On a whim Friday I went to my local running store and registered for Saturday’s Rodeo Run 10, the one-year anniversary of the first race I’d ever run. CLH is out of town, I had no arrangements to meet friends at the start or finish line, and I hadn’t even really trained for it, having slacked a bit on my running since the half marathon, but it’s a fun race, starting at a breezy 9:30 a.m., and the weather was perfect yesterday. I even got a bit of a sunburn.
A month ago I signed up for Kenyan Way so I could discipline myself into working on my speed and endurance. Mostly speed. My goal n the race this year was to beat my time from last year, but my real goal, my secret goal, was to come in in under an hour. That didn’t happen. Here’s what did:
I never don’t get emotional at the start of a race. I never don’t cry at the end. I have a hard time starting off slow — the tendency is to flow with everyone around you, to keep pace when people are trying to pass you. One of the key rules of Kenyan Way is the negative split — start off slow, reserve your energy for the last few miles of the race. EVERY RUN, whether it’s two miles or ten, should be a negative split. I was conservative. I went to the very back of the pack, the 11-minute milers, so I wouldn’t feel the pressure of people passing me. And when I crossed the starting line, I had to go slow, sluggishly slow, because I made up my mind I was not going to stop. I was not going to walk.
Two miles into the race, the route goes over a long, sloping bridge called the Elysian Viaduct. In the middle, the viaduct sags where the columns hold it up over Buffalo Bayou. So the viaduct is two hills, one large and one small. Four miles into the race, at the north end of the viaduct, the route turnes around, and crosses the viaduct again, in the other direction. Four hills, the hardest one the last.
At that turnaround point I stopped for my first water break, four miles into a six mile run, and I walked a few feet while hydrating, and after that point, I was on. I ascended that final hill, WHOOO HOOOED as loud as I could, and hit the gas. My final mile was my fastest, less than nine minutes. I crossed the finish line at 1:03:46, three minutes and ten seconds faster than my time last year.
Each Thursday for the Houston Press Music Blog, Craigers and I do a joint column called He Said She Said where we pick our ten favorite songs on a certain subject. We’ve written about first dates, New Year’s resolutions and music from the Oughts*. This week the Houston Rodeo comes to town, probably the biggest rodeo in the universe, and so we looked at our favorite country music by women.
Saw their first two songs at Walter’s tonight after the Kinky Friedman show at Mucky Duck. Had to come home to do school work and work work. But they were awesome. I’m sold.
— verb (used with object)
1. to demonstrate male privilege right egregiously, to interrupt the woman speaking and dispense your “wisdom”
The inimitable Jessica Hopper used this term in a recent blog post about a man in her gardening class who kept trying to finish the (female) master botanist’s sentences with incorrect information. Constantly.
…never raising his hand, dragging the class down with his exercise of his male right to be a non-stop and vocal authority without being an authority at all.
See also: male answer syndrome. To her credit, Hopper somewhat excuses the guy, since he is, after all, a product of environmental conditioning, but good god, I don’t know where she found the inner strength to do so.
I got so mad, even though he was totally a grandpa and sometimes that is just how grandpas are and there is no amount of coughing or annoyed looks that could possibly stop him. The first 49 years of his life his everyday just enforced that he was the boss of the gals. Any and all gals.
So glad she wrote that last part because it gave me a new perspective of the misogynistic cantankerous British expats who loitered nightly at the Foreigner’s Club in Korea, sailors have lived their whole lives surrounded by other brutish men and living in countries (like Korea) where women are still expected to make perfect, subservient silent wives. Then I come along, with my opinions and other unladylike traits, and you can imagine what happened.
furiously denying that sexism exists by…well, being sexist.
The comments are not for the faint of heart. Every last one of them is Kanye-d to the extreme.
I just remembered, though, being on a historical tour of Communist Prague, me and CLH with a young-ish tour guide (maybe 35?) and three old Swedish men. One of the Swedish men was SO ADAMANT about finishing the guide’s stories, proving his wealth of historical knowledge, interrupting to ask innane questions and one upping the guide at every chance. So maybe it has as much to do with agism as sexism. Or maybe that old man was just an entitled ass.
