Blackout, Bubbles, Beethoven, Blood, Beer and Pho. Just your typical weekend in the land of FrayedLaces.
BlackoutFriday: In case you missed it, the entire island of Oahu was out of power for over 12 hours. I was in the middle of Waikiki when everything went black. Immediately I thought "cool! people are going to riot!" and ran outside. I forgot that the majority of the people in Waikiki were bewildered tourists, so it was very anticlimactic.
Saturday: I used the power outage as an excuse to sleep in. When I finally dragged my sorry butt out of bed, I set to cleaning my poor, neglected Pele. I gave her the love and attention she needed after carrying me through 150 miles in the past few days. When I was done, she was gleaming and purring with contentment:
BubblesRight as I was finishing up with her, the power came back on. Not wanting to face the fact I was back into modern-times, I escaped further responsibility and went for a swim at Ala Moana. It was a picture perfect day and I was ready for a long swim. This is a good beach to swim at because you can swim parallel to shore and it is just like a swimming pool.
From edge to edge it is 1000m, a white pole in between (you can see it in this picture) marks off 500m. I decided to swim 3000m and break my swim into 500m chunks, doing a different drill for each chunk. By the end of my swim I found minor tweaks that took
one minute off my 500m time. Pleased. Very Pleased, indeed.
Beethoven To add a little class to our lives, some friends and I headed off to the symphony. We got all gussied up and pretended like we do this all the time. I must say, I need to hang out at the symphony more often! From husband-wife matching Aloha print poinsettia outfits
to 80 year old women wearing Guess sequined bras,
it was quite the fashion show. I think we laughed the whole time. We ended up staying out a lot later that I thought, and before I knew it I was staring 1am in the face with a looming 4:45am wakeup. Awesome.
BloodSunday: Reluctantly I woke as scheduled and choked down some coffee with a clif bar while I gathered my trail supplies. I left the house to this gorgeous view:
What, you can't see it? That of course is my beautiful panoramic view of Diamondhead at 5am. But ain't that streetlight real pretty?
I was a little concerned about finding my car in the dark, but my brand-spanking new Maniac bumper sticker made it pretty easy to find:
(In case you can't see it on my bumper, it was raining. More to come on that later)
I met up with the gang to "run" a 20-mile loop on the trails of Tantalus. This loop is part of the 100-mile ultra trail run called the
H.U.R.T. 100 . Our friend the Punisher is running it, and I (along with others) am going to pace him for sections of it. Although I had done two 10-mile section of the loop before, I had never "ran" the actual 20-mile loop. Now, please note that we "ran" this trail but we did not run the trail. To run the trail would be next to impossible, so your next best option is to "run" the trail. Have I lost you let? Maybe this elevation profile of our loop will put things into perspective:
The downhills were to steep to actually run, so we had to "run". The flats we could reasonably jog (about 10% of our trip was composed of this) and the uphills we trudged up as best we could. In total it took us just under 7 hours to do this loop. Basically it was raining the entire time, and we were running in ankle-deep mud and water. The trails turned into rivers, even waterfalls at some point. And when we weren't in the water we had to deal with the roots:
I forgot to charge my camera battery before the run, so I couldn't take any pics. But here are some other people's pics of the trails (on sunny days!) that i stole from various sites:
I have been out on parts of these trails a few times, and usually love every minute of it. Today, I was miserable for every minute of the trail. I was ridiculously tired and stupidly thought a clif bar would be a big enough breakfast. I didn't eat enough the day before and have not been properly hydrating for the past few days. And did I mention it was raining? We're not talking cute, pitter-patter mainland rain, folks. We're talking Hawaiian rain. As in "you've pissed off the gods" kind of rain. Most of the trail is on switchbacks and the path is just a few feet wide. One wrong step---say Aloha as you plummet a few hundred feet. Simply zoning out or humming a song to distract yourself is not an option.
And to top things off, I ate it. Right as we're coming out of the Manoa Falls loop, which is the most popular hiking trail in Hawaii that old grandmas can handle, I take a tumble. I looked off the path for one second to check out a rooster and my foot catches a board sticking out of the ground. My knees, elbows, and palms scrape along the ground and I get a face full of mud. Thankfully? The Punisher had his cell camera to document my muddy, bloody mess. Look closely for the river of blood down my left leg and the stigmata wounds on my palm.
Leave it to me to fall at the most benign part of the trail. This happened at mile 7 so I had to run the remaining 13 miles with nasty gashes and a knee that throbbed with each step. I think I said all of 5 words in the last 13 miles. I was irritated, hurting, cranky, cold, and just wanted to go home.
Beer and PhoWhen I finally made it home I had to re-open my wounds to scrub them and sanitize them. Despite how glamorous that sounds, it sucked. I know some people that have gotten staph infections from cuts on the trails, and leptospirosis lurks in the water up there, so I wasn't taking any chances. I am seriously going to have to keep an eye on these cuts over the next few days, since they are pretty big gashes. After I re-opened them, sterilized them, and dropped a few f-bombs I grabbed some takeout Pho and washed it down with my Sam Adams Boston Ale. 20 minutes later I was snoring on the couch. What a waste of a perfectly good Sunday.
*Update: add blood blister to the list. I just found one that was hiding---under a big callus on my big toe. Ah, I have the
sexiest feet ever!*
