It’s only 9:30 and I’m already annoyed. But I’m not going to complain about work today.
Instead, I’ll be happy, because it’s March, and March is one of my two favorite months (the other being October). It’s gray outside today, but it’s also close the 70 degrees, which is lovely.
It was a quick weekend, and I am sleepy this morning. Saturday Buzz and I ran the Rodeo Run downtown, a 10K. We were both still a little under the weather, so it wasn’t our best race, to say the least. I did set a new PR in the 10K (1:03:12), but that’s not really saying much because my last official 10K was in July, and I’m in better shape now having done two half marathons. I had been hoping to do 10 minute miles and finish in 1:02:00, but I just didn’t feel very good. It’d been two full weeks since I’d done any running (since I’ve been trying to shake this cold), and I could really feel it. My legs were heavy.
As if feeling bad weren’t enough, I started out too fast, running a 9:30 first mile, and then got progressively slower each mile. I am really bad at judging my pace, and it really bit me in the butt on Saturday. The race was painful. Poor Buzz was doing even worse. While all my congestion is way back in my head, which made me uncomfortable but not downright crappy, her congestion was making it difficult to breathe. She finished a minute and a half behind me, which is definitely a rare occurrance. She was not a happy camper, because last weekend she’d run a 10K in under 57 minutes.
Still, a little exercise was better than nothing.
Saturday night a bunch of us went to this little theater that plays independent movies and stuff to see “Touching the Void,” a movie/documentary about two climbers who did a first ascent of the face of a mountain in Peru in 1985. On the way down, Joe Simpson fell and severely broke his leg. His climbing partner, Simon Yates, tried to get him down the mountain, until they ended up in a bad situation with Joe hanging off an overhang, and Simon trying to hold him up. Not knowing what had happened at the other end of the line and starting to be pulled off the mountain himself, Simon had no other choice than to cut the rope. Joe fell about 150 feet into a crevasse, and Simon descended the mountain, thinking Joe was dead. Miraculously, Joe survived, fighting his broken leg, hunger, and severe dehydration to drag himself out of the crevasse, across a glacier, through a boulder field, and back to camp just before Simon and the other guy at camp were about to leave.
It’s an amazing story, and the film is really intense, to the point of being both fascinating and hard to watch. It makes you wonder what you would do if you ever found yourself in a situation like that. The kicker is that Simon faced tons of criticism for cutting the rope on his partner when the pair got back home to the UK, but Joe has always defended him. I mean, what choice did he have? It was either one man died, or both men. If Joe hadn’t survived, no one would have faulted Simon, and the mere fact that Joe did survive was practically a miracle.
Anyway. Interesting drama/documentary. Both men are still alive (they were only in their mid-twenties when they did the climb), and both provided commentary throughout the movie. I read in an article that they are still friends, though not as close as they once were, and they don’t climb together anymore.
Yesterday I slept late, then did some shopping with Ron and Buzz for costume supplies for our centipede for Saturday’s Bayou City Classic 10K (six people joined together in costume). Last night I had a soccer game in the drizzle and mud (fun, fun), then went to Becca’s for the second half of the Oscars.
Soccer continues to be interesting. I have become a sort of mediator for our team. The team we played last night has a forward who’s big and physical and wears a knee brace. Our team has a hothead “coach” who plays physically, but doesn’t like it when people dish the physical-ness back at her. Every time our coach ends up sparring with knee brace woman, they end up talking back to each other and getting all upset. Now, I actually think the problem is more with our hothead than with knee brace woman, because I’ve been up against knee brace woman many times and never had a problem. She plays physically, but so do I, and hey, it’s soccer, there’s going to be some pushing for position and for the ball. Last night while the ball was at the other end of the field, knee brace woman asked me if our hothead was always like that. I told her my only advice was to just try to ignore hothead. Then I have to turn around and tell hothead that knee brace woman is a jerk, and she has to just try and ignore her.
Sigh. I’m telling each person to ignore the other just so we don’t freaking come to blows on the soccer field. It’s absurd. And our team is still hit or miss. We follow a brilliant play with an idiot play. And I’m failing as a defensive coordinator or something. As sweeper, I’m always trying to watch the play developing and direct my fullbacks and stopper to where they need to be. We need to mark players on defense, and so I try to do so, but it never fails–when I mark a player, the ball inevitably goes to another forward who isn’t being marked well by our team. When I don’t mark and instead try to follow the ball, there’s too many people open. My defense and I can’t seem to find a happy medium.
And thus was my busy weekend.
