Two laps down, six to go

End of first lap, originally uploaded by ragfield.

Melissa just fished her second 5K lap following an initial 1.4 mile out and back. She has six 5K laps to go. She was 39:08 @ 4.5 miles, and 1:06:29 @ 7.6 miles.

Registration is complete

Waiting to register, originally uploaded by ragfield.

The race begins at 2:30.

4 hours till go time

The Ragfields have arrived in Springfield, MO and the marathon is a mere 4 hours away. Rob is going to take pictures during the race and upload them to the blog while I’m still running, so if you want to, you can follow along. That doesn’t make me feel pressured or anything… not like I have to look good unedited in addition to running fast. In fact, if you don't want follow along, that's fine with me.

Here are some pictures we took while on the road:

Gateway to the west

The Ragfields have entered Missouri

Artsy shot of Iris

Feliz Navidad

Christmas Part 1 took place at Nana and Grampy’s on the 22nd, and a good time was had by all. Aunt Marcia surprised me with a giant box comprised of all sorts of Melissa-themed items. The box was full of all sorts of Nicaraguan, vegetarian, running, and monkey memorabilia. Each item was individually wrapped, so it seemed like it took me about an hour to get through it all. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the box was actually one of the smallest things—a howler monkey charm (like for a bracelet or necklace). I couldn’t get over it. It looks exactly like Wrinkle Belly. I had no idea such a thing even existed. As soon as we got home, I found a necklace to put it on and have been wearing it ever since.

Melissa opening some monkey socks from Nana and Grampy

Aunt Marcia

Rob and Melissa and Nana

Grampy

On Christmas Eve it was on to Rick and Nan’s (my parents) for Christmas at the Windchime. The real party started when my nephew—just short of 12 months old—arrived. Its been a long time since my family has had a small child at a Christmas celebration. Logan is in the stage of constant motion and exploration, so it was quite difficult to get him to slow down enough to open his gifts.

The gals

Logan and his Caterpillar truck

Auntie M trying --with some success--to feed Logan taters.

The biggest surprise was on Christmas Eve night, when we were opening gifts at my parents’ house. A mystery gift was delivered to me, and the tag said it was from Santa (but it was written in Rob’s handwriting). When I opened the box, there were several other wrapped gifts inside—one each for my parents, my sister, and me. I doled out the other gifts and we all opened them at once. It was a book: Nicablogua: The Story of My Dissertation Fieldwork. Santa—with the help of Rob—had printed Nicablogua into a 200-page, full color, hardback book. It was out of this world to be sitting there, holding my own words in my hands, seeing all of my adventures printed out on paper. We all sat around in silence, leafing through the volume. Finally someone would say, “Look at that picture on page 82!” and we would turn to the page. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

On Christmas day, my grandmas and auntie came over. They looked through the blog book and it was such a hit that we all almost forgot to eat Christmas dinner. Rob had printed a copy for my aunt and when we gave it to her she just couldn’t stop crying. She had me sign her copy—my first book signing.

Alright, its time for me to go and continue in the family Christmas festivities. My current project is teaching Logan how to howl like a howler monkey, which is something I'm sure his parents will enjoy.

Solstice Eve

Today, among other things, is the day before the winter solstice. I have been looking forward to this for some time. Hopefully I'll be able to get more accomplished once the days start getting longer.

In other news, I received an email from Eduardo yesterday. It was short, just "Como estas, Meli" and he said that Rob and I were "muy vonito" in the snow photos I had sent him. I was on cloud 9 all day though. Its the first I've heard from Eduardo in more than a month, and I am much relieved to be assured that he is still there.

Now, I'll address some recurring questions that people have been asking me.

Firehouse Spaghetti-- this was actually spaghetti consumed at the firehouse. Unkie John is a firefighter, and every December the fire station has a spaghetti supper fund-raiser.

The differences between apes and monkeys
Compared to monkeys, apes have:

• NO TAIL
• a very flexible shoulder (for suspensory locomotion)
• larger body size
• larger relative brain size
• longer infant dependency
• highly complex social pattern (though there are some exceptions)
• 5 cusps on their molars (monkeys have only 4)

And finally, what is a cladogram?
A graph depicting evolutionary relationships among groups.

I'd put an example of one on here, but that would be waaaaay too educational. If you really want to see one, come to the class I'm teaching next semester.

Thanks for reading and happy solstice.

Winter Weather

Although the official start of “winter” is not for several more days, winter is definitely upon us. We got pummeled with more snow starting on Saturday morning, when I was supposed to do a 12-mile run—the last semi-long run before the marathon. I just couldn’t do it, and at this point, I decided that any more long runs would do me more harm than good. I managed about 3 miles into what seemed to be a blizzard and then called it quits. That last 20-miler in the sleet really did a number on me; I’m not sure I’ve recovered yet.

This past weekend was a big one for holiday parties. We had Rob’s work party on Friday night and then a neighborhood block party and Cara and John’s holiday party both on Saturday night, and finally another party on Sunday night After skipping a 12-mile training run, there’s nothing like going to a bunch of parties and loading up on holiday treats to get you into marathon form.

On Sunday, Rob and I borrowed Aimee and Brett’s cross country skis and headed over to the park to glide around on the mounds of fresh snow we had gotten the night before. The only hill in the C-U area is at the park near our house, so there were a ton of kids and families there sledding. I’ll bet Eduardo would have loved it. Rob actually skied down the hill, but I didn’t press my luck. I pretty much suck at cross country skiing (to me it seems more like ice-skating than running), but I sure had a good time. That is, until the sole fell off of Aimee’s ski boot. I feel really bad for possibly destroying Aimee’s boots, but I am hopeful that they can be fixed with some combination of duct tape, super glue, and nails. At any rate, walking back home (barefoot, uphill, through the snow) with a sole-less ski boot didn’t help with my issue of cold feet, but at least I didn’t have to go too far.

At first, Rob tried to ride over to Aimee and Brett's to pick up their skis. That didn't work out too well.



I emailed these pictures to Leda in Ometepe and she replied that she was sorry there was so much snow and she thought that we needed to come back to Ometepe where the climate is much nicer. She thanked me for the photos and said that I looked good and that Rob looked very elegant (“muy elegante”). Bless her heart.

Monday was a big day for me. I went to Cara’s (er… Ms G’s) school and gave talks to 4 of her 6th grade classes about howler monkeys. Or rather, I answered questions. I didn’t even need to prepare anything… the students started firing questions at me the moment they entered the classroom. The best thing about 6th graders is their inquisitiveness. It was refreshing to be in a classroom like this after having spent a semester in a lecture hall of 750 strung out college students who could care less about anything.

My favorite questions that the 6th graders asked:

• Did you spend your birthday in Nicaragua? (And they were highly amused when I told them that, in fact, I had spent my birthday in a Nicaraguan hospital).
• According to the theory of evolution… (I don’t actually remember what this student’s question was, but give him a gold star for prefacing it that way. Plus, he actually drew a cladogram, which made me want to give him a big hug).
• What kind of person would be good at becoming a primatologist? (Good question! I'm not even sure that I'm the right person for the job!)
• Did you and Ms. G. meet in high school or college? (Not about the monkeys, but compelling nonetheless).

And the best thing by far was that Ms. G had already taught them the difference between a monkey and an ape. When I got there, the first thing I did was put up a big picture of a chimpanzee and ask them whether they thought it was a monkey or an ape. 30 hands shot up in the air and they all told me that it was an ape because it did not have a tail. I was floored. That’s amazing. Ms. G deserves the teacher of the year award for teaching them that. Hopefully they remember it all through their lives. Every primatologist dies a little inside when there’s a TV show or commercial with a chimpanzee and they’re calling it a monkey. There are a lot of differences between monkeys and apes—the one that is perhaps the most visible and easiest to remember is that monkeys have tails and apes do not. We taught this to our class of undergrads this semester—going over the information repeatedly and in great detail. Plus, we told them flat out that it was going to be on the final exam. 37% of them still missed it, which—all things considered—isn’t as shabby as I thought it was going to be.

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading.

The Taper

On Saturday I did my second (of 2) 20-mile marathon training runs. Much like the first one a couple weeks ago, it was cold and sleeting and I hadn’t eaten a proper dinner the night before. This time it was considerably more icy though. Most of the sidewalks in the neighborhoods were covered by a thin film of ice still leftover from Thursday night. I did about 8 miles of the run on a 2-mile loop in the park near our house because the sidewalks there had mostly been cleared off. For the rest of it, I mainly stuck around areas of campus where the sidewalks were good and salted. But still. Being gingerly about randomly appearing slicks of ice slowed me down a lot. Not to mention the wind and freezing rain. In fact, it took me about 45 minutes longer to finish the run than it should have. The extra time certainly wasn’t helping my suddenly insatiable hunger that emerged at mile 2.8. Yikes, there was still a long way to go at that point. By sheer force of will, I waited to slurp my “Hammer Gel” until mile 7, and that sustained me until about mile 10. Then I swung by our house again, where I had stashed about 20 oz of Gatorade and some dried mangos on the front porch. I don’t know what it is about them, but dried mangos really do the trick for me on these long runs. I gulped my whole bottle of Gatorade (something I never do) and wolfed down 3 big pieces of dried mango.

Once I got to mile 12, I began the Countdown to the Taper. When training for a marathon, you build up your mileage over several months, and after a peak mileage week about 3 weeks before the marathon, you begin to taper it down. After months of practically running yourself into oblivion, during the taper you just concentrate on not getting injured or sick and on eating whole wheat pasta. Your training is essentially over—you’ve done all you can. Prior to this icy 20-mile run, I had actually not been looking forward to the taper. The reason being is that I love running, and during the taper, you do a lot less of it. All of a sudden it could not come soon enough. With every footfall, I was saying to myself (okay, and sometimes out loud too), “8 miles until the taper…” then “7 miles until the taper…” and so on. Finally I staggered in home—covered in frost and ice (ice had actually collected in my eyelashes)—but nearly euphoric to have actually survived to the taper.

I was exhausted but managed to keep going in the afternoon. We were out of everything that sounded good to eat, so I went to the grocery store, and then in the evening we went to Unkie John’s Firehouse Spaghetti Supper. Afterwards, everybody came back to our place to watch a movie. About 5 minutes into it, I passed out on the couch. For a while Rob kept trying to wake me up, but eventually I crawled back to our room and fell asleep with my clothes on and didn’t even hear everybody leave when the movie got over.

After running 20 miles in sleet and freezing rain, you feel awful pretty much everywhere—not just your legs and feet. Your arms and shoulders hurt. Your lungs hurt. Your head feels like a boiling tea kettle. You eat so much that your jaws hurt from chewing but you are still hungry. On Sunday, Rob and I both woke up with sore throats and stuffy noses. If it was just me feeling sick, I would blame it on the run, but Rob felt the same, so it must be something else. I’ve been taking Airborne, but I don’t think that stuff actually does anything. I think I need a rest, but this has suddenly become crunch time for absolutely everything in my life. That’s probably one of the reasons why I run—to ignore all the other things that I really should be doing. Now that I’m on the taper, I can suddenly see how much everything has piled up!

On that note, I need to get going. Here are a few pictures of the ice storm and some older ones of our Christmas tree:

Pulling in home from the Christmas tree lot: it looks like our car Iris is puking up a Christmas tree.

The tree un-decked.
("A lot of sap in here. A little full. Lot of sap." -- Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation)

The tree, decked (view from outside):

Blurry ice at night