Winter is here

Winter is here in Fairbanks and I can’t decide whether I am ready for it or not.  I miss fickle fall, which comes on strong and disappears too quickly.  As of a few days ago, we’ve got several inches of powder sugary snow on the ground. The skies have been clear and blue, and the dog is losing her mind every hour, whining to get outside and bury her face in it.

I went for my first snow run of the season yesterday. We’ve had a bit of snow for a while and though I have gone out, yesterday was the first time I put on the little red cleats that keep me from slipping around.  Last year I wore them a bunch when trail running behind my cabin and they make me fearless.  I was happy to slip them on yesterday again, needing them mostly for the mile stretch up Miller Hill Extension – a slippery gauntlet.  Since this summer, I’ve also gotten in the habit of keeping Sadie on a leash while we run. I attach her to my waist and she tugs ever-so-slightly.  She is my pace-keeper and I like watching her furry butt as we run.

I have abandoned all hopes that she will be my skijoring queen, but that’s OK. I’m not sure how I feel about cross-country skiing anyway and think I’ll stick to snow running for the time being anyway….

Last year it took me a while to start running on a snow and ice-covered surface. I think I was a bit skeptical, or afraid of the unusual terrain.  It does feel different.  The cleats make my feet slightly heavier and when I turned off hard, ice-packed road onto a trail, I sunk in.  I move slower, each step takes a bit more effort.  I dig it.

This summer’s trip to Brazil seems so far away – not to mention the overbearing heat and the presence of venemous animals.  In celebration of nonsequitors, I’ll post a few more photos from that trip.  Oh, also – because I have recently begun drinking mate out of a mug fashioned from the horn from one of these guys:

This poor cowboy nearly got mauled by one of those horns:

Dream delayed and flashback to the past

I’m sad.  After much internal debate, I canceled my entry into the Nov. 2 NYC Marathon.  That’s the bad news, anyway. I do get guaranteed entry next year and anticipate that nothing will stand in my way after a full year of work.  So, why’d I cancel?  The answer is simple, really.  A) I wasn’t ready. B) I wasn’t ready. And C) I wasn’t ready.  I had contemplated just going and being part of the whole NYC Marathon experience, but I think I wanted something a little more than that.  I wanted to run the race feeling good about it and feeling like I was well-prepared.  Also, if I ran this year, I’d have to wait another three or four years before I did it again.  I guess, with this dream anyway, I want the chance to do it right the first time.

I figured that what this false entry has done for me is to jumpstart my love of long-distance running again and by the time fall rolls around in 2009, I’ll be amped, pumped, and much more ready to run 26.2 miles.  I’m also contemplating a few other long races before next year and have been busily getting ready for these possibilities. I purchased a new set of winter running gear and am daily motivated by the energy of my dear running buddy, Sadie.

On another note – in a fit of cleaning my cabin for winter, I discovered several rolls of undeveloped film.  Film. Wow. What a concept. I figured they were likely from a trip I took to Guatemala in the spring of 2004, but couldn’t be sure.  I dropped them off at Wal-Mart’s 24-hour film processing, but since I’m woefully out of practice in this whole process of getting back pictures, I promptly forgot about them for three weeks or so.  I remembered over the weekend and finally yesterday I managed to get across town to the store I never go to anyway and pick up these mysterious photos.

There were six rolls in all (though I’ve found three more since then) and I was worried that the film’s quality would have degenerated too much over the years for the photos to be very good.  I was slightly surprised and then taken aback by these images from my life five years ago.

Here is me in front of a temple ruin… the name of which has escaped me.  Someday I will perhaps go through these photos and try to remember precisely where we went during the month-long road-trip.

Another temple ruin.

And yet another… scrambling to the top.

Scene from the road…

And the scene at a local market.  This photo makes me chuckle because when I looked at it for the first time, I immediately thought of a dog team.

And how could I forget our visit to the deity Maximon in Santiago? He prefers gifts of rum and tobacco (see the man lighting his cigar):

More scenes from a local market. I love the repetition of ceramic pots:

And here is me again on a boat in Lake Atitlan.