You gotta love living and training in Seattle. I always defend the city I’ve lived in for the past 9 years whenever people go “Herp derp doesn’t it rain there all the time?” by saying that it’s more gray days and occasional rain vs. nonstop downpours. Then I feel like a jackass whenever I strap on my running shoes and look woefully out the window as the cold rain splashes against the glass. Sad trombone. Nonetheless, it’s Seattle, and you gotta put up with some shitty weather if you want to stick to your running regime and are absolutely useless on a treadmill (sentiments I’ll reserve for another post). On Friday I HTFU’d and yanked on the running tights + long-sleeved shirt to trudge through a quick 3 1/2 mile run through Capitol Hill. Not only was it raining, as usual, but the temperature had dropped to balls freezingly cold (if I had any, that is). As I was running up the shoulderless and sidewalk-challenged Interlaken hill in my black running clothes, I cursed the Pacific Northwest for turning apocalypticly dark at 4 pm in the fall and winter. The last thing a driver heading up the windy road will see is my minorly crooked white teeth as my mouth pulls back into a horrific grimace while my stubby body bounces off the windshield. With my dying breath I’d utter “Damn you…Seattle…Nirvana…is…overrated…uaghhhhh.” When I was about two blocks from home, my right foot slipped on a wet, pulpy pile of soggy decaying leaves, and my ankle promptly rolled while I windmill arm’d and jazz-handed myself back upright. Naturally, this display of grace occurred at a busy 4-way intersection that not only contained a line of cars, but happened to have a bus stop full of people who caught my America’s Got Talent live audition tape. Now I get to nurse tendinitis, Achilles tightness, and a stiff ankle. On Sunday, I was lured to the morning group run with promises of a post-workout brunch that was kind of crappy due to Surly Goth Waitress and a sub-par biscuits and gravy with an order of poached eggs that somehow translated to “hard boiled” back in the kitchen. When I woke up that morning and checked the weather to see how I was supposed to dress for my 8 mile run, I saw “37” sneering back at me from my iPhone. Since I don’t own a snowsuit or a Bubble Boy-esque insulated hamster wheel, I resorted to wearing two long-sleeved shirts, a jacket, running tights, a pair of shorts, and a cheapy pair of gloves. By the time I finished my workout and attempted to inconspicuously peel my freezing sweat-soaked sports bra off without flashing my chesticles to everyone in Leschi, it had already started to snow. Today it’s 30 degrees and still snowing, and tomorrow’s forecast calls for a low of 16, a number I previously attributed to the “and Pregnant” variety, not an actual temperature. However, most of us don’t have the pleasure of living in sunny California or humid Florida (and even if we did, we’d have to deal with training in choking heat and the chance of sunstroke/dehydration). Despite its wonky and oftentimes depressing weather, I love living in Seattle. Training here is just another one of the many mental challenges associated with preparing for endurance events. If I can put up with freezing mountain conditions, searing desert heat, slick leafy roads, multiple windstorms, and pouring rain, I’ll be a more confident, headstrong, stronger athlete…even if I do look like a sausage in running...

Every month or so I head to Colorado for work. This time around, I brought Jason with me so we could attend my boss’s housewarming party (I use the word “house” loosely, as 12,000 sq. ft is less of a “house” and more of a “Xanadu”). We spent the 4th of July hiking and trail running in Colorado Springs. That may sound impressive at first until I tell you that I both fell on my ass in true Mediocre Athlete fashion and we got horribly lost and ended up going twice as far as intended. Never go hiking with us unless you want people to stumble across your squirrel-eaten carcass months later. Jason and I drove over to Colorado Springs (we held our breaths as we passed the Focus on the Family Visitor Center exit so we wouldn’t get our souls stolen) and parked at a 6.5 mile trail head so we could do a hike/trail run. We had an 18 mile run scheduled for that day but figured we could manage to do a 3 hour hike/jog in the high elevation (around 7,000 feet) and trail terrain and call it good. It was a hot, sunny day and the trail was virtually deserted. We ran when we could and walked when we felt like our hearts would explode. I snapped a picture of Jason as he tried not to look like he was drenched in sweat: I made him take a picture of me before we ventured on: After a little bit, we stopped so I could do the requisite “self-portrait attempt” with my long monkey arms. 10 times out of 10 this results in me cutting off the top of Jason’s head in the photo (stupid 11″ height differential). Here’s attempt #3: We ran a bit further and came across a little foot bridge that took us over a tiny stream trickle and some rocks: Since it was so hot outside, I splashed some of the cold water on my arms and neck. When I turned around, I saw a little butterfly. “OMG, NATURE! MUST TAKE PICTURE!” Jason patiently waited for his dorky girlfriend. When I was ready to leave, he jokingly said, “Don’t slip and get swept away by the strong current.” I was like, “Hurr durr, I won’t,” and then promptly slipped on the rocks, fell on my ass, and slid a few feet down towards the foot bridge. It was so ridiculously inept that I couldn’t help but laugh: Then: “Wait a sec, I didn’t sit on the butterfly, did I?” Thankfully, I did not have a squished butterfly corpse smeared across my ass. After laughing heartily at me for a few minutes, Jason helped me up, cleaned me off, and we finished our trail run. From that trail head we drove over to the Garden of the Gods, a park that has a bunch of cool rock formations and lots of intersecting trails. We got a map at the gift shop and decided to do a 4 mile loop. While running, we came across a couple who offered to take a picture of us in front of some rocks. It turned out pretty ridiculous: We had to dodge a ton of horse crap on the trails because a bunch of dooshers were riding horses and couldn’t be bothered to clean up the giant dung piles their animals left behind. Running amidst steaming horse shit on a hot, sunny day aren’t my ideal hiking conditions, but to each his own. Jas and I tried to head back to the car to complete our 4 mile loop, but since all of the trains intersect and...

Last week I spent four nights in New York City, came home for a day, went to Penticton over Memorial Day weekend to train, came home for less than 24 hours, and flew to Denver (where I am right now) for work. Despite all of the jet setting, I managed to get in a decent training weekend. I have tasted Ironman Canada, and it tastes hilly and challenging. Jas and I drove to his parents’ house to carpool up to Penticton. On the way we stopped at REI so I could pick up some leg warmers because I realized it’d likely be ass cold over the weekend and I had forgotten to pack tights. We arrived at our hotel in Summerland, unloaded the bikes, and enjoyed the overcast views of the lake. On Saturday Jason, his dad and I woke up and prepped everything for our ride. We parked a few miles from the transition area and started setting everything up when I realized that the black rolled up wad of fabric I grabbed and shoved into my bag wasn’t arm sleeves like I thought, but rather compression sleeves for my legs. Fudgers! It was going to be a gray, chilly day, and my wimpo arms were surely going to freeze without some sort of cover. Jason suggested I just wear my compression sleeves as arm warmers. I didn’t have any better options, so that’s what I did. I ended up with 90 miles of compressiony goodness, but unfortunately I realized two things after the ride: The sleeves, which typically go from under my knee to my ankle, weren’t long enough to cover my entire arm. Even though the sun wasn’t out, that doesn’t mean the rays weren’t poking through the clouds. As such, I ended the ride with this B.S.: The watch tan I’m used to. The half-forearm tan? Not so much. (I’ve grown accustomed to the hairy arms though, so deal with it.) Anyway, I started riding for a whopping minute before realizing that, no fucking way, my bike computer’s cadence sensor wasn’t working again. What the shit, I just replaced this stupid thing two weeks ago! I angrily fiddled with it for a while, and it went from not reading my cadence to not reading anything. Great, now I was going to ride 90 miles with no indication of my speed or cadence. Frustrated and fueled by rage, I took off and anger-rode for an hour. After a while, Jason appeared next to me, slightly out of breath, exclaiming, “It took me forever to catch up to you! You need to slow down!” Apparently I was averaging about 24 mph and was climbing rollers going 20. To be fair, the first 30 or 40 miles of the Canada course are pretty fast, with lots of flats/downhills and a few inconsequential hills. I pouted a bit more about my broken computer but decided to slow it down in anticipation of Richter Pass. Before we got to the pass, Jason’s dad got an epic flat by running over a huge kinked wad of wire. He wrestled it out of his tire and changed the tube but wanted to stop at a gas station to properly fill the tire with air. While he was fixing his bike, I stopped inside to use the bathroom and buy more fuel. When I came out, I saw Jason barely hiding his irritation while a filthy grifter with roughly four teeth peppered him with questions about our bikes. Apparently this Canadian mountain man had been marveling at how nice our bikes were and said that someone should build an eight person stealth bomber...

My coworker Mike put together a team to do Seattle’s annual Big Climb event (this year it’s on March 22), and I am one of his easily winded participants (go Team Flabalanche!). What is the Big Climb? Well, every year the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society organizes a race to raise money for leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and myeloma research. The race consists of climbing 69 flights of stairs up the Columbia Center in downtown Seattle. That’s right, your favorite mediocre athlete is going to try and run up 69 flights of stairs. Me, aka the person incapable of running along a flat sidewalk without tripping. (This actually happened to me–I was running along 19th and looked down to skip a song on my iPod at the exact moment I came across a raised sidewalk groove. Before I knew it, I was flying forward and skidding my knee and hands on the hot, gritty concrete. I immediately snapped up and looked around to see if anyone noticed my blunder, and sure enough, there was a group of people staring at me from across the street with their mouths agape, silently mouthing (“silently” because OK Go was still blaring in my ears) “Are you OH-KAY?” I squeaked out a falsely cheerful and overly loud “YEAH! I’M FINE!” before scampering away as fast as I could, blood running down my leg.) So yeah, jogging up a butt-ton of stairs can’t possibly lead to disaster for the clumsiest person in the Pacific Northwest… Anyway, I pledged to try and raise $500, so I’d really appreciate some donations (think of it as a tip for serving up awesomely mediocre blog content). Check out my donation page at http://www.llswa.org/goto/rebeccakelley and donate some money if you like me, if you hate me but like science research, if you like me and hate leukemia, or if you hate me and want me to leave you alone. If you donate money, I promise to write an especially amusing and self-deprecating recap post about the Big Climb once I haul my ass out of bed and do the race on Sunday, March 22. I imagine the post will consist of about 30% race details and 70% post-race brunch recap. Please donate! I also have a team page (we’re actually not Team Flabalanche, though I wish that were our name) in case you’re feeling especially charitable and want to donate more moolah, but at the very least I’d really appreciate anything you can...

I don’t know what it is about my running speed, but I’m either too slow or too fast to run with a buddy or in a group. It’s like I give off some sort of anti-social pheromone (it’s probably sweat, which I do a lot) whereby people catch a whiff of it and are motivated to run a couple hundred yards ahead of me. Case in point: my recent track workout. I showed up for my first track night in like a month, but the pattern was eerily familiar. We all do some warm up laps and some drills before Teresa tells us what the workout is and assigns a pace for each of us. Every single time she does this, she assigns everyone a pace and seems to forget about me. I ask her “What’s my pace?” and she gives me one, then she scans the group and tries to find someone who runs at the same pace as me. And, I swear to God, whoever she pairs me with ends up running like a minute frickin’ faster than what Teresa assigned us as our pace. We all take off in a group and I check my watch to make sure I’m running at an appropriate speed, then I look up and see that the group I’m supposed to be running with is a million paces ahead of me, competing in some sort of unknown foot race that I’m most certainly going to lose. I mentally shake my fist at them and call them jerk face overachievers for running faster than they said they would. I then proceed to run by myself. This happens to me a lot. The same thing happens with Jason. We start off on a long run together and he half-ass jogs right in front of me because he thinks he needs to hang back and run at my pace. But then if I need to stop for whatever reason (e.g., I have a cramp, that hill nearly killed me, I’m fat and out of shape), he begrudgingly slows down and walks alongside me for roughly twelve seconds before whining, “Can’t you at least jog?” Then I snap at him to run at his own pace without me, which he ends up doing. He trots back to find me every so often, which I both hate and like (hate because I hate that he’s faster than me, like because at least he’s not completely ditching me). I’m starting to think that I’m destined to run by myself because apparently there is nobody in the entire Seattle metropolitan area who runs at the same pace as me. It’s like the Farmer in the Dell and I’m the cheese who stands alone. Or, in this scenario, I suppose I’m the cheese who runs alone. Hi-ho-the-dairy-o, the cheese runs alone. I’ve gotten pretty much used to it at this point, though. Besides, I’m not much of a talker when I run. I once ran around Greenlake with someone who talked my ear off the entire loop, with me offering up the occasional grunt and winded “Uh huh.” But still, there’s something about having a presence next to you that’s somewhat comforting. It’s like you mentally push each other to keep going and maintain a good pace. You don’t have to exchange words or have a lengthy, heart wrenching conversation about the meaning of life or anything. Oftentimes all you need is the physical presence of someone next to you to encourage you to keep going. And I don’t have that. (Well, Jason is pretty encouraging when we do our long runs, but I find his encouragement to...