the worst crowd organization I've ever seen. There was one big mash of people, probably 10 heads across squeezing down into two security screens. The problem was that with such a big area for the "line" people wou...

Rome We got up early and headed out to the the area where all the major archaeological sites are. We had a lot on our agenda, but luckily, most of the sites are very close together. When we came up the stairs from the metro (subway) I got my first glimpse of the Colosseum. All I can say is, wow. I knew it was big, but it is seriously huge and imposing. I can only imagine how the Romans felt upon seeing it since they weren't used to huge stadiums (like we are today). After I was done staring at the Colosseum, our first stop was Domus Aurea, the great palaces built by Emperor Nero after fire destroyed most of the city. Rumor has it that Nero was behind the fires so that he could clear out parts of the city for his palace. Later, after Nero was killed the area was filled in and buildings were built on top of the site to remove the stain of Nero. The palace is now in the process of being excavated and preserved. The scale is miraculous and it's beyond the imagination to imagi...