une evasion de la vie quotidienne.

As soon as I stepped off the plane in Calvi, Corsica, on Thursday night, I let out out a sigh of relief and wonder. Six hours earlier I had been in the lab, sweating and stressing over locusts. The project wasn’t going well; coordinating with my supervisor wasn’t going well; communication between us and the other research team sharing the lab space was downright horrible. This setting is not good for your health.

But as I stepped onto the tarmac, I absorbed the sun. I felt the mountains. I smelled the sea. Life was about to get better.

By the time I took a taxi into town, checked into my hotel, dumped my stuff, and headed out the door, dusk was coming and there was about to be a sprinkling of rain. Clouds were rolling in, but it didn’t matter. I had no idea what the city held, so I hiked up to the most obvious interesting part: the citadel. The wind blew my hair as I looked back over town, across the bay, and into the mountains. I was free from locusts, on my own, in this beautiful new place. Why weren’t more people up here!? (Probably, the rain.)

Then I walked down through the port and out onto the rocks. There’s no better way to calm yourself down than to sit by the water, looking at the horizon and listening to the waves. This was just what the doctor ordered.

And so began three days that I would call one of the best vacations I have ever taken. I don’t spend much time vacationing in warm places – usually I’m chasing snow – but Corsica was a reminder that focusing solely on winter is a mistake. Between this and the trip that I took to the canyons of southern Utah last spring at about this same time, warm places are asserting themselves as pretty darn great.

I slept so late on Saturday, waking up just in time for the hotel’s breakfast. It was bright and sunny and I needed to get out exploring. A quick look at the map revealed a huge peninsula just south of town: Punta della Revellata (things are always mixed up French and Italian). That’s where I headed, running along the road for ten or fifteen minutes before dropping down onto a dirt track along the coast. Every time I turned a corner I wanted to stop and take in the view, or take a picture. It took some discipline just to get 20 minutes before taking a water/photo break. It felt like forever to get to the next acceptable break.

At the end of the peninsula is an oceanographic studies center of some sort, so I started finding dirt roads to follow. I followed them, winding back and forth up the steep slope, until I got to the top of the hill, almost 500 feet over the Mediterranean. The great thing about being a retired athlete is that every day doesn’t hinge on executing a well-conceived workout. I set out to go on a run. But everything around me was too much to take. By the time I reached the top, I had to stop and appreciate what was around me. I climbed up onto the rocks and lay in the sun for a long time, succumbing to the reptilian warmth-seeking genes I inherited from my mother. (Love you, mom!)

Finally, I ran home. I’d probably run just an hour and a half, maybe 1:45, but I was tired – the sun takes it out of you, as does a week of getting only five or six hours of sleep per night. I hadn’t been taking care of myself, and part of the point of this vacation was to fix that.

For long periods of my life, I did not take vacation. After I entered middle school, we barely ever took family trips; in college, I visited some amazing places, but my travels always had a purpose, whether it was work or training or racing. The idea of just taking vacation – to do nothing – was foreign.

Now, as an adult balancing school and a job and living by myself, I have a different outlook. The harder you work, the more you need a break. Think of it like intervals as an endurance athlete: you can do long threshold intervals with short rests in between. Or you can do really hard, short intervals, where you need rest more frequently. At this stage in my life, I’m doing some very high-intensity intervals. I can go on one weekend trip and feel like I’ve come to a revelation about some aspect of my life; apparently it took five to realize that I need to keep taking these trips.

I needed recovery, and I am going to keep needing it. I have to build it into my plans. Burnout is not an option; periodically doing nothing is a very good one.

I arranged the trip less than a week before leaving. With my current project, I have to work most weekends and holidays. In theory I split these obligations with my supervisor, but I’m never quite sure what her schedule is, which leaves me in the lurch and often on the hook. So, suddenly, it was a mad dash: I need to get out of here. I can get out of here! Train tickets, a plane ticket, a hotel reservation. And here I was, running back along the rocky coast of a famous island. (Besides all the Napoleon stuff, Christopher Columbus was apparently born in Calvi.)

And it’s amazing that I have the opportunity, and the means, to something like this. I am a lucky girl. This semester my trips have never been more than long weekends, but they have gotten progressively more expensive: each time, the hotel ten Euros a night more than the last. After a few trips, that adds up. And Calvi was the worst; you can stay somewhere cheap, or stay somewhere decent. I’ll be skimping for two weeks to make up for it, but it was completely worth it, even the ill-advisdely pricey last dinner I ate at a restaurant in the citadel, overlooking the harbor.

The island has incredibly natural beauty. I wish I could have spent a week, or a month, exploring it all. With little public transportation, I was limited to forays on foot from town, but even just in three days, just around Calvi, I was amazed by what I could do. I would spend the mornings running or hiking (I’ll post a separate photo gallery from my last hike), and then make sure to spend each afternoon on the beach.

By the time I left on Sunday, I was in a different state of mind, a more calm, relaxed, and centered state of mind. It was hard to say goodbye to Corsica, because I really fell in love. I want to come back in two months, when the Tour de France rolls through with three long stages. (I can’t; it coincides with the week my project is due.)

I want to come back every spring for the rest of my life.

That probably isn’t possible, but I know that I will be back. So in that way, and with my newly zen outlook, it wasn’t so hard to say goodbye after all.

cuisine sans cuisine.

(that’s “cooking without a kitchen” for you Anglos.)

Even casual readers of this blog probably know I love to cook… and since I don’t think anyone reads this besides my friends and family, hopefully some of you remember a meal I cooked for you, hopefully with fond memories.

When I was accepted into grad school, I knew that a major part of my life was going to change. I’d be moving every six months to various cities around Europe. There would be no more cob ovens in the backyard, no more potluck pizza parties; no more summer nights concocting each new flavor in the hand-cranked ice cream maker; no more spring days sweating over a boiling vat of water as I pressurized cans of newly-cooked-up jams.

I did a farewell tour of my favorite cookbooks, then packed my bags for Europe.

At first it wasn’t so bad. In Sweden I had a great communal kitchen and great hallmates; I’d whip up huge curries and soups that I’d eat for days, and I’d bake strange and adventurous desserts to share with my friends. I’d leave cakes on the counter with a note that said “eat me”; one morning, I found a note back that said, “thanks, mysterious cake baker. you saved my day!” (I still have the note.)

For my friend Katie’s birthday, I made a cake, frosted it, and we had a great time decorating it with pink and purple sprinkles, flower-shaped sugar candies, and Disney princess candles. It was a hit.

Then I moved to France.

Not only do I not have a kitchen in my room – that was fine in Sweden – but the group kitchens are atrocious. There is one kitchen for thirty people; it has no ovens. Just a few stovetops and a few sinks, and one table, and sometimes some chairs. There are no cupboards, so you can’t store anything there; by default that means no communal cooking equipment. You own all your own stuff and store it, with your groceries, in your room. Luckily, we have small refrigerators. But our rooms are tiny enough as it is (mine is just nine square meters). So you don’t keep much.

The one time I have used the kitchen, I made donuts – well, beignets, with a nod to Todd – for my classmates. We drenched them in vanilla sugar. They were delicious. Other than that, the kitchen is just too much of a pain in the ass.

So what’s a gourmet addict to do? Believe it or not, there’s a lot you can cook without a kitchen. Am I happy? No. Am I eating? Yes. Tonight’s dinner:

Pretty romantic. And yes, my whole room, basically, is lime green. It’s not as jarring as you would imagine.

If you are in a similar situation (with the kitchen – not the lime green paint, you’re on your own for that one), the most important thing to do is to buy an electric kettle! You need to be able to boil water. Other appliances are great too, but that’s the bare minimum, and that’s what I did, for not too much money at the Casino Geant. It’s like a Wal-Mart. Yes, first I lost my kitchen privileges, then I started shopping at the French equivalent of Wal-Mart. What is my life coming to!?

So when the shit hits the fan, here’s how to eat. A guide to cuisine, sans cuisine.

Sandwiches

If you’re not American, skip this part. Apparently everyone else thinks sandwiches are stupid. I used to agree with them; I just never liked them that much, and then I went through this summer where I could eat at a dining hall but I was always gone for mealtimes so sometimes I’d eat PB&J three meals a day, and that did not improve the sandwich outlook.

But: sandwiches can be great. If you put no effort into a sandwich, it will suck. But think how much time you put into making a “normal” meal. Now put half that time into a sandwich. It’s going to be great! Even if it’s not even half the time.

In Sweden, I had great combinations of soft cheese, lingonberry jam, chicken, and cucumbers. In France, it’s a paradise with which to make a sandwich. You have great bread. Amazing cheese, of every provenance and type. Mustard? heck yeah! Cured meats sliced thin. Sauces and spreads. Olives and pickles and fresh vegetables. I like to throw in apple slices. You can make a different sandwich every day, practically.

Do not fear the sandwich. Turn it into a meal. The sandwich is your friend.

Cold Things in Bowls

Basically everything else I eat is a pile of food in a bowl. I don’t own a plate; I own two blue ceramic bowls that I bought at IKEA. So, food in a bowl. The first category is cold things in a bowl.

The most obvious answer is salad, but as a single person, I don’t buy greens; they always get slimy before I eat them all. So my cold bowls have other bases, and are usually topped with a homemade two- or three-ingredient vinaigrette that sometimes contains mustard. Some recent ones:

Avocado, pear, hard-boiled eggs (made in your electric kettle!), cheese

Purple cabbage, lentils, apples, nuts

Tomatoes, cheese, cucumber, tuna

Panzanella: bread salad with tomatoes (like this)

Use your imagination and go wild. Vegetables are your friends; so are fruits (fresh or dried); so are canned beans and legumes. Meat and cheese are good additions. I’m inspired  here because soon it will be so damn hot that you won’t want to eat anything cooked anyway; salads are the way to go. If you think at any point, “I’m spending this much effort on a goddamn salad?” think of the Salade Nicoise, which is delicious, famous, filling, and has a ton of stuff in it. Seriously. A meal.

Warm Things in a Bowl (or Cold and Warm Things Mixed in a Bowl)

So let’s go over that electric kettle thing again. There are some obvious things you can make in there, without it even seeming to weird: ramen noodles. Just put ‘em in a bowl, pour the boiling water over them, cover, wait. They’ll get cooked. Frozen vegetables, too. Powdered soups.  And more adventurous quick-cooking items like couscous, Chinese egg noodles, dried mushrooms. Pour, cover, come back in five or ten minutes and voila.

But I’ve been working to test the limits of what you can cook in an electric kettle. One thing is for sure: just boil things in water. You don’t want to boil anything else to the bottom of your heating element. Or, who knows, I haven’t tried, but it sounds like a big mess/burn waiting to happen.

So: pasta. Easy. You just have to make sure the water doesn’t boil pasta foam all over your counter, and that you wash the kettle well afterwards so your morning coffee isn’t made out of pasta water. Most even have a sifting spout, making draining super easy.

But also: vegetables. Think of ones that you would usually steam. So far I’ve had great meals with broccoli, green beans, and even asparagus that I cooked in the kettle – yes, asparagus, prepared in the least gourmet way possible. Which leads to lots of options.

Tonight’s dinner: tortellini, tomatoes, and green beans with olive oil

Last night: Chinese egg noodles with peppers (frozen), mushrooms (dried), green beans, and curry sauce (store-bought)

Penne with broccoli, tomatoes, pesto, and chevre

You get the idea.

Breakfast

This is no problem. You can’t fry up any eggs and bacon, but luckily, France has the biggest yogurt selection in the known universe. I could try a different kind every week the whole time I’m here and never get bored. I usually top it with either jam (or marmalade), fresh fruit, and/or museli.

Plus, I can always walk around the corner and get an amazing pastry, because I have the rocking-est local patisserie (bakery) in town. Maybe I’m biased, but I swear La Mie de Pain (get it?) is the best. I don’t even have to tell them what I want, they just give it to me. In other news, I’m probably eating too much pastry…

…. And Junk Food

This makes me sound incredibly healthy. Despite the two-week diet that was pretty successful, I’ve gained all that back… mostly in junk food. Shit. My life is stressful, okay!? You can buy individual-sized tiramisu in the yogurt aisle; that’s a popular dessert, or maybe just a tiny tub of Hagen-Daaz (they sell boxes with one-serving tubs of different flavors… yeah I’m screwed). There are so many kinds of chocolate bars to choose from. I try to snack on fruits and nuts but every time I go to the grocery store, I’m enticed by crap. Delicious, delicious crap. These people take their cookies seriously.

Finally: the two-euro wine in the story is way better than American two-buck-chuck. Heck, it’s often even made right next door. So if you’re food isn’t that great, rinse it down and you’ll be way happier.

Kitchen problem solved.

The End.

cevennes on the trail of RLS.

I have been hoping to write this up for some time and have finally given up…. so here it is, a quick note and a photo gallery. Last weekend I didn’t really have the weekend off from work, I had to give a presentation on Monday which I hadn’t started putting together yet! And also I wasn’t sure whether I would have to come into the lab on Sunday afternoon. So I put together an unusual travel itinerary: get on the train in Montpellier at 7 a.m. on Sunday, go to the mountains, have a nice night, and then get back on the bus there at 7:15 the next morning to return in time to do my work. Most people don’t plan 24-hour trips this way, but it was great!

I got all the way to Saint-Jean-du-Gard, about 1 1/2 hours away, for less than six and a half Euros, on the train and bus. I was staying at the Château de Cabrières, which I would highly recommend; as far as Chateaus go, it was pretty cheap, and an absolutely amazing location. There were extensive grounds to wander around and my room had not only the huge bed (my requirement for travel these days) but also a huge window, with big French shutters like you imagine in the movies. The Chateau was up on a hill, so the view out the window was over the village and then into the next hills and valleys.

I dropped my stuff off (they were nice to let me check in early) and then hit the trail: the Robert Louis Stevenson Trail. I am now dreaming of coming back and doing a through-hike when I’m in my 40′s. It would be much different than the American style – you can stop and stay at gites, in small villages, or even in chateaus like this one – but it is quite long and has a lot of elevation gain and loss. My out-and-back run on a small section was a blast.

After a great dinner in town, probably the fanciest food I’ve eaten in France at half the cost of a comparable meal in Montpellier, I nestled down, exhausted, to enjoy that big bed. The early morning light woke me up and it was back to Montpellier. Although I would have loved to stay longer, it was a great one-day getaway. The Cevennes National Park area is huge and I was just scratching the surface – I will have to do much more exploring if I have time.

blue skies again (in my dreams).

After so many happy posts of a life of productivity – I was running! I read Cloud Atlas and loved having time to read so much that I quickly bought four more books from Amazon! I had finally cleared all my bureaucratic hurdles! – I disappeared because things got more grim. There is little running to be had these days, as my advisor took a well-deserved vacation that had the unfortunate side effect of leaving me to run the lab for the week. Plus I have a paper due tomorrow. It rains on the weekends and that encapsulates my mood.

But a bright spot was a visit from my lovely cousin Emily. As I mentioned it rains on the weekends, so my promises to take her to the beach were turned into a cruel joke. But on Sunday we managed to find a patch of blue sky and a nice olive grove in a park where we had a picnic of food we had bought at the market the day before: fresh sourdough bread, goat cheese, handmade sausages, a mix of olives, dried kiwis and coconut cubes.

In general, it was really fun to have a chance to explore Montpellier as a tourist. I realized that I haven’t made all that much of an effort to see everything that is here. It turns out there is an amazing art museum, and we spent a lot of time wandering around different parts of the city. I found new ideas of places to go for dinner, and I’m perhaps most excited about a tea shop that offers not only your own pot of some crazy unique combination of teas but also incredibly delicious pastries. Now that’s good for a rainy day.

It still doesn’t remove all of the sting of living in a city, but it was a relief to find some more “good city” things to do. I’d rather not live here, but it’s a nudge away from “bad city.” A much-needed nudge.

Life was darn good and I was lucky to have her come!

Mostly, though, I’ve been working. I even have to go in on the weekends, which is frustrating since my classmates don’t. I guess there is a benefit to working with computer models, but I also guess that despite all the added work of working with actual biology (hint: it’s the study of living things….) I am, you know, working with living things and not only computers.

Plus, locusts can be some beautiful shades of green.

And it’s not like it’s nice on the weekends anyway.

I have taken measures to combat the downturn in conditions. Like, one night I sat in the courtyard park of our residence and drank beer with Andres. It was a welcome respite from 10-hour workdays in the lab after which I’d come home and frantically try to write but end up procrastinating. It turns out he was in a worse situation than me as his advisor went through a bad breakup and basically stopped coming into the lab or communicating… always remember, it could be worse.

Meanwhile, I started doing things that are symptomatic of a breakup as well.

Eating tubs of store-bought tiramisu (you can find it in the yogurt aisle, I love France!)? Check!

Painting my nails sparkly bright pink? Check!

Sipping some local white wine out of a glass jar as I type this? Check!

I discovered the musician Grimes, and love her music (also her feminist tirade). There’s one song that starts, “baby I can’t say / that everything is okay / I’ve got a problem / and I don’t know where to start from…” I thought about sending that to my advisor when I realized I had to cut the number of individuals in my experiment in half. Maybe without the “baby” at the start though. And it wouldn’t have mattered since she wasn’t really on e-mail.

I’m not miserable, although there are days my body tells me, I long to run. A long run. Hopefully this week with my advisor back I can hit the road again. And hopefully I can rad a few chapters so that I don’t have to lug pounds of paperbacks along with me the next time I move. It’s just a reminder that when you lead a life so busy, as so many of my friends do, there are ups and downs, rushes and ebbs in the pace of life and the number of “extra” things you can take pleasure in each day.

If you can’t fit in the things you normally enjoy, find something to replace them.

Like tiramisu.

Cheers.

bureaucra-see part deux, at the doctor’s office.

Doesn’t look like much, does it?

In America, if you want to do something stupid and ill-advised, that’s usually just fine. Say you die – so what? Well that was dumb of you!

Not so in France. If you want to do anything athletic at all, you need to have a signed doctor’s note saying that you are healthy enough to participate. In some ways it makes sense, but in others, what the- why!? How many people die each year at 5 k road races? How about intramural soccer games? Maybe a few heart attacks could be prevented by telling people who were at risk not to do sports, but I’m not even so sure about that. Some people know they are at risk; some would probably want to run a road race anyway, if it makes them happy.

And yes, people tear their ACL’s and whatnot, but that just happens, it’s a risk you know you take when you decide to play. They are called sports injuries for a reason, and that’s because they are an inherent part of sports. These kinds of injuries happen from the bottom level of sports all the way up to the very top, and no doctor’s note is going to make a tendon change its mind about snapping.

In my mind, here’s how this system came into place. Doctors weren’t getting enough business. Hmm, they thought. How can we get more people to come in? I know! We need to see the healthy people, not just the sick ones! So let’s try to think of a way to get perfectly healthy individuals to be forced to come see a doctor a couple times a year… hmm… yes! I have it! We’ll just require them to come see us before they do anything that’s, oh, I don’t know, completely normal for a healthy person to do!

Anyway. After I signed up for my marathon, I knew that I had to get one of these darn doctor’s notes. I put it off for a while, and eventually discovered that the university health service does this kind of thing for free. Great, I thought! But then it took another two weeks for me to get an appointment and make it into the office.

Because here’s another thing that bugs me about this system: it’s a pain in the ass to go to the doctor’s. They’re only open during working hours, and you know what I’m doing then? I’m working. It’s a relatively small barrier to participation, but it seems like erecting any more inconveniences and barriers to sports is a bad idea, even somewhere like France where there are a dearth of fat people. We shouldn’t be creating any more excuses not to exercise – or, forget the exercise in itself, to taking part in fun group activities that are so emotionally beneficial.

So, I finally figured out a day when I could come in to work late, and there I was. (And I should preface this account by saying that everything was discussed in French.) When the receptionist asked what I needed the note for, I said a running race. She laughed, like, a serious one? Yeah, I said. Then she laughed a lot more. Ha, ha, a whole marathon or something crazy like that! She rolled her eyes.

The receptionist took my height and weight and asked me to read an eye chart. When I replied to her questions by saying I didn’t smoke, no not even cannabis, nothing, and I didn’t take birth control pills, she gave me serious side-eye.

Then she asked me if I ate three meals a day. Where did I eat lunch, the university restaurant?

The fact that she said “good” when I replied the affirmative was troubling, because the food at the university restaurant is shit.

Things were not off to a good start.

The doctor was slightly more sympathetic, in that she did not laugh at me immediately (that came later). But my next challenge was explaining to her that yes, I did have asthma, but it probably wouldn’t be an issue because it’s only brought on by the cold.

How many times a year to you use your inhaler? She asked.

Oh I don’t know, a few.

Has an attack ever made you stop running?

No, I said, I’m never running when it’s cold enough to give me asthma. Then I’m skiing.

So when you’re running do you ever have heart palpitations?

Umm, no, what?

Well will you be carrying your inhaler with you just in case?

No, I mean, it’s going to be June in southern France, the chances of me having a cold-induced asthma attack are pretty slim…

Next she examined me for scoliosis, which I guess is nice, and took my heart rate. She expressed surprise and approval that it was so low. Blood pressure, too: “parfait.”

I was asked to do 30 flying squats, so that she could see how my blood pressure responded to activity. I’ve never been asked to do that before, but it’s a good idea, actually. So off I went. La la la la la la la, 30.

The blood pressure was again “parfait” but the good doctor was troubled that my heart rate had jumped. It increased a lot, she said. And all you were doing were 30 squats – do you really think you can run 40 kilometers if your heart rate does that?

My initial reaction was to be pretty offended. Yes, of course I can run a marathon! I didn’t quite know what to say. Had I really been working that hard? The squats had felt pretty easy, and my old Tabata instructor Jon – whose workouts I really miss, incidentally – would have been yelling at me to push harder, that I could do 25 in 20 seconds, or whatever. Standing in the doctor’s office in my bare feet, without a shirt and facing the doctor, I had gone at a pretty pedestrian pace.

As I mulled over the troubling possibility that I had been working really hard to slowly squat down and stand back up, she reached over and took my wrist to check my pulse again. Wow, she said, okay. It’s only been a minute but it’s already back to normal.

Now we were getting somewhere. I explained that the last weekend I had run 35 kilometers in 3 hours and felt fine, so I was pretty sure I could finish the marathon with no health issues.

Have you run a marathon before? she asked.

No, I said. Just a few halfs.

So this is your first one? Are you sure you are going to be able to do it?

I wanted to say, well, you have to do the first one once, or else how would anyone ever have done one before… but what was the point.

After a few more questions – many about a detailed history of my family’s heart health – she signed the sheet above and I was done. I felt even more ridiculous than at the beginning; I had imagined getting some sort of official-looking form describing my medical history. Instead, all of that was for a half-sheet of paper that doesn’t even say anything useful (but has, as all things in France must, an official stamp!). Are you kidding?

As I biked to work, I thought more about my heart rate, and realized that she probably had no idea what a high heart rate would even be for me. Okay, so at rest, it’s around 55 or 60 these days. That could double and I’d be working at the rate of an easy jog. It could triple and I’d be working pretty hard, but still not at max. I don’t think most people can see their heart rate go from 60 all the way up to 195, so she probably had no idea that I wasn’t working all that hard.

This is another reason the whole system is so stupid: you go to some doctor who doesn’t know you, and yet they are supposed to be able to quickly draw a conclusion about your suitability for sports. It’s so similar to other French bureaucratic messes that I have encountered, in that deep at the core it’s maybe a nice idea, but in practice it is so poorly executed that it just creates a hassle for everyone without fulfilling its actual purpose.

Oh well. I have the signed note, and I should never have to do this again, because after this summer it’s goodbye, France.

*       *       *

I have been thinking about trying to write something about the events that happened in Boston this week, and I have been struggling. Part of it is that it is difficult to process what is going on; I’m so far away, and it’s not exactly a top-headline news story in France. I know that if I was at home, everything would seem so much more immediate to me.

Every once in a while someone will realize that I’m American and ask me if anyone I know was affected. What do I say? None of my friends died or got their legs blown off, is that what they want to know? But yes, we were affected. I know so many people who were there at that marathon, either running or supporting friends and loved ones, and I have so many friends who simply live in Boston.

For me, it’s a double whammy against two of my communities: New England and running. A gut-wrenching shock. I can’t see or understand what’s happening all the way across the Atlantic, but I know how horrific it must be. These are great people, and they do not deserve any of the pain, physical or emotional, that has been inflicted on them. Luckily, I know a thing or two about New Englanders, and runners. If there is anyone who can weather this storm and help each other out, it is these two incredible communities of people. Already we have seen so much strength.

But that’s not really it, either. It comes down to what it means to be an average joe of an athlete. I’ve been at big sporting events where there was tight security; it was kind of a nuisance, but I knew exactly what sort of an impact it would have if some group attacked World Championships or something like that. It would get at a system where athletes generate a huge amount of money for themselves and their sponsors, where fans are rabid for their city or country or just their favorite athlete. Professional sports are inspirational and exciting and hopeful, but also economic and, to some extent, a matter of luxury. It wouldn’t be any less horrible if something bad happened at a professional sporting event, but it’s something our minds are more prepared for – something that government suits warn us about, at the very least.

The Boston marathon, on the other hand, is none of those things. The man who won, Lelisa Desisa, is an incredible athlete who is now two-for-two in marathons and is surely destined for more great things. He’s a professional. But if you look him up on the internet, you can barely find any information. He’s Ethiopian and is sponsored by Nike. You can bet he’s not raking in the big bucks; nor is he probably making Nike too much money either. Does he have other sponsors? Who knows. Distance running is not a particularly lucrative endeavor.

Instead, Boston is about everyone else. Talk to anyone with a passing commitment to marathons, and they’ll talk about the year they ran Boston, or that they’re planning to, or that they are working towards qualifying. It’s something special, not something you do every year; it’s also a very difficult marathon. Heartbreak Hill is famous even beyond the running community. And so the honor of running in Boston creates an incredible environment. It’s uplifting to see what “normal” people, our cousins and brothers and friends and teachers and bosses, can do. You always want to congratulate them and urge them on to greater heights, which is why Boston draws so many spectators for what is, at its heart, one of the more boring sports to watch.

Come marathon day, people are fulfilling their dreams and goals. Even if you have a bad race: you have run Boston. You did it. That’s a huge accomplishment.

To imagine that running towards those dreams could ever put you in danger – not from a moose or shin splints or a speeding car or a dog that slipped under the fence, but from a bomb – messes with all of our minds. It’s not supposed to be this way.

It all feels especially strange given that I had finally decided to re-enter the running community for real, and had signed up for my own very first marathon. It’s easy to imagine that another year, that could have been me crossing the finish line in Boston after four hours. It makes that much more real the threat that our community feels, and what has changed. As I run more and more in the next few weeks, this will likely be on my mind. I want to do a good job in my marathon for those that weren’t able to have the race they had dreamed of on Monday.

Let’s hope that things are not changed for good.

old new.

When I “retired” from skiing – every month that seems like a more ridiculous way to describe it, since retiring implies that someone cares that you quit and I was never good enough for that to be true – I imagined that the times where I tested myself physically, where I charted a course for new athletic horizons, was done for good.

I knew I’d always be an athlete, jumping in a road race here or a ski race there. Perhaps, if I went in a new direction, I’d take up cycling or rowing as semi-serious pursuits. That’s the only way I could picture myself revisiting the crazy life of butting your head against the wall over and over in an effort to improve, and investing yourself enough in racing to risk the psychological damage that comes from a disappointing result. But at the time, I was ready to move on, excited about being a grownup and getting a job. From that point forward, sports would always take the backseat to the “real” part of my life. I imagined never again putting on rollerskis; leaving my heart rate monitor in a drawer in New Hampshire; training logs becoming a thing of the past.

One by one, of course, I broke those rules. The first to go was the rollerskiing, as soon as I moved to Oregon. That year, too, I put on the heart rate monitor, albeit only a few times. After two years of Pepa’s meticulous testing and recordkeeping about VO2Max, lactate thresholds, and other physiological data, the scientist in me was curious to track this experiment on myself: how fast would my fitness decline? But it was only a sporadic interest.

A few weeks ago, the last barrier fell: the training log. The winter of 2003 was the first year I kept a training log, dutifully counting the hours I spent skiing for my club coaches Scottie and Dennis, and I continued right through 2011. Eight years of training logs. Two years without.

This spring has been challenging in a number of ways as I adjust for the first time to a city that has very little in it for me. I knew earlier this year that when I moved to Montpellier, I’d be done with skiing for the season. I had heard that it was not bike-friendly, and so I abandoned my dreams of buying a used road bike and simulating the Tour de France a couple times a week. That left running. Over the course of the winter, I mentioned casually a few times that maybe I’d try my first marathon in the spring. It would have to be an interesting one: maybe through a big, old city somewhere in Europe, where I’d have lots of architecture to look at to stay occupied. As a skier, marathons were always a disaster for me, and the prospect of running 26.2 miles on pavement didn’t excite me much either. A trail marathon would be a no-brainer, but there would have to be something special to entice me into a normal one.

When I first arrived in Montpellier I couldn’t find anywhere to run. I couldn’t find time to run. The marathon seemed like it was not destined to be.

After a month, I changed my mind. I needed something to focus on, a task to plan for, a goal to look forward to. The other things in my life in Montpellier were not doing the trick. I began looking at the marathon schedule here in France, but another challenge was that I don’t do well in the heat. There were some interesting races in the spring, but I didn’t think I’d be ready; once it hit June, I was terrified of running in one of the country’s notoriously furnace-like cities. I found a small marathon in Sauternes, a famous wine region outside of Bordeaux, that coursed through some vineyards on the first Sunday of June. I checked historical weather data. It might be hot, but it equally might not be hot. Pictures showed happy men and women running along dirt tracks between the rows of grapes. This was my marathon.

I signed up.

After the years of ski racing where all indications suggested that I ought to be good at marathons, but I just simply wasn’t, I was acutely aware how miserable it can be to get stuck out there in a race for a couple hours, working hard for the sole reason that then you can finish sooner. I didn’t want that to happen again. If I was going to race a marathon, I wasn’t going to do half-heartedly and risk 26 miles of hating myself. I needed to be fit enough to have a good time – it wasn’t about winning, but rather enjoying the experience. If I went into this thing un-fit, there was no point. In that case it would be better to spend that June weekend doing something else more fun.

So, the training log.

I was emphatic that I didn’t want it to look like the google document that I shared with Pepa every day back in Craftsbury. I wanted to be organized again, to have a plan, but this couldn’t be like when I was training for skiing. After all, I have a different life now. I was in class – now doing research – and I don’t have a gym membership. I can’t alternate endurance workouts with strength; it’s hard to train twice a day; I don’t want to track my heart rate on every run. There will be fewer intervals. My life is not dedicated to training, and I don’t want to compare it to the time that it was, as such a comparison can only be discouraging. So I made a simple Excel spreadsheet: miles, minutes. Pace.

Even more than the training log, the mileage tally was a huge and scary mental step for me. The last time I kept track of miles was back in 2007, when I was still running on the Dartmouth cross country team. Those were not happy days for me, athletically; my sudden jump in results in skiing was like a godsend that allowed me to quit running and do something much more fun. I’d had an iffy relationship with running races for years afterwards, which I’m just beginning to get over. In skiing, we track hours, not miles, and I was always happy with that.

But I needed to track miles. It’s one thing to do a three-hour run and assume it’s 20 miles and is preparing you well for a marathon. But what if you have no idea how fast you’re going and it’s actually 15 miles? Then you’re not so well-prepared. I needed to know these things. Miles it would be. I created an account on mapmyrun and figured I would map every workout. It could be fun.

The first week was tough. I had felt pretty okay when I signed up for the marathon; one of my last weekends in Sweden, I had competed in a 40 k ski race and felt pretty good. I had even stood on the podium and won some money, and it was incredibly fun. I couldn’t be that out of shape, I figured, if I could do well in a Vasaloppet seeding race, classic skiing against a field of all Swedes.

One of my first runs after deciding to track these things was an hour long. I patted myself on the back. Then I saw that it was just about six miles, and I was running ten-minute miles. Ouch. The next day, I figured I’d do a long run – an hour and a half. An hour and 25 minutes later, I called it quits. When I got home and mapped the route, it was just eight and a half miles. Again, over ten-minute miles. In the comments section of my Excel spreadsheet, I wrote, “Felt slow and horrible. Went slowly. am ashamed.”

So, things were not going to be easy. I was terrified and embarrassed. How could anyone take me seriously if I couldn’t take myself seriously?

But the great thing about being a former full-time athlete is that you know you can work your body pretty darn hard. You want to get better? Well, just work. Maybe you’ll be going more slowly than you used to, but you can still put in the time and energy, and you know that it’s physically possible. The next week, I ran 30 miles. That’s not that impressive, but I began to feel a little better. Maybe part of the problem had been that my body just wasn’t used to running. There were still bad days, where I was sluggish and tired, but there were better days, too. Running felt a little bit more possible.

And since then, training has definitely had its ups and downs. I talked to my friend Lynn – thanks for reading and offering inspiration, Lynn, I am so lucky! – who said I needed to do four to six 20+ mile runs. I knew she was right, but it was daunting. Last Sunday I decided I’d give it the first try. My goal would be to run for three hours; I’d only have a watch to time when I needed to drink and eat, and when I got back I’d map it out and, if all went well, it would be 20 miles. I was preparing to be destroyed, to bonk in that last hour (my previous longest run had been an hour and 40 minutes, 11 miles), to come home and collapse into bed. I remembered the days in Craftsbury, where an OD would be rewarded by sitting on the couch all afternoon reading a book, or maybe taking a nap. These were luxuries that no longer existed for me, now that I have an adult life and more commitments. I was nervous.

But it wasn’t so bad. I felt surprisingly strong for most of the run; the last hour I really started to fall apart, but it was regular-grade fatigue, not a bonk. I felt my form disintegrate, but I was still going. I never hit the point where I had to walk. This was surprising.

What was more surprising was when I returned and saw that I had run over 21 miles at 8:06 pace. What!? How was that possible? That was almost twice as long as any previous run, and at a faster pace than the vast majority of my short runs. So that was a high point.

But just as often, I felt pretty mediocre. When I started my research project in early April I was immediately spending long days in the lab. This wasn’t computer work, and it wasn’t sitting in class. I was on my feet for hours at a time in a room set at 32 degrees C (90 degrees F) so that our locusts could reproduce. I’d come home exhausted, completely shell-shocked, and dehydrated no matter how much water I tried to drink. Then I’d stay up late finishing other work that I couldn’t sneak in here and there during the day since I wasn’t at a computer. It wasn’t surprising that some of my runs felt pretty run-down.

Then there was this, too: I’m not mentally the same person as I was the last time I took running seriously, but that mind is in a different body too. One day I was thinking, “man, my legs feel heavy.” Then I realized: well, Chelsea, that’s because your legs are heavy. Like, they weigh a lot. You’re sort of fat and are not built like a runner anymore – you lost that years ago, and the time since Craftsbury in particular has not been kind to your thighs and ass.

But despite the bad days, the times where I mean to run and then can’t find the energy, I’m feeling more confident. It feels good to have a plan, and it feels good to check things off. Right now, it’s what I control in my life. Yesterday when I got back from a hilly 18-miler through the vineyards, I was a little bummed that it wasn’t 20 miles. But I was so satisfied, at the same time. I had done something with my morning. Somehow, humming along with one foot in front of the other provides a deep sense of contentment. My running time is my own, and I’m happy when I do it.

Finally. I’m happy again when I run, reliably happy, happy enough to be able to make a plan and follow it week in and week out without needing to bolster my less-fun running with more-fun bikes or skis or rows.

It feels like a victory to return after so many years. Yes, there were brief stints of this feeling in Florida and in Oregon, but there I was just running – now, at last, I’m trying again to be a runner. There’s a difference.

Which is why, when I added in my run yesterday, I saw something astounding. In the last seven days, counting Monday which I took off, I had run a total of 68 miles.

For someone training seriously for a marathon, that’s maybe not so impressive. But I’m training as an extra layer on an already-busy life, even if I am deliberate about it, and this impressed me. Not even when I was running in college had I ever run so far in a single week.

For the first time in years, I crossed a line into uncharted athletic territory. And in the next two months, I’ll do it again and again. It feels good.

lifestyles of the always-complaining.

We had a three day weekend for Easter. We went to Monte Carlo.

Okay, that’s not quite right. We went to Nice for the three-day weekend and one day we went to Monte Carlo. Let’s be clear: we can’t afford to stay in Monte Carlo. Nor, really, even eat dinner there.

I contemplated not even writing about this trip. I don’t know what to say about it – I went with my classmates and we had a good time.

But the juxtapositioning to my previous trip bears noting. I almost considered not going to Nice; I didn’t know much about it, but traveling to see a city just because it’s a city that people go see isn’t really my style. I didn’t come to France with a list of things to see, cities to visit, checklists of things you’re supposed to do when you’re in France. I had some ideas, but Nice wasn’t one of them (and Monte Carlo certainly wasn’t).

It would be so nice to travel with company though, with my classmates who I love. What was I going to do otherwise? Stay in Montpellier, the city that makes me un peu malheureuse? Duh. I was going. (This was confirmed as a good decision when, two days before we left, my friends were talking to our buddy Reto, a Swiss guy who had also done an exchange semester in Sweden, and he looked up tickets and decided on the spot to fly to Nice and meet us for the weekend. If I had missed that, it would have been terrible and embarrassing.)

When we arrived we wandered the city streets and eventually found a Lebanese restaurant that served up a mean Moussaka. We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around, to the beach and boardwalk, up to a park overlooking the city. We soaked in the sights and it was great. So fun to be done with classes – we had finished the day before, and this was a celebration. We soaked in the atmosphere of no responsibility.

The next day, Monte Carlo. As we walked out of the station, the sun on the Côte d’Azur was so bright we could hardly see the paradise around us.

We wandered down the streets of this immaculately planned and landscaped city, seeking the water. There’s not much space; tall luxury apartment buildings swooped skyward, roads slithered underneath. Monte Carlo is built onto  steep slope that tumbles down to the sea; sometimes you don’t realize how tall the buildings are because you don’t know that you’re not staring at the window on the ground floor.

It was almost silent; when you have your own personal chef and house staff, why would you leave your condo at nine in the morning? You’d sit on your balcony or open the windows of your bedroom and admire the weather, the blue that seems to reflect off of everything. Or you could go up to your rooftop garden, lush and green from all the photosynthesis of the Mediterannean spring. And soak in the quiet, the calm of cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars not yet plying the streets.

I don’t know who cleans Monte Carlo, or when, but by morning, it is immaculate. In so many ways a very unnatural place; as biologists we should have been appalled. But it didn’t feel sterile. It was nice to see a street with no trash, to not have to worry about stepping in all of the dogshit you find in France itself. There were flower beds everywhere, of course blooming. It smelled like flowers. This must be science fiction.

We found a playground. This was an affordable way to enjoy the city.

As we walked down the last street towards the port, I saw bikes flash past. My first thought was, man, if I was rich enough to live here I would buy the fanciest frickin’ road bike you’ve ever seen, and I would be so fit and and have a great time. Then my second thought was, wait a minute, that was a lot of bikes going really fast. I think there’s a bike race!

There was!

This was paradise, I thought.

This surprising development was enough to convince even my classmates to stand in the sun and watch for a little while as the jerseyed riders streaked past luxury yachts. I explained how a criterium worked. It turned out to be a disappointingly lame crit: just a one-kilometer loop with two turns. But they were steep enough to bunch the field up nicely. Still, even just a few laps in, there were groups separated by almost half the length of the course.

You can only watch bicycles race around in loops for so long, so we began to wander down the port itself, looking at all the fancy boats. We laughed at their names, imagined what the owners had done to get all their money, and joked about what we would do if we were lucky enough to own one of those boats. I tried not to imagine how much it must cost to have a slip in the port of Monte Carlo.

After a rainy previous day in Nice, it was enough for us just to take in the sun. I hoped I wasn’t getting sunburned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We spent the rest of our time walking around, buying an overpriced and honestly not that good lunch (should have just sucked it up and payed a truly exorbitant amount for something good – if you’re buying lunch for a reasonable price here, they know you’re not their core customers…), and walking around some more. It was lovely.

As was the rest of the trip when we returned to Nice. I try to have a structure in my life: wake up in the morning, run, go to work, come home, answer e-mails or work for FasterSkier, make dinner, keep working, read something before bed. There’s little downtime, it’s always on to the next task. Now that I’m training for a marathon there’s an extra layer of control, even for me: you have to run at least this far, you have to not eat too much, you have to remember to sleep. To get away from that all for a weekend was liberating in a different way than going on a ski trip. There’s two kinds of vacations and both are very necessary! I felt guilty when I came home; over three days I had only run once. Unacceptable. But the standards I set for myself can be high. This weekend I was a normal person. And I know I will go back to being me, so it was fine.

It was more than fine. It was great. It was the Côte d’Azur, and I’m definitely coming back for another vacation later in life. The blueness of the sea, the tropical trees, everything. Delightful.

Now imagine racing around this corner in an F1 car: