Motivation Monday: Five Trail Races Between March and May

The whole family got muddy on New Year's Day, me trail running
and Mike and Muffin mountain biking.

Last year I ran around somewhat aimlessly, just trying to recover from injury while still wanting to run the Army Ten Miler. I had no real training plan, other than going to my chiropractor regularly and making sure to do yoga and strength training. After a Did Not Finish at the Blessing ten-mile race in Narragansett in July, I was more determined to pay attention to my injury and caring for it. I also started looking at my diet, too. I absolutely did not have to lose weight and that was not my goal. However, eating a little healthier has not only given me strength for injury recovery and running more, but jeans and t-shirts that were beginning to feel uncomfortably tight started feeling comfortable again.

With injury prevention and running more in mind, I came to the realization that I was bored running on roads. Last spring I'd started seeking out trails to run on a regular basis and began enjoying it more than my road runs. The slower pace seems to suit my aging body without exacerbating injuries. So I started looking at trail races in the area. I found that Virginia has tons of them. After doing a bit of research, I decided to sign up for The North Face Endurance Challenge half-marathon distance at the end of April. Once I signed up for that, Facebook started advertising even more trail races in my feed. They are all so tempting. When I came across the Backyard Burn trail race series, I saw that they had a five-mile option for each of the four races. Three of the races occur before TNFEC so I thought that shorter races would give me the feel for trail racing without taxing my training at all. So I signed up for all four in the series during the early registration discount period. The last one is the weekend after TNFEC. I figure even if I'm still exhausted from the half marathon the weekend before, I can still fast walk it within the time limit and get my series finisher prize.

Weekly and yearly mileage as of
Saturday, January 5

January is my base mileage month. I'm already eating tons of food and taking naps at every chance. I'm setting small goals and taking it day by day. I'm doing a lot of yoga. I'm managing my time and planning and prepping meals as much as I can.

I don't plan on running the Army Ten Miler this year. After three years I'm ready to try something else. There's a fall Backyard Burn series as well. Maybe by then I'll be ready to run all four of them at the ten-mile distance rather than five.

For now, it's one day at a time. Run, eat, sleep, repeat. Work and parent and be a good partner in between those, too.

Give Girls the Opportunities to Play Whatever They Want

Yesterday I got together with an old friend, Vicky from The Mummy Chronicles. We've known each other since high school, long before blogging was a thing. We've kept in touch over the years but living in different states and different countries has made it difficult to see each other in person. Every time we see each other, though, it's like no time has passed. She's one of the few people from back then that I still keep in touch with regularly.

Our children met for the first time yesterday. The kids hit it off. A morning at the beach followed by lunch and backyard play, then ice cream, is a universally good day in the realm of kids. It was so nice that the kids are old enough to play together without needing adults, leaving plenty of time for Vicky and me to talk and catch up. When we noticed the kids were playing some sort of fighting game with a toy gun, a sword, and frisbee that doubled as a shield and a helmet I turned to Vicky and said she must have the same problem I do sometimes.

All our kids, four in total, are girls. And Vicky and I have both received comments, if not outright criticism, from other parents about having girls who play "boy" games.

This needs to stop. There is absolutely no reason for toys and games to be gendered. Saying that certain toys and games, such as "army" or "police," are boy games, is an insult to any woman who is in the military or in law enforcement and to any girl who has a parent or someone else close to them in those fields. Someone is really going to tell my daughter that she can't be in the military or be a cop like her father? Because by referring to those games as something only boys can play, that's exactly what girls hear. That's it's something they can't do.

I think a lot of parents don't even realize the content of their comments until someone else calls them on it. Or maybe they assume girls and boys grow out of these things and the careers they choose later in life have nothing to do with the games they play as children. What I see, though, is parents who are my age and younger, who grew up in the post-feminist movement, imposing gender stereotypes even more strictly than my parents' generation did. Look at those insipid Dick and Jane books. Jane may be wearing a pretty dress but she is playing the same games as Dick, with cars, in mud, and all that. Today, when I browse parenting boards, I see far too many posts from mothers talking about cars being a boys' toy. Why are we regressing? Some girls like princesses and that's fine. But are we really giving all our kids all the play options available or are we limiting them to what adults think are gender appropriate?

I'm going to throw this out here to think about: We need more female police officers right now. Which means we need to encourage young women to think of this as a career. Which means we need to let girls pretend to be cops when they play. There's been talk of police departments wanting to have more racially diverse forces to better reflect the communities they serve. We definitely need that. Let's work on gender diversity on those forces, too, since women make up half the population of this country.

We should be thrilled that they are playing outside in fresh air while the adults relax and talk, not worrying too much about the content of the game as long as no one is getting seriously injured. Parenting is hard. Why do other parents want to make it harder with gender stereotypes? There are so many battles to fight. I'm so tired of this one.

ThrowBack Thursday: Serengeti National Park, February 2009

One of the inspiration locations for my novel, the Serengeti.

(In case you missed it, read the blurb here and Chapter One here.)

Aloobari Monastery: Escaping Darjeeling to See Some Nature. And Losing a Shoe.

Day Three

Our host at Dekeling Resort finally understood that we wanted to take a nice walk rather than sit in the car. He suggested we take the Toy Train up the mountain to Ghum, then hike to Aloobari Monastery. We'd stopped by the train station the day before and the train was already sold out so we decided to take part in one of the Darjeeling travel traditions -- the taxi-share. We packed up Muffin, some snacks, and some dry clothes (because it was raining) in the backpacks and walked into town. We took a wrong turn, then ended up at the wrong taxi stand. A driver pointed us in the right direction. We passed another taxi stand and then another one. And a driver there pointed us back toward the last stand we'd passed. A driver there pointed across the street. It seemed like we'd been walking for nearly an hour and we'd finally found the right taxi. We decided to pay for four seats so we could have the large back seat to ourselves and have room for the backpack. We then had to wait for the taxi to fill up. Three more guys climbed into the front and a man and two women climbed into the wayback, and we were on our way up the mountain in a taxi-share!

The driver stopped a couple times to let off other passengers. No words were spoken; we were hoping we'd either see a sign or the driver would indicate to us when it was time to get out. We wanted to get out just after Ghum. We passed the Ghum train station and then saw a sign for the next town. And then we got stopped in pooja traffic again. More people celebrating the lunar holiday by parading through town with Buddhist texts on their heads. They were also tapping the heads of people on the sidelines so while we were stopped, Muffin stuck her head out the window and got herself blessed with a Buddhist text.

We inched along in traffic until a T-intersection came into view. The driver pointed to it and said "Aloobari," so we got out and walked from there.

Traffic

Taking a left at the intersection

The walk was great.

Every fifteen minutes or so we'd see someone and ask them if we were still going in the right direction. There had been a couple intersections; also, we had no idea how long the walk was going to be and if someone told us "short distance" or "long distance" it was completely irrelevant. We knew we were on the right path and we decided that if we were out there for six hours and still hadn't found the monastery or our way back to town, we'd flag down a car and pay any price they asked for a ride back to our hotel.

Luckily it didn't come to that. After maybe an hour of walking, some of it at Muffin's pace, we glimpsed this through the fog:

Aloobari was under renovation but the caretakers let us come in to take some photos.

From the monastery we could continue along the same road to return to Darjeeling. We were told "long distance," but we hoped that the man who told us that meant "long distance for tourists," which actually wouldn't be as long for us as it is for other people because we are hearty walkers. We were getting hungry and the weather was turning cool and rainy so we were ready for lunch.

Somewhere between this photo:

 and this photo:

Muffin fell asleep and when her foot relaxed one of her Crocs fell off and we never saw it. By the time I noticed it was gone, it was out of sight and none of the locals had seen it and picked it up for us (which often happens when one of her shoes fall off). We were too tired and hungry to back-track more than a couple meters so we wrote it off and figured we could find some fake Crocs in town.

The road brought us to Chowrasta, a pedestrian plaza in Darjeeling about two kilometers from our hotel. We stopped at a restaurant and ate some of the worst Indian food we've ever had. Muffin didn't even eat her dosa, and she loves dosa.

Chowrasta:

One of the roads off Chowrasta was a Cheap Chinese Plastic Mela so we browsed there for a new pair of shoes. Only one guy had fake Crocs and he didn't have a pair small enough for Muffin. On the way back to the hotel we stopped at every shop that looked promising but couldn't find anything appropriate. This meant a trip to the Western mall, as opposed to the Mall, a pedestrian walkway lined with shops and restaurants. So we went to the mall and not a single store sold children's shoes. We'd heard about a Thai restaurant and on the way we found a children's shoe store. The Crocs were all too big for Muffin and most of the sneakers were too but we finally found one pair that fit and, even though I thought they were ugly, Muffin thought they were cool so we bought them. (Two days later she announced they were too small and has refused to put them on since.)

We had an early dinner of terrible Thai food and took a taxi back to the hotel. We needed to get an early start the next day for our drive to Bhutan.

Day Four Coming Soon

Day One: 8 Days on the Road from Darjeeling to Bhutan. With a Preschooler
Day Two: Some Enforced Site-Seeing in Darjeeling

Some Enforced Site-Seeing in Darjeeling

Day Two
Since we had to go back to the hotel with Mike's passport for registration, we decided to eat at the breakfast buffet there. So another walk down the hill and back up it was needed. Breakfast started at 7:30 and we had arranged for a car to pick us up at the resort at 9:00 for site-seeing so we needed to get back-and-forth with a reasonable amount of speed, for India.

We didn't come to Darjeeling very prepared with touristy things in mind to do. We wanted to walk around, see some mountain peaks, and drink some tea. Tea was the easy part. The weather was too cloudy, and even rainy at times, to see the Himalayan peaks. There really wasn't much to walk to in town, especially if you wanted nature. So we decided we may as well start with the standard tourist package. We'd heard the zoo was worth the fifty-ruppee (one dollar) entrance fee and we wanted to tour a tea plantation so if that's all we could do that day, we'd be satisfied.

The driver was supposed to pick us up at 9:00 but everyone forgot it was a lunar holiday and traffic was completely stopped in town as celebrants paraded with Buddhist texts on their heads toward a temple. He showed up at 11:00. We had no idea where he was going to take us; we decided to go with the flow and see where we ended up.

Pooja traffic.

We ended up at the zoo, which is also where the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute founded by Tenzing Norgay Sherpa is. The zoo has red panda and snow leopard breeding centers. It's small, but seeing the pandas, a variety of leopards, and peeking in at the mountaineering museum was certainly worth the dollar we paid for admission. Muffin was fascinated by the mountaineering gear and the statue of Tenzing Norgay. She started talking about how she wanted to climb mountains. She even insisted on standing on the "little mountain" next to his statue rather than on the ground in front of him when she posed for a photo.

We unfortunately ruined the whole day for many zoo-goers who wanted to take Muffin's photo. We wouldn't let them. It slows us down and makes Muffin withdrawn. Plus, she's not an exhibit. We were watching the snow leopards. One was actually walking around very close to the front of the cage and I'd never seen one so close before, nor so active. They are always curled up as far away as possible. So I was pretty mesmerized and was enjoying myself. Until someone asked me if they could take Muffin's photo and they kept insisting after I said, "No." Eventually I said, "There's a snow leopard right there! Take a photo of that! My daughter is not part of the exhibit." I cannot get over the fact that so many people feel it's okay to intrude on our day to take a photo of Muffin and get insulted when we say it's not okay. It's never just a quick snapshot; even if it were, a quick snapshot for ten different people asking becomes a large amount of time for us. It's not as if she's a celebrity and she owes it to her fans. She's a regular little girl trying to enjoy the zoo with her parents.

Okay, that rant is over.

After the zoo we told the driver we wanted some lunch. I specified "Good Chinese food or good Indian food" so he'd have some idea of where to take us. He drove up to some kind of tourist attraction and we could smell the fried snacks. We were very annoyed. But then he pointed down a treacherous staircase along the side of the hill. "Go down there and cross the street." We did, and we saw a sign that said "Burmese Restaurant." We were hungry and didn't know what else to do so we went inside.

It was pretty dirty. But we got some fried rice and Mike had dumplings and they brought us a yummy cilantro soup. It made us warm and full and didn't make us sick later in the day, so that made it a good lunch.

When lunch was over we told the driver we wanted to tour a tea plantation. We didn't care about his enforced itinerary anymore. He seemed confused. He'd also seemed confused about our request for lunch. We were not sticking to the plan anymore. But Muffin could only last for so long and gosh darnit, we were in Darjeeling and wanted to see the tea.

The tea plantation was a pleasant surprise. We were at Happy Valley. The guide told us they are the only plantation that does tours. I have no idea if that's true or not. But it was free and I ended up buying some tea so everyone was happy. It was a tour of how the tea is dried and processed once it's picked and how the black tea, green tea, and white tea are handled differently. After the tour of the building we asked if we could walk around outside and the guide said it would be okay. Muffin took off down a path saying "Follow me, guys!" ("Guys" is a new thing for her. It's funny, but I still want to be "Mommy.") Then she saw some local children playing in the tea and the next thing I knew, she was climbing her mountain right into the middle of the tea bushes. She was running and laughing and having so much fun that we didn't stop her. We just let her go for a while. We could see her head and her red sweatshirt and we could hear her laughing and yelling. Eventually I followed so I could fish her out and help her back down the hill. She refused and kept climbing higher.

Just outside of Happy Valley, there was a little old lady with a snack shack who invited us in every time we walked past. Once we were done with our tour and our walk, we obliged her and went in for her tea. I'm a little confused about her operation but it has something to do with the tea that is given to the pickers each week as a supplement to their salary and she collects it and resells it so the pickers can get more money. She had several small bowls with different tea leaves in them. She taught us how to pick up a handful, blow on it, and then smell it to see if it's good tea. Muffin loved that:

Then she taught us the super-secret-special thirty-second brewing process. I found that it's just like brewing tea any other way, except the result is weak tea. Muffin loved the tea, though (with more milk than tea and a little sugar):

After our tea adventure we asked the driver to bring us back to the resort. We'd accomplished our goals for the day and Muffin was approaching melt-down time if we tried to squeeze in one more tourist attraction. Plus we needed to rest up for the walk back into town for dinner. We'd forgotten to put our order in at breakfast and we wanted to try a different restaurant anyway so we walked to the Mall and went to a Continental-style diner/bakery. We were hungry and it was edible.

We walked back up the hill to the resort for the night, remembering to put in a breakfast order before we went to bed.

Day Three Coming Soon.

Bhongir Fort, Hyderabad

About fifty kilometers outside of Hyderabad lies a little-known attraction called Bhongir Fort. The town of Bhongir is home to the "monolithic rock" where the twelfth-century fort still stands. And you can hike up that giant rock to the fort on top.

We've been looking for day-trip hikes to do with Muffin and a friend said he was going back to Bhongir and didn't mind if we tagged along at Muffin's pace. We brought the baby backpack but we let her start off on her own. We are always impressed with her stamina and endurance, for a two-year-old, but she blew us away as well as all the others in our party by insisting on walking up to the top all by herself. She held our hands in a few tricky places but she refused to be picked up.

She was so proud of herself when she got to the top. When she saw the view of the plains below she let out an "Oh wow!" that echoed through the fort. Then she very happily and very hungrily dug into the lunch I'd carried up for her -- chocolate milk, cheese, bananas, and almonds. As we'd been hiking up the last part, she said over and over, "Chocolate milk at the top!" and I think it became her version of "Just keep swimming," keeping her motivated.

We ate lunch and rested for a bit, walking around the fort and exploring. We decided to put her in the backpack for the walk down because it was so steep and she was so tired; none of us really had the energy to try and keep her from tumbling down. She protested, but as tired as we were, we were still bigger and stronger than she was and we wrangled her into the backpack. She fell asleep within about five minutes and stayed asleep for the whole walk down and the whole drive back to Hyderabad.

Going up...

and up...

and up.

At the top.

Coming back down.

The walk up takes thirty minutes to an hour, depending on the pace you're going. You can go straight up the rock or take a winding stairway around the sides of the fort.

To get to Bhongir, take the road to Warangal. At just under fifty kilometers, you'll notice some large rocks on the horizon and there's a sign for the town of Bhongir. There's a nominal entrance fee. We'd heard 60 rupees per person but we were charged something like 100 for all 5 adults, Muffin, and two cameras. We learned why we got such a discount on the way down. The ticket agent called the local newspaper after we entered and as we descended, reporters and photographers were waiting to take our photos and get our names. It was very exciting news to have Americans at the fort, apparently. We obliged and gave them our first names. Muffin was totally conked out, or else they would have gotten a real treat for the front page.

Anantaghiri Hills, Vikarabad, India

A few weeks ago we decided to leave the city in search of nature. Not just any nature. Forest. Green nature. The rainy season was going to be ending any day and we wanted to see something green before the dryness set in. If you take the Outer Ring Road toward the airport and take the exit for Vikarabad (and watch the roundabouts -- the signage is not clear), then drive for another hour or so and take a left at the T intersection, you'll get to Vikarabad. If you go another ten kilometers beyond the center of town, you'll reach the temple with the big Hanuman statue in front. Park at the temple, follow the sidewalk down the hill into the woods, and within a few minutes you'll find yourself surrounded by more trees than people. Once we passed the huge banyan tree after a few hundred meters, we didn't see any people at all anymore.

It was wonderful. We let Muffin run on the path for an hour, then we turned around and let her run back to the car for an hour. There was a little bit of road noise and at one point we veered off the main path and found ourselves nearly in the middle of the road. We could forgive being close to the road for all of the fresh oxygen we were breathing from the trees.

Stop and park at the Hanuman.

Go down the steps.

Trees!

These giant spiders were everywhere, mostly in webs over our heads. 

Back at the car for peanut butter sandwiches and apple juice.

One of the AP tourism resorts is out there, so you could spend the night and explore other trails, but it's perfect for a day trip. We brought lunch but there's a small restaurant across the road from the temple where you could probably get edible dosas and drinkable chai. We arrived around 10:00 and by the time we left around noon it was getting crowded with holiday folks visiting the temple. It might be worth a try to get there even earlier, but I don't know if there's a time the parking lot technically opens.

It was a perfect one-day getaway from the city.

We Knew When to Fold 'Em and When to Walk Away

Our vacation wasn't terrible. But we came home a day early. It wasn't what we expected and it wasn't relaxing. The good parts weren't making the lame and frustrating parts bearable enough and since Mike has Monday off from work we decided to come home while we could still salvage some of the long weekend.

Muffin had a blast. She was having so much fun that it was nearly impossible to get her to sleep at night. We saw monkeys right outside our cabin and at the camp restaurant. There were goats and cows along the road. A camp dog followed us around all day and hung out on our porch. There were bugs and dirt everywhere. It was paradise for our little adventure baby.

Packing up.

It didn't take Muffin long to go from hip city kid...

...to Lord of the Flies jungle baby.

Out for a walk.

The Tyda Jungle Bells camp was a bust so it's just as well we only stayed there one night. The trekking they advertised was walking up the hill along a road and they insisted we needed a guide. The guide never showed up so we wandered around on our own until the humidity and bugs drove us back to our cabin.

The language barrier with our driver only exacerbated some of the problems we had with him. A lot of the problem would probably be considered our fault for not wanting to stick to a planned itinerary, for wanting to be more spontaneous. That's the way travel is done here. But we insisted we had reservations at one hotel and even when we showed him the printout, he didn't believe us and drove us to another hotel, brought our reservation up to the front desk, then returned to the car to explain they have no rooms so we'll have to go to the other hotel. No kidding, that's why we didn't book there in the first place.

Muffin gets a lot of attention when we go out in public because she's so white. We're used to it here in H'bad. But out in a remote area that doesn't have a lot of Western visitors, we were mobbed whenever we left our room and it became exhausting. We were seen as the rude ones for being tired of having so many people stop us to take photos and try to hold the baby. It's one thing when it takes five minutes out of our day. But when there are several families taking that five minutes, the time adds up and we felt like we had lost a lot of our own family time, obliging other families and trying to be friendly.

Her adoring fans.

The Borra Caves were cool and we're glad the driver ignored our wishes and took us there early in the morning before too many people arrived. The botanical gardens in Araku were also quite pleasant, later in the day as the sun was going down and we were too tired to worry about being polite, declining all requests for photos with Muffin. And the scenery throughout the trip was gorgeous. It reminded us of the mountains in Burundi and Rwanda. But I think we were actually aching for some Burundians whose French was at least as decent as ours so we could get our basic ideas across rather than hoteliers who didn't speak any English at all.

But in the end, we were tired from Muffin's lack of naps. We weren't doing any of the trekking we had planned. We were spending too much time in the car between the few touristy things that we did want to see, plus the driving between hotels. (And to top it off, we were in a dry county! Not that we're huge drinkers, but we were having the kinds of days were a cold beer at sunset would have tasted very good.) On Saturday afternoon I asked Mike when do we decide to go to the airport and catch the next flight home because it wasn't fun anymore. He made some calls and we were home about thirty hours sooner than we'd planned. Muffin went down for a nap right away and then went down for her regular bedtime with no fuss.

The trip was a learning experience. We now know that Muffin is mostly agreeable (until bedtime) where ever she is and she handles all the attention like a champ. The hiking backpack worked out well. I'm not inclined to go on too many more trips, though, until she's off of bottles and formula. Washing the bottles in the given facilities was a pain. And somewhat begrudgingly we'll probably try a more "Western-friendly" location on our next trip, just to see what the difference is.

More photos on flickr.

The Terrible Smell

We have a terrible smell on our terrace. We have gorgeous weather and I'd love to be keeping the back door open and spending time outside with Sophie, but the terrible smell is keeping us closed up indoors. I asked our upstairs neighbor if she knew what it was. She suggested perhaps it's the people next door smoking "something organic." I said, No, I've smelled them smoking pot, and what I'm smelling now on the terrace is not that.

This smell isn't as strong as the soup trees, but it's a worse smell. I suspect it's tree-related. There are these trees with big red, inedible fruits that have been cracking open and falling. I think the smell is the rotting fruit or seeds. It smells like awful bad breath.

For a couple days now I've been opening the door in the morning hoping that the smell has run its course. So far, no.