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A whirlwind of the best type

A whirlwind of the best type

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It feels like my schedule has whiplashed from being pretty bare, a casualty of the pandemic, to being full-throttle and non-stop, nearly as soon as this school-year has begun. It’s like a whiplash of the best type though, as I (and so many others, obviously) have missed all the normal interactions that we would have otherwise had, had the pandemic not undone society over the past 18 months.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about volunteering for the first time since the pandemic began at a local, in-person, road race in San Jose. It was amazing, and it left me buzzing for the rest of the afternoon.

Luckily, I was able to replicate the feeling again over the past weekend, a day after my first 20 of my 50k training.

hello hello from Boccardo
not freaking out re: bovine proximity en route back to ARP (can you see how many are behind me and how close they are to the path?!)

Just as we had before the pandemic, Wolfpack Running Club, my beloved team, hosted the USATF Pacific Association’s Golden Gate Park Cross Country Open meet (GGP XC) in Lindley Meadow, in Golden Gate Park, in San Francisco.

Hosting an XC meet is a shorthand way of saying that our club — and more specifically, our RD, Andy — put the thing on, top-to-bottom, start-to-finish. “Labor of love” probably fits the bill.

The last time our club hosted this event (pre-pandemic), I opted to both volunteer and run the race. This time around, with my 20 miler the day before and the convenient reality that I’m in a different mode of training right now, I opted to exclusively volunteer, and even brought A along for the experience.

It was so fun to see so many teammates (and meet new teammates!) during race day, as well as see so many friends whom I hadn’t seen in a while because of the pandemic (Meredith! Angela!).

It was fantastic to see so many people at the race and to feel like we were doing it as safely as we could. To be honest, if there’s anywhere in the world I want to be running right now, it’s here, simply because the vaccination rates in the Bay Area are so high and because an overwhelming majority understand the gravity of the situation; see also, Tuesday’s recall results.

women’s start!

It is nice to begin to feel like we are nearly touching “normal” (or at the very least, “modified normal”) again.

Double-take

Double-take

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Earlier this morning, I thought I’d have loads of available time today to wax philosophic about my event I’m training for this fall and that for which I registered in the spring.

Instead, it’s nearly 9pm, I’m about to do bedtime, and shortly after I, too, will collapse in bed after what turned out to be an action-packed day of everything and nothing all at once. With both kids doing school, in school, I guess I stupidly thought that I’d have more available time to do … whatever, but at least right now, I’m very much feeling the beginning-of-the-school-year crunch.

All good things, for sure, just a lot.

So! In lieu of what I was originally going to write about tonight, I’ll leave you with a picture that I took on my long run on Sunday morning, when I ran 18 on as-hilly-as-possible-roads, all over the the east side, because ARP was closed due to heightened fire dangers with the high temps, low humidity, and high winds.

I was running by a house that had this down by the road and actually stopped to do a double-take because it was so unusual.

Seeing a web in plants isn’t all that unusual around here, but to see a web that has trapped this much water droplets (when have we had type of water falling from the sky recently???) — that was something else.

When’s the last time you stopped mid-run to do a double-take?