Browsed by
Tag: social media ambassador

an overdue ‘life, in a nutshell’ post

an overdue ‘life, in a nutshell’ post

Had to do some searching for the last time I wrote one of these not-really-running-related posts, and yeah… it has been a while — a many month while, in fact. I’m going to break my rule and include some running-related banter in here because it’s timely, but heeeeeeere’s what’s been going on.

It’s The San Francisco Marathon race week! nope, I’m not running SF’s awesome marathon on Sunday (tear) or either of its half marathons or ultra, but I am running the 5k! Friday will be 36 weeks for me — that’s 9 months! — and most likely, as far as I can tell anyway, TSFM’s 5k will be my last “race” of this pregnancy. I’m looking forward to race weekend, seeing and spending time with Erin (coming in from Chicago!) and possibly Meredith (who left Chicago for the Bay Area earlier this year and might be doing the second half this weekend–yay!), working at the expo with all the other lovely social media ambassadors on Saturday, and oh yea, leading a community shake-out run on Saturday morning with the one and only Dean Karnazes! I last saw him during the Oakland Marathon ’14 (I think he lives in Oakland or SF… somewhere in the Bay Area), and he’s a badass. This weekend should be a lot of fun between seeing new and old friends there to race/pace the events, meeting and running with Dean, and 9-months-pregnant “racing.” And hey! come see me at the expo on Saturday, and/or come to the shakeout that morning! (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-san-francisco-marathon-shakeout-run-with-fitbit-ambassador-dean-karnazes-registration-17446880088)

excited to see Erin B again this year in SF!
excited to see Erin B again this year in SF!

 

and yay for possibly seeing Meredith again over event weekend!
and yay for possibly seeing Meredith again over event weekend!

 

1000 books before kindergarten. The little one still has another year before beginning kinder, and when we learned about this program that the SJ public libraries are sponsoring, we (mostly me, ha) were totally excited. It’s no secret that it’s critical to read to kiddos, starting as young as possible, and fortunately for us, A really likes to read; she likes to be read to, she likes to “read” her stories to whoever will listen, she likes to tell her own stories… you get the idea. Over the past few months that we’ve been participating in this program from our library, she has gotten really into it and even insists that after we read books together, C or I go write down the books’ titles on our tracking notebook 🙂  It’s very sweet, and it’s so awesome to see her so excited about reading and books. I just think it’s an awesome idea and hope that other libraries nationwide are doing something similar.

LOGO,-jpg,-horizontal---1000-Books-Before-Kindergarten

 

cord blood donation. This is more of a PSA than anything, I suppose. When I first began all this marathoning stuff with Team in Training, I learned about the Be the Match marrow registry, got on the registry, and eventually, when we got pregnant with A, C and I learned about cord blood banking. The two of us researched and eventually decided that we preferred to donate my cord blood to a public bank instead of storing it in a private bank accessible only to us. (Tangent: if you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can get a little primer on the subject here. Like pretty much anything else related to health and pregnancy, how you choose to proceed is a personal decision. For many reasons, we believed [and still do] that public donation was best for us). Annyyyyyway! After we had A in Chicago, we donated the cord blood to a public bank — which was a pretty straightforward process, just one riddled with lots of paperwork — so this time around, that was our intention here in CA as well. We had to do some hoop-jumping to get the paperwork in order (just due to some hospital red-tape issues), but unfortunately, apparently in California my autoimmune disorder renders me ineligible for donating … even though I had it when I was pregnant four years ago, I’ve been medicated for it since 2010, and I publicly donated my cord blood in 2011 while being medicated/treated. Ugh. Not gonna lie, I was kinda heartbroken that we aren’t able to donate this time around; it just kills me because I know that our donation could make a huge difference to someone and, more importantly, so many pregnant women and their partners don’t realize that donating their cord blood to a public bank is an option. If you take nothing away from this little tirade, take this: if you’re pregnant — or are planning to become pregnant, or know someone who is — know that you can donate your cord blood and that it can make a difference in someone’s life. Otherwise, it’ll literally end up as medical waste … and that sucks 🙁  (and for more info on the donation process, start here).

books! Oh my, lots of books since our last little update together. I was on a fiction kick for a while but have since returned to my usual nonfiction preferences.

The “mehs” include:

  • Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music — a fun vacation read but kinda “eh” overall
  • Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl — same as above, except less fun
  • Dr. Tadashi Yoshimura’s Joyous Childbirth Changes the World — interesting point of view, good information and resources, but kinda “out there” and definitely not for everyone
  • Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl — a pretty fun and easy vacation read but kinda lackluster toward the end

The “don’t bother”s include:

The “absolutely!”s (and naturally, three of the four are nonfiction):

  • Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which could probably make for a good movie or mini-series
  • Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, which, no joke, I cried every.single.time I read, and even bought a copy for my dad to read so we could talk about it
  • Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Art of Tidying Up, which will probably make you judge me a bit, but honestly, I thought she had some really interesting stuff to say and some really good perspectives on how a tidied/in-order house can affect our moods and, honestly, how much shit we all probably have in our homes that we actually don’t need. I read a lot of scathing reviews about this book from people who thought Kondo was a little left-of-center for some of the stuff she said — and I’ll concede that her techniques can be a little weird — but again, I think the crux of her message is important and worth considering. It’s a quick read, anyway.
  • Ina May Gaskin’s Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta.  No surprise that I liked this. I mean, c’mon, captive audience.

And finally, I’m in the throes of reading Sapiens, and so far, so good. This one might take me a while.

Family outing at Levi’s Stadium. C’s work sponsored their annual summer shindig at Levi’s Stadium (where the 49ers play) this year, so we dropped a few hours there on Saturday morning so A could get her face painted (which, if it were up to her, we’d have a live-in face-painting artist), her hair braided, her arm airbrushed, and many, many opportunities to bounce to her heart’s content at one of the many bounce houses. It was a lot of fun, and the stadium is really, really nice.

19618922780_70d1dd8622_o

 

19619682160_580ee92a77_o
family cheesin’

 

Ohio!! and finally, in early June, A and I ventured out to northeast Ohio to see my family for a couple weeks. It was amazing because not only did we get to see my parents, my also-pregnant sister and her family (my brother-in-law and my three nephews), but we also ended up being able to see my brother plus his family (his wife and another nephew), who had flown in from Houston; a great aunt; another aunt, uncle, and my cousin’s newborn daughter; my also-pregnant BFF; and my in-laws, who drove in from IL for a quick visit. It was all very awesome. We were in Ohio for 13 days, and while it rained probably 12.5 of those 13 days we were there — and hello, oppressive humidity! — dammit, it was just great. The photo dump can speak for itself.

pregnant for days with Shannon
pregnant for days with Shannon
my bro, SIL Lisa, and their little guy Riley
my bro, SIL Lisa, and their little guy Riley
A reading to my mom :)
A reading to my mom 🙂
cousin Brian on a boat!
cousin Brian on a boat!
Drew, Trae, and A
Drew, Trae, and A
almost all the cousins - A is the only girl!
almost all the cousins – A is the only girl!

collage

 

That’s about it these days! Hope all is well with you these days!

2015 ZOOMA Napa Valley half marathon race report

2015 ZOOMA Napa Valley half marathon race report

Not very long ago, I wrote about how stoked I was to be running ZOOMA’s Napa Valley half marathon again this year because a) I so enjoyed meeting and getting to know the other ambassadors throughout the past year, b) I was looking forward to seeing my South Bay-based RA pacing buddies on the course again this year (like last), c) Chicago-based-but-recently-CA-transplanted friend Meredith would also be running the 13.1 (on her birthday!), and d) I’m just shy of 8 months pregnant, so to even be able — and wanting — and willing to run 13.1 for the hell of it was just … cool. At any rate, as I suspected, all these great factors combined to make for a 98% enjoyable — I’ll elaborate — experience in beautiful Napa over the weekend.

On Friday mid-morning, after a nearly 3am bedtime (thanks, delayed flights from the midwest), A and I trekked north to volunteer at the expo for a few hours. Much like last year, the expo was pretty low-key, but we still had a good time. I enjoyed chatting with the Napa-based GOTR volunteers and getting to meet some of the ZOOMA staff with whom I’ve been corresponding over the past year. A and I left around 4pm to not lose our souls in traffic heading back to the south bay — on a good day, getting to Napa is about a 1hr40 minute/90 mile-ish drive — which meant that again this year, I’d have to miss all the ambassadors at Friday’s mocktail party (boo). You can just pretend that I’m in this picture, though.

PC: Lynda. Just pretend I'm in there.
PC: Lynda.

 

With a 7am start time in Napa, and another 90 miles or so of driving, and with a heaping of jet lag, I greeted Saturday morning at WTF o’clock and picked up Meredith at a BART station along the way. Although she’s been in CA now for nearly 9 months, I hadn’t seen her since the last time she was here for work, so this weekend was even more special because it gave us lots of time to catch up (in addition to run). We got up to Napa around 6:15, took care of the typical pre-race logistics before hopping on the hotel shuttle to the starting line, and suddenly, somehow it was already nearly 6:40 and we were scrambling to drop our gear check bags off, pee, and warm-up … and yet again, I had missed another photo opp (that I had arranged, grr!) with the social media ambassadors under the starting arches at 6:30. WTF, self?!

PC: Laura
PC: Laura

 

I managed to get in a super-short warm-up, barely a half-mile, as well as a pee stop, before things kicked off, and I was feeling pretty great. Seeing my pacing buddies and some of the other ambassadors pre-race in the starting corral was also a nice pick-me-up, and I started the race looking forward to just going for a little 13.1 mile jaunt through the streets of Napa. Fortunately, the potentially disastrous 90s/50s weather report didn’t appear to be manifesting,  so the temps actually felt rather comfortable for a majority of the run. Plus, really, even if things didn’t feel comfortable, there’s enough pretty stuff to look at in Napa/on this course, like hot air balloons!

Napa on a Saturday morning! PC: Linh/RA
Napa on a Saturday morning! PC: Linh/RA

 

At the risk of sounding like an ass, my goal for this race was to “try to not try” — basically, to run at a really comfortable pace, my “run all day” speed, and to just have fun with it. As a third trimester/pregnant runner, I know/knew that ZNV wasn’t going to be about racing as much as it would be about just enjoying the day and the scenery, so I wanted to keep things low-key, if not somewhat pedestrian (that makes me sound kinda douchey … sorry). The other thing about running this late and this far into pregnancy is that it is really important — as in, super, critically, essentially, vitally important — to acknowledge how your body feels and to respond appropriately. As runners (pregnant or not), I think many of us become rather hyperaware to all the little kinks or imbalances we sometimes feel, so generally speaking, we’re pretty good about monitoring when things go south in a run/workout. Obviously, this hypervigilance is all the more critical when you’re running while pregnant because best case scenario, it’s no big deal (like feeling an appendage on your bladder) but worst case scenario, it’s a BFD (like going into preterm labor).

With all of that in mind, then, I wanted to “try to not try” at ZNV. I would love to run a sub-1:55 (arbitrary time goal), or maybe even match or come really close to my SLO half marathon time I posted at 24 weeks/6 months pregnant (a high 1:49), but ultimately, I just wanted to have fun, enjoy the run and the experience, and as cheesy as it sounds, just effin’ celebrate that I can and still want to run this far, this late into my second pregnancy.

The first few miles, when all the HMers and 10kers were together, were nice and quite chill. I was surprised that my watch was displaying 8:teens for some of these miles because I felt like I was kinda running through molasses. I was certain that holding an 8:teen effort for the duration of the race would be challenging, but I figured I’d just assess things as they happened and take each mile as I ran it. Seeing Linh and his 1:45 group not too far ahead was fun, as always, and chatting with ambassador Amanda and her husband, who were both doing the 10k and vying for an AG/OA place, was also cool. Man, I so dig this community.

queen-waving to Linh. PC: him/RA
queen-waving to Linh. PC: him/RA

 

The other thing about the ZNV half is that even though I was running this year’s iteration very pregnant, I went into it with something of a chip on my shoulder. At last year’s race, I had a really good 10k+, but between miles 7-11ish, I got into such a negative mental space that it has damn near haunted me for the past year. I know it’s normal to go through these highs and lows during a run/a race, but it was like ZNV last year really brought out the horrifically mercurial side of racing for me. I finished last year’s place with decent OA/AG places, but I was so incredibly disappointed and pissed at myself for allowing myself to get into this mercurial mental space that I was determined to not go there this year, even though I knew this year’s race would be slower and more of a run than a race. My time be damned — I was determined to not have an encore performance.

Well … determination can be one thing and reality another, my friends.

After the 10k and HMers split, things went from “pretty quiet” to “even more quiet.” Very few people had passed me, and since the race was small (with fewer than 400 people in the HM), things also got pretty spread out up where I was. Eventually, I saw the lead runners run against us and scored a solid side-5 from Meredith (nice pick-me-up), and by my estimates, I was somewhere in the top 30 runners, maybe top 20 women, which was also cool. I felt pretty comfortable still on the run and hit the halfway mark at a high 8-teen average. While I still didn’t think that the pregnancy would allow me to hold that pace for the final 10k and change — which, again, was fine, given my goals for the day and my obvious current physiological state — I figured I’d just press on and assess at each mile. Taking a couple gels and ingesting some water and gatorade on-course probably also helped keep my energy levels from completely tanking, but by about mile 8, I had begun to mentally resign myself to acknowledging that I was getting tired — the 25+ pounds of pregnancy I’m carrying was making itself known — and again, for whatever reason, just like last year, hope went to die between miles 7-12 for me. I hadn’t gotten passed by any runners for a really long time, and eventually, at around mile 10, the 1:50 gang caught up to me (fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck).

Though I was disappointed that hope showed up again to just die (again) between miles 7-12, I kept forcing myself to have some pretty hard conversations with myself. As runners, we’re taught, and we constantly teach ourselves, to break through ruts. We teach ourselves to meticulously distinguish the fine details between things like pain, discomfort, boredom, hunger, thirst, bathroom cues (I can’t be the only one, ha), overtraining, undertraining, lack of motivation, laziness, or sluggishness, and time and experience eventually give us mechanisms to combat all of these relatively common or benign ailments. It doesn’t matter if you’re an experienced or novice runner; we all encounter these ailments periodically. It’s part of the program.

Running a HM at nearly 8 months pregnant though, and facing these “where hope goes to die” miles and the associated ailments above, proved to be rather challenging in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. I acknowledged that I was getting tired and bored and even considered that maybe stopping for a bathroom (which I didn’t really think I needed, but WTH) or stopping for a walk break (which, again, I didn’t really think I needed) would bolster my attitude and help me finish strong. I wasn’t in pain at all, though my hardening midsection was giving me the impression that maybe I was having some benign Braxton Hicks contractions. I eventually decided that even though I was nearly positive that what I was feeling just attributable to plain, ol-fashioned fatigue, with maybe some boredom and BH contractions thrown in for good measure, I needed to err on the side of caution and just take things down a notch — and importantly, critically, vitally,  be okay with that.

I tend to be pretty competitive with myself, and I won’t fabricate things here: acknowledging that I needed to take things down a notch for a little bit just to be on the safe side, regardless of how “certain” I was that I was feeling the way I was due to some pretty innocuous reasons, was tough. I felt like I was giving up, like I was giving in to the same hopeless mental trash that showed up last year between miles 7-12, even though the context in 2014 was light-years different than it was in 2015 (not pregnant versus pregnant). I even went so far as to mentally scold myself here and remind myself that if I can’t get my head outta my ass, that if I can’t truly be ok with taking things down a notch, that I need to stop running for the remainder of this pregnancy. I’m not trying to prove anything to myself or to anyone else; truly, I’m running while pregnant only because it’s good for my body and my developing fetus; it makes me feel good; and because I enjoy it. I’m not out there to set any records or anything.

Eventually, this mental scolding and recentering worked, and before I knew it, I had just a 5k to go, I was coming up on the 1:50 group, and hell, I even began passing some people in the final miles.  From the turnaround-onward, I had gotten a barrage of support from the other runners/walkers/spectators who would generically cheer for me and then realize that I was pregnant and even more enthusiastically holler at me, which was both very cool/sweet and somewhat embarassing.   🙂 Truth be told, though, it’s one of the reasons why I like the ZNV atmosphere; it’s so awesomely supportive and empowering. With a slight downhill on the final 2 miles, and with my head fully out of my ass, I was able to finish with a solid and comfortable pace (further irritating me that I unnecessarily slogged miles 7-12 bc of bad mental real estate, but whatever) and came just shy of 1:50, with a 1:51:01. I dualled with a dude in front of me for the final 800m or so before he ultimately passed me — again, fuuuuuuuuuck — but he (and many other runners) so sweetly came up to me after the race and told me how “badass” or “inspiring” I was to be running “so fast” and “so pregnant.” Again — very sweet, very nice, very unexpected, and for someone who is doing this (running) simply for health and to feel good at this point, somewhat embarassing. 🙂

happy to finish the thing. PC: Linh/RA
happy to finish the thing. PC: Linh/RA

 

Meredith and I reconnected post-race and learned that she was in the top 5 finishers and also cinched an AG award. We stuck around for the awards ceremony, chatted with Amanda (who went on to win her AG in the 10k just as she had envisioned- you go!), got a post-race massage, and slogged some super easy, almost arthritic-granny-like CD miles on a trail we found near the host hotel. Things had really warmed up by the time we got off our asses to post our CDs, so we were lucky to have dodged that bullet during the race. All in all, though, a really good morning in Napa, one that I’m really grateful for and one that I’ll remember for a long time.

yay, birthday girl, Meredith!
yay, birthday girl, Meredith!

 

yay, Amanda!
yay, Amanda!

 

Even for it being just its second year, I think ZNV is doing a good job with this race. The 10k and HM courses are flat and fast, which can be conducive to a PR, yet it can also be challenging because the race is small (capped at 1k runners), which might mean that you’re running by yourself — or nearly by yourself — for part or all of your run. When you’re running for time, there are inherent advantages and disadvantages to running a smallish race (which is also the case when you run larger races, too). And sure, it’s June in Napa, which more often than not means heat and sun, but c’mon, gang … it’s the weather; it’s a variable that no race can ever control. If you care about swag items, I think their stuff is nice — gender-specific socks, tech shirts, hats (last year), or this year, a little journal, along with a nice medal — but more importantly, I think this race is well-organized and doesn’t let on that it’s a newbie in the northern CA racing scene. What I probably like *most* about this race, though, is that it’s simply a good race that just *happens* to be women’s-focused; I don’t feel like the race is dumbing itself down or being unnecessarily and obnoxiously pink-pink-pink or heteronormative or just kinda, dare I say, stupid or obnoxious like some of the other women’s races out there. There’s nothing about this race that leaves me with that sinking feeling in my stomach like I get when I see other women’s races (or their advertising); seriously, I think it’s a good race that just happens to be women’s-focused. Even with the high price tag, I think it’s worth doing at least once.

Suffice it to say that I’m looking forward to next year’s HM wherein I plan to destroy any memories of those “where hope goes to die” miles. The first iteration of this race, I had a flurry of hopeless miles and finished the thing alright; the second iteration of this race, I ran it while nearly 8 months pregnant, still had some hopeless miles, and finished pretty ok still (27/379 OA; 19/351 female; 8/71 AG); the third iteration of this race, in 2016, will be my best yet. Mark my words. That gauntlet is THROWN, my friends!

Many thanks to ZOOMA for another fun race and the opportunity to be a social media ambassador for the past year. Obvs the views expressed herein are mine.