Return to Withlacoochee Forest (And Lake Minneola)

The only thing I love more than doing a brand-new race, is returning a second time to experience it again. Especially for these out-of-town races which tend to be even more of an adventure.

So I’m happy to report that I’ve completed essentially a repeat of what I did last year, getting hotels and doing the Lake Minneola Half Marathon last weekend in the lovely town of Clermont, and this weekend doing the Croom Fools Run on the trails of beautiful Withlacoochee State Forest. 

This year I did the shortest distance for the Croom, the roughly 16 mile loop just once and what a relief to not have to do it a second time like last year! Even so, I definitely faced a few moments of despair out there today; that specific hopelessness that only endurance runners can know, where you’re already so tired and you still have so many more miles to go. 

It took me about 3 hours and 45 minutes, longer than I had hoped, but fortunately I had just enough time to get back to my hotel and cleanup before checkout (last year, doing the 50k, I had to checkout before the race, since I knew I’d be out there for untold hours). I feel like I may dream tonight about those hours of slip-slide running on the sandy trails, tripping over roots and nearly falling, and praying for the next aid station to appear.

It was much warmer this year than last year, for both races. The Lake Minneloa course was the same scenic route, along the lakeshore for much of it. Like last year, I found some runners to chat with, to make the miles go by faster. This year I met Lisa and Kim, learned about their work, their families and their 10 year running friendship, which made me miss my running buddy all the more. My time came in at just under two and a half hours, much slower than last year where I was just over a 10 minute mile, but still faster than the Shamrock race, so that made me happy.

Another difference this year is that I took my husband to the half marathon - and quickly realized that it’s actually not that fun to have a travel partner unless they are doing the race with you. I thanked him for accompanying me but then told he me was off the hook for the remaining race this weekend! We still had a nice dinner at a tiki bar/restaurant on the lake but I was pretty preoccupied with pre-race stuff like getting enough hydration and getting back to the hotel before too late, to ensure I could get enough sleep.

So, I don’t know that I’ll do either race again next year for a 3rd time, but I’m super glad that I was able to do them both again this year, despite not feeling in the greatest running shape. The bad news is that my right Achilles tendon is so sore it’s like touching a live wire and my left hip is still hurting. The good news? No more long distance runs until the Clearwater rock’n roll half marathon the first weekend in October! I am looking forward to the rest, it feels like it comes not a moment too soon.

Heavy on my heart too, is the thought that when I did these races last year my mom was still alive. But that topic - the ongoing process of grieving this loss - is for the next blog post.

Good For Her Age

Even while I’ve been bemoaning my slow-down and physical ailments, three really wonderful things still happened in this vicinity, so I had to share.

That last race that nearly killed me? I got 2nd place in my age group! (Partly because it was such a small race and partly because well, let’s face it, I’m old. But I was told I really don’t have to mention either of those things.)

What does one win for getting 2nd in her age group, you may wonder? Well, I don’t know because of course, not realizing I had placed, I didn’t stick around after the race for the awards ceremony. But all is not lost! 

Because I actually also won 3rd place (again in my age group) in the Florida Road Races “Starfish Race Series” (their medals have the cutest little running starfish), by doing 4 out of the 5 races this organization puts on, and getting a certain amount of points based on how I placed in those races. 

The email that alerted me to this wonderful result of me running a 15k down at Fort De Soto last Fall (featured at the end of my Sept blog post), the Holiday Halfathon in December, the St. Petersburg Distance Classic in Feb and then this most recent race at the beginning of this month, stated there will be a season ending party and awards presentation mid-April. My hope is that if I show up for that I may also be able to belatedly claim any award I may have gotten from the Shamrock Race. 

I’m expecting the prize to be another t-shirt or medal so nothing terribly exciting but I think I would probably go to the party even if there was no award, because it is a really sweet race series and I want to support the organization. So I will report back on that in April!

And if all that weren’t enough consolation and reward for carrying on in the face of my recent struggles, I also won 3rd place (in my gender) in the Orange Theory Fitness Transformation Challenge that I was participating in for 8 weeks running from mid-January until early March. 

I didn’t think I was doing that well, because I wasn’t very disciplined with my food (nothing compared to what I did last spring for my one and only bikini/fitness competition, that was completely brutal!) and when I weighed myself the scale really wasn’t going down, but then the InBody scan taken at the beginning versus the one taken at the end, showed my body composition had really changed, by losing almost 4% body fat and gaining almost 4 pounds of muscle over the course of those 8 weeks. The prize for coming in 3rd place is a $50 gift card, haza! 

So, the journey continues but I found this all really really encouraging just when I needed it. I face another half marathon race this weekend and the weekend after that my season ending trail race, where I’ll do just one 16 mile loop on the trail where I did two 16 mile loops last year to complete my one and only ultra-marathon. My goal right now is to just run*jog*walk as pain free as possible, enjoying every minute that I can. 

If there’s anything these 3 recent events prove, it’s to not get discouraged because you just never know what’s possible! And, like me, you might be doing better than you think.

2023 Racing Season, So Far

 “Well I don’t know, but I’ve been told/You never slow down, you never grow old.” ~ Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

I hate to admit this, even to myself, but I’m finding it harder and harder to do these half marathons. And yet I’ve already done 4 of them this racing season, which is more than I have done in some entire years in the past. I’m a Gemini so I’ve always been a mess of contradictions like that!

Before this most recent race, the medal and the reward eating afterwards - 

I still love doing these races, but I’ve gotten so dang slow it’s like I hit a wall right after turning 50 and after getting my PR last year in New Orleans; it’s all right there in black and white, impossible to deny or contradict.

 

This last half marathon (not showing yet on Athlinks.com) was my slowest yet at 2 hours 34 minutes and there were demoralized moments in that hot sun, with legs feeling like lead and my lower back and left hip hurting so much, I was afraid maybe I wasn’t going to make it. They’d find my sweat-soaked body on the trail in Fort De Soto and that would be it.

😁

And I’m starting to feel a little like a woman who can’t leave an abusive relationship, but I am doing some things to help myself: I got X-ray and MRI done on my lower back and left hip last week, I see my new spine doctor tomorrow to review those reports. 

The prior MRI on my neck that I feared would lead the doctor to tell me I had to quit running such long distances, only led to a probable diagnosis of carpal tunnel syndrome and me wearing stabilizing splints at night to stop my hands from going numb while sleeping (ANOTHER troublesome thing to come on only after turning 50 WTF).

I have a couple weeks with no races but then I have another half on March 25th and then a 25k/16 mile trail run on April 1st (half of my 50k ultra marathon I did last year). Then break for the summer and October is the Clearwater Rock ‘n Roll half marathon that was rescheduled from last year, due to Hurricane Ian. 

I am equal parts looking forward to and dreading all future races but I hope to have myself sorted out at least by the Fall, if not by these next ones. And if I can just resist signing up for other races I normally do in November until I know I will be fit to run them, that will be one minor victory. Meanwhile I guess I just have to feel good about still being able to do this type of long distance running. 

And grateful - above all grateful! During the toughest parts of any race (or training run, for that matter), I pray “Thank you God for allowing my body to do this” and “Please God help me get through this” - and so far, it’s working. I may not be fast, and I may not ever be as fast again as I was about a year ago on that beautiful day in New Orleans, but I remain an endurance runner - so all I have to do is endure. 

Obligatory V-Day Post

I really hate Valentine’s Day. Even being coupled all these many years, I’m just sooooooo not a fan.

But I love cats. Cats are awesome!

(Shortest blog post ever.)

This is the Year…For Connection

So, 2022 was all about my fitness goals in the year I turned 50. Between that and everything else that went on last year, it turned out to be almost too intense! 

In 2023 I’ve decided to turn my attention more to emotional well-being, mental health and even spiritual “fitness” which, as a not particularly religious person, I feel will be a good challenge. And so the question I’m asking first and foremost is: how do we be more present in our lives, with ourselves and with the people we love, how do we increase connection?

Some relationships pose greater challenges for connection, others are easy. Some distances between us are psychic or socioeconomic or based on how other parts of our daily lived experience differ from others; other distances are purely physical. 

Case in point: everyone knows how much I love my three siblings, but we all live so far away from each other it makes connection a little harder. But my older brother just bought tickets for a trip to visit in February for Presidents’ Day weekend and I’m so excited! This will be his third time visiting me in Florida since I moved here almost 14 years ago. Dave for the visiting-sister win! (Although, in all fairness, I do think that Steph has visited 2 or 3 times as well.)

I’m also going to visit my sister in April for her birthday and to be together for the 1st anniversary of our mom’s death. Definitely will be a future blog post about that! (A past visit was chronicled in a poem I still enjoy reading, even though I feel like I was sort of a different person back then.) Now I just have to get my younger brother to come for a visit, and since he is not a huge traveler, I may just have to settle for him coming out with the other sibs next December Xmas visit for which I’m lobbying hard.

But before letting go of 2022, when I reflect back I actually see a lot of effort toward connection already. And this ended up meaning A LOT of airplane travel! 

Totally not bragging but because I like to count things and I’m still amazed by it, I have to add up (in no particular order) all the ways in which I accidentally reached silver medallion status on my Delta SkyMiles account: trip to Seattle in March for younger bro‘s 40th birthday, trip to see mom in April and then back again in April for the funeral; New Orleans for half marathon in March; a college friend’s wedding in California in June and another college friend’s 50th bday weekend in October held in Austin, TX; 4th of July long weekend trip to visit a friend in Denver, Colorado; trip to Hawaii in July followed by a few days in Seattle; trip to Milwaukee in June. And, of course, the recent Mexico trip.

The shortest trip of all of these was to New Orleans, which was only one night. We basically flew in, spent one night, raced the next morning and then flew back that evening. But we managed to fit in some good food because - NOLA!

I adore my running buddy, who has recently taken a hiatus from running half marathons with me but in the ebb and flow that is connection, I just have to have faith that she will return and there will be more fun race-related travels in the future. Maybe even another trip to New Orleans! Just gotta have faith.

A Christmas Story - Hirning Style

Like a lot of families, my family watched the movie “A Christmas Story” from the time it came out, and we loved it. In case you don’t know and were wondering when that was, I googled it so that you don’t have to, you’re welcome: A Christmas Story - Wikipedia

This year we watched the new one “A Christmas Story Christmas” while we spent 5 full days together (7 including travel days), on vacation just prior to Christmas Day, at a fancy resort in Cancun, Mexico. The movie was really sweet and I loved all the references to the first one.

Also like a lot of families, my family has many inside jokes, one of them being about getting to the airport super early which we call “Grandpa Hirning style” - because our sweet grandfather (my father’s father), living in LA generously drove an hour and a half one way to my college to ferry me back and forth to the LAX airport, not only every Christmas but also every summer that I returned home to Seattle. 

At that young age, I got accustomed to bringing plenty of reading material to while away the inevitable excess time at the gate. I may have been torturously early every time, but I was never late!

And so we joked with each other (on our ongoing FB Messenger chat thread), that we were at our respective airport gates “Grandpa Hirning style”-early as we made our way from our various states, to meeting up in Cancun, Mexico for our pre-Xmas vacation together, the 4 of us siblings + Stephanie’s patient husband.

Mexico! It helped me a little bit with the Hawaii post-trip let-down to have this next trip to look forward to. Sometime in August after we locked in our trip dates, I was the first to buy my tickets. Since this was our first Christmas without mom, we wanted to be together and do something different, “take the edge off” the sadness, so to speak, by being somewhere exotic and luxurious.

Because is there anything that makes Christmas what it is other than our Moms? All the Dads can stand up now in protest but I’m just saying that I think for a lot of two parent households like mine, that Christmas magic was largely made by mom.

And yet I have a very specific memory/story about my Dad and a special Christmas gift possibly not given to me, but to the whole family, yet I seem to recall it as mine. A gift not placed under the tree to unwrap on the actual day but given a few days before, so we could enjoy it approaching Xmas. 

Dad and I went to the Fred Meyer‘s store which is now (and has been for decades) the “Broadway Market” with huge QFC and other stores, but I will somehow always think of it as the Fred Meyers in my heart. We went to the music section and got the Chipmunks Christmas album. Annoying screechy voices aside, it can’t be denied that this album has become a Christmas classic.

I think this gift sticks out in my memory because it was something I really wanted and it didn’t come from “Santa” (if I was even still young enough to believe in him), but was a special gift from Dad (including the bonus time together on the trip to the store). 

Also, given how we never seemed to have enough money in our family, it felt like a bit of “luxury” that I was surprised Dad agreed to. I still don’t know how they managed buying Christmas presents for four kids, not to mention everything else they did on two very modest incomes, it seems like magic in retrospect!

We had to make our own magic this Christmas, but I feel we did a pretty good job, taking 3 days to just hang out on the resort with the “All Inclusive Plan” and two days for excursions. The resort was just beautiful and all credit goes to Steph and Noe for their membership in expensive “Vacation Club” that made it possible and pushed us to not just talk about, but actually do this.

The one day we had a bit of rain, we started playing games (my sister brought gobs of them), a Xmas Eve tradition from our childhood, and we managed to find time to play quite a few:  How Old Are You Really?  the Wordle Board Game (2 of us play the online original, 2 of us do not), Inspirational Women Trivia Game and of course, Clue. 

Sadly, I won “How Old Are You Really?” (meaning I got the most “old” points) but I also surprisingly won Clue! We had so much fun, I just love my siblings, I feel so lucky to have them in my life and I appreciate how these continuing relationships give me a way to remember and somehow stay connected to Mom.  

And given that we are all 4 fairly “strong personalities” (what a great euphemism right?) I am pleased about and proud of how well we managed to get along during this vacation! I kind of still can’t believe we did it.

Riding that success, we are now talking about possibly rotating the holiday location to our respective homes in future and so I’ve officially put in my bid to have next year be a Florida Christmas. With any luck the weather will be just as warm as Mexico was and though the excursions may not be as impressive as Mayan ruins, I will see what I can come up with, I do have a little bit of time to plan it. 

😎

Happy Holidays everyone!

The Happiest Half Marathon of the Year

 

This Sunday I run my next half marathon, my final one for the year and my first ever holiday themed race.

It takes place at beautiful Madeira Beach, one of the many beach communities near St.Pete, FL. The last beachside race I did last January the weather was crappy, so I’m seriously praying for sun this time. 

And I’m realizing more than ever how much the weather affects my mood, after a seriously crappy November full of overcast days and two cancelled - for me - half marathons, due to COVID. I am, sadly, no longer a super-dodger though I did dodge it for a pretty long stretch of time, especially considering that I’ve been living life like normal for a while now. 

It is Florida after all! 

😎

I am happy to report that it wasn’t that bad (felt like a normal flu to me and never affected my lungs), and I’m very grateful for my return to health but I gotta say, November was a pretty rough month! 

For much longer than I expected, I felt out of step (pun intended), with my running and my relationships, with my mood, my sleep and my energy. Since then I’ve had one good long training run last weekend (the sun was shining, I noted), and I may be slower than normal, but I’ll do this last race of the year one way or the other.

So, if November was about things not turning out as expected or planned, and facing post-COVID and first-Thanksgiving-without-Mom depression, then December is all about getting back into the good groove of things. And if a little Christmas magic happens a long the way I’ll take that too! 

This Thanksgiving is So Sad

Calling back to the house grief 

we thought was so bad.

This is worse: we weren’t there 

for her last breath.

We should have done more 

while she was still alive 

before we lost her to death.

Stopped the bad medication 

forced her to walk 

and drink water,

took away her wine 

not lived so far away 

visited more often 

spent more time.

We didn’t know

what to do 

we did the best 

we could 

we gave as much 

as we had 

to give.

But is that really the truth? 

I don’t know but this holiday 

is making me think about 

diseases - of depression, 

alcoholism and Alzheimer’s - that 

I hate, and Ghost of Thanksgiving 

past, pointing its bony finger at me:

You didn’t do anything!

You didn’t do anything! 

and now it’s far too late.

You Know You’re Watching Too Much Netflix When

You dream 

that you have 

an entirely different Mother, 

an entirely different Father - the actor 

from “The Wire” horribly miscast as 

Prince Charles in the latest season of 

“The Crown” - but it was the same old story

We were trying 

to figure out what 

they liked, we were trying 

to please  them, to make them 

happy, in the kingdom of family 

they were our sovreign, we 

their subjects, eternally

*****************************************************

This man, entirely too handsome to play that man!

🤣

(In Love With) Songs About Ghosts

Just in time for Halloween, all the songs I’ve ever loved about Ghosts!

“The Ghost in You” - The Psychedelic Furs - The Ghost in You (Official Video)

Indigo Girls - “Ghost” https://youtu.be/KwbeHSI-3Co

Kristen Hirsch’s “Your Ghost” 

https://youtu.be/ZfW4-nP2G1Q

“Ghost in this House” Alison Krause 

https://youtu.be/5nP0gMVpp1c

“Dancing with Your Ghost” by Sasha Alex Sloan 

https://youtu.be/Qzc_aX8c8g4

And one that I like about Monsters…Skinny Puppy’s

“Monster Radio Man” https://youtu.be/qhg6lai7dcE