upside down and underwater?
So over a week ago I did a race. It was kind of a big deal, but I’ve been too disorganized to write about it because I’ve been busy answering to the mistress that is grad school applications. I’m really tired; it’s possible that I fell asleep in our lab meeting today. While my real boss (the postdoc) definitely made fun of me afterwards, I’m pretty sure that the big bosses (the professors) didn’t notice because they don’t really notice me in general. Phew!
So – I’m overworked. Getting up at 3 a.m. to watch and then report on biathlon races on Sunday probably wasn’t a good idea either. In hindsight, it was obvious that it was completely stupid, but for some reason I did it anyway.
On a related note, if anyone knows what the hell the difference between a personal statement and a letter of motivation is, please, drop that knowledge on me.
But anyway, last weekend I did the Civil War Relay, a 52-mile race from Corvallis to Eugene. Out here people call the Oregon State-University of Oregon football game the “Civil War”, which as a reasonable person who understands history kind of offends me. OK, more than offends me. We live in America, and the Civil War, capitalized, means something specific, something really bad and sad, something that defined what our country is today in many, many ways. It’s not a thing where you sit in a stadium and get drunk and party. But anyway. I digress.
The relay features teams of five, and everyone runs five times, roughly two miles per leg. I, of course, got stuck with the only three-mile leg as well as the only one with any significant uphill – oh well, I can’t complain too much. As I was completely exhausted and kind of a zombie, I didn’t really run very fast, but our team still managed to be the top open team – that means that we were the first team with at least one woman. Woohoo! We finished in 5 hours and 41 minutes. And oh yeah, in typical fashion, we wore red dresses. It was good fun.
At some point I’ll get some more pictures that do NOT involve porta potties and do a real race report, but here’s what you need to know: it rocked. I love relay races.
