Hey Guys, I Went to England Briefly!

Last week I had a BIG ADVENTURE. On Friday my boss called and said that there would be some emergency testing and that I needed to go observe the tests. After some frantic e-mailing on Friday night and Saturday, we finally found out that the testing would be taking place in Chelmsford, Essex, UK. So after finding out what country the testing would be in on Sunday around 11am I boarded a plan to London around 9pm on Sunday night.

This was, if possible, rather more stressful than it even sounds because:

• I have a big chunk of travel coming up and it wasn't clear whether it would just glom into one long trip
• What to do with the dog on such short notice??
• My friend Clara was supposed to visit me the following weekend

Luckily, I was able to get everything sorted out, Clara will be able to visit a different time, my brother was able to take care of the dog, and I was able to pack 4 different types of wardrobes all in my one suitcase!

Also luckily:

There was champagne available, because I work for an oil company and it was a long enough flight to sit in FancyPants Class.

Once at Heathrow, I took a series of trains to get to Chelmsford, which I found to be pretty charming. There was shopping, Marks and Spencer, and cheap Indian food, so I had pretty much everything I was expecting?

Further, because it was a small enough town there weren't any chain hotels to stay in. Therefore I got to stay in the very charming County Hotel. It was great. There were tea and "biscuits" every day when I got back from the test facility.  As an aside, can you imagine a product in the US being described as "the driest oatiest imagineable" in a positive context? I cannot.

Here are some pictures to prove how charming the hotel was:

Cute Window Alcove (Also I don't understand when to use Flash)

Bed Area

Useful Desk Area (Also Featuring Tea Service)

Bathroom Mirror

Shower Mirror???

The idea of a shower mirror was profoundly weird to me. Luckily, it steams up almost as soon as one starts using it, making it much less of a vanity exercise than it might otherwise have been. I video chatted with my friend Caroline during my trip and she said that there is also one in her shower area in Israel so it might just be a foreign thing. A foreign concept shall we say?? (wah-wah)

On the last day, I caught up with my friend Jenni who I know from the wilgier days of yore. We met in London and first did some seeing of the sights:

Big Ben Clock

Then, since the weather was miserable and I still had my suitcase and my backpack with my 14lb work computer, we did the sensible thing and dropped my stuff off at the hotel and went drinking. It was sometimes snowing and sometimes wintery mixing (my least favorite precipitation), and as you can see from the photo I had forgotten that it would be WINTER or perhaps forgotten what WINTER means. 

The sights were obviously really cool and it iiiisss sooo convenient that they are so close together, but the drinking/talking portion of the festivities was the highlight for me. I think that Jenni and I have very similar thoughts on our current jobs and also share an experience where we are becoming more feminist as we get older. We talked nonstop for more than 10 hours, some of which was clearly spent catching up on life events, boys, and Happenings In The Lives of Mutual Acquantances, but a good part of which was spent on more general engrossing conversation about Life Choices. 

Also, I had an interesting revelation about my personal struggle to maintain a clean apartment and an organized life. My job has morphed into a role where I am basically counted upon to be a good organizer, which is fine for now because when that is clearly my role I am quite good at it. However, after doing that for 9 hours it's hard to come home and do yet more organizing. This doesn't make the problem go away, BUT it does make me understand why I have such a problem motivating myself to do those things and easier to not beat myself up about it. 

This realization came about during a part of the conversation where we talked about how as the young ladies in our respective workplaces we sometimes feel pushed into this organizing role since we are perceived as being more organized than the young dudes in similar roles. By itself, this isn't a problem. What CAN and HAS happened in some cases though is that this role comes to be seen as the "girl" role and people get it into their heads that we are doing this because our technical skills are not as strong as the people who are not in this role. This is clearly ridiculous, the new hire women wouldn't have been hired if they did not have the same technical credentials as their male counterparts.  It's just that the women happen to be head and shoulders ahead in this area.

Obviously this statement is a gross generalization and men and women fall at all points along the spectrum of organizational abilities. However, this isn't the first time I've felt that I had this issue in common one of my fellow young females in an engineering environment. I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has ever had a similar issue and how/ if you had found a way to deal with it.

Hey Guys! I ran a Marathon!

I think I mentioned here, and if not I think that I talked everyone's ear off elsewhere, about the fact that I had signed myself up for the Austin Marathon. As with all good decisions, I decided on it after personally drinking approximately a bottle and a half of wine when I went to Boston at approximately the beginning of the Olympics season last summer/fall. Somehow I was given to understand that my friends Erin and Sarah were planning on running the race, I'd had such a great time meeting up with Sarah and other college friends to run the Monterrey Bay Half Marathon the year before, and as a special bonus it was on my list of badassery to take care of before I go to the great dog park in the sky.

Well, I did it! And here is the proof:

Before we continue, some notes about the hardware and this picture:

• Yes, it turns out that if Austin Texas had to pick the four most representative things about itself, they would be the state capitol (allegedly 1ft taller than the United States Capitol because.... you can guess why I don't need to tell you),  the University of Texas Main Building (where the race started and finished, so relevant), a cow (actually a steer, actually a Longhorn, just in case the University of Texas main building thing was, like, subtle, or something), and Willie Nelson. Its... important to have one's priorities straight, civically speaking.
• I LOVE Texas. Sometimes its like that dude who really only has one defining personality trait, which is hilarious for about three weeks, then really gets on your nerves for a WHILE. Then slowly it dawns on you that if he weren't there being like that, every gathering would be just a bit sadder. 
• Yes, this is a picture of my medal hanging from a light fixture in my apartment, so you CAN see my bookshelves with of my knick-knacks in the background. Yes, I did go through a phase in highschool art where everything I did was vaguely asian themed (terracotta solder, box with meditating dude on top...). No, for some reason my parents didn't want to keep those things when I moved all my things.
• Yes, my apartment has built-in shelving. My apartment is the best.

There isn't a logical segue back to my topic, so I'll just pick the train up and putting it back on the tracks. I ended up finishing in 4:40.04, which was right on pace with what I had, in my dreams, wanted to go. My first goal was to finish (obviously), and my next goal after that was to be somewhere between 4:30 and 5:00. So, DONE!

Sarah finished the marathon (her 2nd!) as well, but I am not sure how much of the details of her race it is my job to talk about on the internet, so I'll just let it be known that she is a Total Badass. Erin ultimately wasn't able to join us because she was injured in the course of her training. We definitely missed her though, and I spent a mile of the race thinking of all of my favorite Erin stories to try to compensate. :(

The two aspects of the race which I was the most worried about were the hills (depicted below) and some knee issues I had been having in the course of my training. As you can see from this picture I took from the race website, miles 9-19 were uphill. This is a problem because Houston is very flat so I had not had the opportunity to do any hill training whatsoever. I compensated by doing long runs which were a little longer than I would have done otherwise, a strategy which seems to have mostly paid off.

                        

The knee issue reared its head around Christmas time and had been presenting itself (rearing?) ever since. I started having some pain which felt like it was in the outer meniscus of my left knee, which would start as a dull ache and then eventually get stabby if I kept running on it. 

I made a couple of unsuccessful trips to some really unhelpful doctors, and then eventually through talking to friends developed a theory as to what was causing the issue, presented that specific issue to a doctor, and then finally found something which helped me to get through to the end of my training. It was a frustrating process.

The most aggravating incident of the medical saga took place when I went to see a fellow billing himself as a "Sports Medicine Specialist." I explained to him that I had been training for the marathon and that I had started to have some knee pain, and then he sat back and looked very thoughtful for a moment. "I'll bet.... that you've hurt it running!" he pronounced as though he had arrived at the cure for Cancer and it happened to be eating sour gummy worms. His suggestion for getting better was almost as insightful, he thought that I should "Try to run less."

This is not a complaint against doctors in general, many of whom have been quite helpful to me in times of need, just a couple of the individuals I encountered in the process of trying to make it to the race. 

In case you are curious, the issue, which I understand is quite similar to an issue my friend Fiona had when she trained for and ran the Boston Marathon, was that I had an overstressed IT band. That is a muscle which runs between your hip and your knee on the outside of your leg. It is a very hard muscle to stretch, but if you start to run a lot and fail to make a concerted effort to do so it just tightens and tightens and tightens like a ratchet over time. At this point, if you have weak knees you'll have a pain in your knee or if you have weak hips you'll have a pain in your hip. In my case, the answer to get me through to the end of the race was to start a very rigorous program of foam rolling to work out the tension as much and as often as possible. I also started taking a glucosamine and chondroitin supplement to help repair and damage I might have done to my joint. That helped ease up the pain enough that I could continue my training mostly on schedule. 

Now that I'm done, I've signed myself up for a month of yoga classes at a place near my work. I think that this will help me regain flexibility I lost in the course of my training, but also I think that if (probably when, I enjoyed it a lot) I run another I will incorporate some sort of formalized regular stretching/flexibility workout to help avoid this issue again.

Some of you might be wondering, what is R2 doing now that you are not running so much??? The answer is: BEING ANNOYED. There is a fenced-in dogpark nearby (which also happens to be a bar) so we've been going to that as often as possible to give her a chance to run off all of her energy, but mostly she is filling up her newfound free time with lots of looking at me expectantly. I'll leave you with this example: