on saturday, my volcanology class hiked mt. etna. it was about two hours straight up, but it was fine--luckily i've been doing an hour of calisthenics every morning, plus running 10 miles every other day.
wait, all of that is a lie.
the truth is, my running "career" has..how shall we put this..skidded out a bit. i mean, i'm still trying: every day i walk five minutes to school, walk up about 20 stairs, and am on a strict diet of 4,000 carby calories. (last part was kind of a joke...kind of).
i know that one day when this dreams ends (actually, in less than a month...whaaa), i kind of have to get serious about training. i haven't gotten too far outside the fitness orbit, but wanna have a successful senior season, blah blah blah.
so my roommate found this group of runners, and she asked if i wanted to try. this was a sink or swim situation. my first thought was, "i should do it once before i leave." my second thought was, "i will have to wake up at 5 am." one won out. my alarm went off at 5:08 am tuesday morning.
i was planning to hit snooze but was suddenly paralyzed with fear. maria had promised me that they go "slow" and only do "between 10k and 15k" at a time. okay, so...anywhere from 6 miles to 9ish. COOL. my weekly mileage has been..oh, i don't know, somewhere fluctuating between 0 and 2.5 for about three months.
but i went. and i was shaking. maria had told the group--anywhere from 5 to 20 tiny Italian marathoners, gym-owners, runner's world models, etc.--that i would be coming, and they were excited to meet me. walking from home to the bridge where they meet i just kept repeating this phrase over and over in my head, practicing: "mi dispiace, sono stanca, voglio fermata." i'm sorry, i'm tired. i want to stop.
on the way to the bridge we ran into skinny runner couple #1, who are 45 and 50 and both hovering around 100 pounds and 25 years old in looks. they kissed me on both cheeks. i thought, you might be the last people to kiss my cheeks. because, you know, i might die.
a little white car pulled up beside us, and pepe, wearing a large raincoat and spandex to my tank top and short shorts, leaned out the window and told us to hop in. the bridge was about ten feet away, but these people like to do a strange thing: every morning before they meet the others, they drive around the island for five or ten minutes blasting italian music. they sing. loudly. i relaxed a little, letting my ears swallow the sound, because, you know, it might be the last music i heard. it wasn't a bad last song, either. but let's not get too morbid.
so we started. three minutes in i realized that "slow" for these people is actually rather "fast" for me. well, "fast" now that i considered climbing the stairs to my apartment three times a day a great form of fitness. i looked at maria. she was boppin along. cute running couple looked like they were sleepwalking, and pepe was high stepping. i immediately regretted that maria and i hadn't set up some sort of secret signal so she would know when to call the ambulance. could i shout? if i said it in english, would it be less embarrassing?
this all sounds very dramatic. because it was. i half-expected the rocky theme song to be playing from every passing car. my legs seized up. my chest was tighter than lisa rinna's face (gotttttem!). we were six minutes in.
well, i didn't die. the wife of the cute couple, thank god, has some sort of heart condition that means she can only go fast for a short period of time before resuming human running pace. i hung with her. every few seconds her watch beeped to let her know her heart was still kickin in a good way, and i let that rhythm guide me for the next 45 minutes. i have never, ever, ever, ever, ever been so happy to see that white car. i am dead serious about that.
we slowed down a bit at the end, and carlo said, "jessica...10k piu? i...buy for you...grande gelato...con panne...if you come 10k with me..."
CARLO.
how did he know i was a sucker for whipped cream?
but no. i politely declined, because i am sure carlo wouldn't have much appetite for gelato after seeing me splayed on the street crying.
they said they want to take us out to pizza before we leave.
they are meeting again tomorrow. i am going.
because...you guys...pizza...duh.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Thursday, April 8, 2010
apples and onions
if you are ever sitting in a floating sauna in the swedish countryside, sweating your head off in 90C heat, and you are playing the game apples and onions (also known as roses and thorns), where you pick the highlight and lowlight of a certain past period of time, it is always better to say the onion, or lowlight, first. even though i like onions. when i play this with my campers during the summer, i like to have them say their lowlights first, so that they can then be completely overshadowed and taken over by the highlight. so, looking back on the past week, here is a game of apples and onions. onions first.
i am an idiot. the morning of the sauna was, and i quote, the best day of my life. jokin, but not really. we went to stay at johan's country house and his parents made us this ridiculous swedish breakfast and then we went to the sauna, floating on a mostly frozen lake, and spent 20 minutes dying of heat exhaustion before plunging into the icy lake, which was cathartic and terrifying and amazing. the point is, the heat is supposed to open your pores and all the bad stuff (toxins but also, i like to think, stress and negativity) is supposed to leave you, and then the freezing water is supposed to be this shocking cleansing agent and you're supposed to feel all renewed and stuff. and i was, trust me. in that tiny sauna on that massive frozen lake outside of stockholm where there was a wood stove and a dog to play with and a head scratcher (one of those half-whisk things that massage your skull and OH MY GOD HEAVEN) i felt a kind of peace (don't laugh) that i haven't felt in awhile. it wasn't new or completely unfamiliar--but different.
so while all the stress of trying to straddle the atlantic ocean (i've given up, actually) disappeared, so apparently did my sense of logic and reasoning. because later that day, in the afternoon of the best day of my life, i realized i had left my passport on tucker's desk in copenhagen, a 5 hour train ride away. i realized this, of course, while trying to check into my flight from stockholm to milan monday afternoon. i called tucker and god i love him but his stoic response of "...did you need this...?" was the perfect start to a whirlwind 48 hours of operation get into denmark without a passport and take a metro two flights multiple buses and many tears home.
so that was kind of an onion. another onion was that i almost got arrested by a danish metro officer because i'm sorry that i cannot read danish (it's a character flaw, i know) and did not know that the piece of paper i had on my person was actually a receipt and not, in fact, a ticket and i have only been in copenhagen for 12 hours and most of this was spent wearing tucker's sweatband and watching family guy (to be fair, i'd already done the whirlwind copenhagen tour a few days earlier, after stockholm but before the country house, so i felt entitled to a night of quagmire and bitch stewie [get my episodic reference?]) and i was not actually trying to smuggle drugs into the metro just because i had a wallet full of kroners that i didn't have time to exchange back and NO I DO NOT HAVE A DANISH SOCIAL SECURITY CARD BECAUSE I AM NOT DANISH. I AM NOT DANISH. I AM SORRY, BUT I DON'T LIVE HERE. FOR THE NINTH TIME. AND AGAIN. FOR THE TENTH TIME.
that was another onion. nothing sets me off more than when short men who look like hitler think their dumpy metro uniform makes them TOUCHED BY A HIGHER POWER TO MAKE THE LITTLE PEOPLE BENEATH THEM MISERABLE.
but apples! there were so many.
1. suzanne was in stockholm. this was clearly fate, and meant that in a span of 5 days and two cities i was hanging out with a high school friend, a college friend, a camp friend, and italy friends, which was ridiculous. and we went to an ice bar, in which we put on these massive furry parka things and bumped into lots of other people wearing parkas and drank out of ice cups and just lived our icy lives.
2. johan made reindeer and we watched titanic. that there is no better man in this world than the character of jack dawson = apple. that he does not actually exist = onion.
3. the sauna, duh.
4. seeing my skinny friend tucker (he claims he eats alot but this is simply not true) in copenhagen, which i could tell was a wicked hipster, progessive and awesomely liberal city despite the freezing rain.
4b. christiania, the seventh smallest country in the world, which is a micronation inside copenhagen and has only three rules: no violence, no hard drugs, and no weapons. which means a lot of love, people. and hash. and love. and weed. so love.
and more. there were the two little girls posing like mannequins in the window of the hard rock cafe in copenhagen (something my sisters and i used to do ALL THE TIME); drinking coffee in a stockholm prison from 1300; the hilarious multi-story swedish club we went to where literally every girl was a legitimate supermodel (not joking) and we were in a corner in our jeans and cardigans laughing at this; the train back from copenhagen where we sat across from one (1) cat in a carrier and two (2) dogs. not sure if this was allowed.
so in conclusion, there are many apples in scandanavia. some onions, too, but onions are good. especially if you sautee them and eat them with ketchup. (call me giada, but that is my specialty.)
oh i forgot! my luggage is kickin around in rome still. but hey. just add ketchup...
i am an idiot. the morning of the sauna was, and i quote, the best day of my life. jokin, but not really. we went to stay at johan's country house and his parents made us this ridiculous swedish breakfast and then we went to the sauna, floating on a mostly frozen lake, and spent 20 minutes dying of heat exhaustion before plunging into the icy lake, which was cathartic and terrifying and amazing. the point is, the heat is supposed to open your pores and all the bad stuff (toxins but also, i like to think, stress and negativity) is supposed to leave you, and then the freezing water is supposed to be this shocking cleansing agent and you're supposed to feel all renewed and stuff. and i was, trust me. in that tiny sauna on that massive frozen lake outside of stockholm where there was a wood stove and a dog to play with and a head scratcher (one of those half-whisk things that massage your skull and OH MY GOD HEAVEN) i felt a kind of peace (don't laugh) that i haven't felt in awhile. it wasn't new or completely unfamiliar--but different.
so while all the stress of trying to straddle the atlantic ocean (i've given up, actually) disappeared, so apparently did my sense of logic and reasoning. because later that day, in the afternoon of the best day of my life, i realized i had left my passport on tucker's desk in copenhagen, a 5 hour train ride away. i realized this, of course, while trying to check into my flight from stockholm to milan monday afternoon. i called tucker and god i love him but his stoic response of "...did you need this...?" was the perfect start to a whirlwind 48 hours of operation get into denmark without a passport and take a metro two flights multiple buses and many tears home.
so that was kind of an onion. another onion was that i almost got arrested by a danish metro officer because i'm sorry that i cannot read danish (it's a character flaw, i know) and did not know that the piece of paper i had on my person was actually a receipt and not, in fact, a ticket and i have only been in copenhagen for 12 hours and most of this was spent wearing tucker's sweatband and watching family guy (to be fair, i'd already done the whirlwind copenhagen tour a few days earlier, after stockholm but before the country house, so i felt entitled to a night of quagmire and bitch stewie [get my episodic reference?]) and i was not actually trying to smuggle drugs into the metro just because i had a wallet full of kroners that i didn't have time to exchange back and NO I DO NOT HAVE A DANISH SOCIAL SECURITY CARD BECAUSE I AM NOT DANISH. I AM NOT DANISH. I AM SORRY, BUT I DON'T LIVE HERE. FOR THE NINTH TIME. AND AGAIN. FOR THE TENTH TIME.
that was another onion. nothing sets me off more than when short men who look like hitler think their dumpy metro uniform makes them TOUCHED BY A HIGHER POWER TO MAKE THE LITTLE PEOPLE BENEATH THEM MISERABLE.
but apples! there were so many.
1. suzanne was in stockholm. this was clearly fate, and meant that in a span of 5 days and two cities i was hanging out with a high school friend, a college friend, a camp friend, and italy friends, which was ridiculous. and we went to an ice bar, in which we put on these massive furry parka things and bumped into lots of other people wearing parkas and drank out of ice cups and just lived our icy lives.
2. johan made reindeer and we watched titanic. that there is no better man in this world than the character of jack dawson = apple. that he does not actually exist = onion.
3. the sauna, duh.
4. seeing my skinny friend tucker (he claims he eats alot but this is simply not true) in copenhagen, which i could tell was a wicked hipster, progessive and awesomely liberal city despite the freezing rain.
4b. christiania, the seventh smallest country in the world, which is a micronation inside copenhagen and has only three rules: no violence, no hard drugs, and no weapons. which means a lot of love, people. and hash. and love. and weed. so love.
and more. there were the two little girls posing like mannequins in the window of the hard rock cafe in copenhagen (something my sisters and i used to do ALL THE TIME); drinking coffee in a stockholm prison from 1300; the hilarious multi-story swedish club we went to where literally every girl was a legitimate supermodel (not joking) and we were in a corner in our jeans and cardigans laughing at this; the train back from copenhagen where we sat across from one (1) cat in a carrier and two (2) dogs. not sure if this was allowed.
so in conclusion, there are many apples in scandanavia. some onions, too, but onions are good. especially if you sautee them and eat them with ketchup. (call me giada, but that is my specialty.)
oh i forgot! my luggage is kickin around in rome still. but hey. just add ketchup...
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