“Welcome…to Jurassic Park!”

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:

It’s not a fanny pack, I swear

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:

He gave up and crouched down to my height

We ran a bit further and came across a little foot bridge that took us over a tiny stream trickle and some rocks:

The roaring waterfall

Foot bridge over the mighty rapids

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 a bunch 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 so tiny!

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 run into each other like one huge clustermuck, we ended up on the wrong trail and went in the opposite direction. This happened roughly 4 or 5 times, and we both got crabbier and crabbier. My stomach started to get upset due to lack of calories combined with the elevation and heat. At one point we came across a deer and I considered mauling and eating it for sustenance, but since we had only been wandering around for a couple hours, I figured I should wait a bit longer before resorting to drastic measures.

You lucked out, deer. Next time it’s venison for you!

We kept getting turned around and had to double back multiple times. I was sweaty, stinky, and tired, and I wanted this stupid trail run to be over. (Jason later told me that I had “murder” in my eyes. He knows me well.) Finally we gave up trying to make sense of the 50 random trail paths and hiked up to the road, and we ran along it until we were able to get our bearings and figure out which parking lot we needed to head towards. Our 4 mile run turned into about a 9 mile nightmare, and we ended up running probably about 15 miles total. I convinced myself that it was good training for Canada.

Jas and I got back to the hotel, cleaned ourselves off, and drowned our “we suck at hiking” sorrows in various fried foods at a nearby New Orleans-style seafood restaurant. Nothing like immediately replenishing the calories you burned plus an extra thousand! The hike went as expected for us: it started out fun but got mucho sucky towards the end, but we were still glad we did it and can laugh about it now. (Come to think of it, that’s usually how races go, too.)

Massage #1 was given to me by my triathlete coach’s massage therapist, Richard. She referred me to him after I was complaining of pain near my right shoulder blade. He’s a pleasant, calm Asian man who works out of his house. I spent an hour laying face-down listening to Jack Johnson while Richard worked on my shoulder (at one point, he took what felt like a running start and leaned all of his body weight onto my back, which I found pretty amusing). I liked Richard a lot but found him to be a bit out of my price range for regular visits.

Massage #2 was courtesy of a no-nonsense woman I tried out for a session. Her hands were brutally magical (I’m a fan of deep, hard massages to the point of being unbearable — the harder, the better) but she talked non-stop and complained about how expensive it is to travel nowadays. I don’t particularly care to have conversations with surly masseuses, so I ruled her out for subsequent visits.

Massage #3 was in Cancun, Mexico, after the Ironman Cancun 70.3 (I’ll write a separate post about that race soon). Jason and I booked a couple’s massage at our resort, and two Mexican masseuses poked and prodded at us for what was probably ninety minutes but seemed like an eternity. The whole ordeal was uncomfortable for both of us. Jason was uneasy because it was his first ever massage, and he was paranoid about virtually everything the woman did. When she rubbed some aromatic cream on her hands and stuck them under his nose, instructing him to “Breathe deep,” he wondered if he was going to get knocked out and wake up in a bathtub full of ice with a kidney missing. Also, he put up a stink about having to get nekkid. I, meanwhile, had the pleasure of my masseuse giving me a long, grueling massage all over my horribly sunburned back (that deserves its own post as well), which felt more like I was being viciously tenderized for a lavish cannibal buffet.

I don’t particularly like getting massages, but since my doctors urged me to consider them for health purposes I booked an appointment with a massage therapy facility for Attempt #4. The massage was good timing since my back and neck had been bothering me recently and I had been having frustrating workouts. It also doesn’t help that I get paid to hunch in front of a computer all day. The fact that I don’t have a Quasimodo hump yet is astounding.

Anyway, I booked a massage at a new place in Capitol Hill. After filling out a rough approximation of my medical history, I met with a woman who looked vaguely like tailie Ana Lucia from Lost but wasn’t quite as surly scowly (sorry, Michelle Rodriguez). She was refreshingly non-hippie and kept pretty quiet for the entire hour, save for the occasional stomach gurgle (I bet she hadn’t eaten dinner yet). The massage was ok — I wish she would have abused me more, but she did do this one maneuver I dubbed the “attempt to rip my arm off at the shoulder blade,” and that felt pretty satisfying.

Since I don’t find massages relaxing, my mind couldn’t help but randomly wander for sixty minutes. Here’s a snippet of thoughts:

• After noticing one of those flashing fire alarm lights directly above me on the ceiling, I suppressed a giggle at the thought of it going off, forcing a dozen naked massage patients to come running out of the building.
• If I had to attribute the music to a particular movie score, I’d say it vacillated between crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Desperado, and any stupid scene where a couple runs at each other in slow motion (most likely in a field).
• Every time the massage therapist yanked my arm up or adjusted something, I worriedly wondered if my boob was exposed.
• I thought of how hilarious it’d be if, while the therapist was working on my neck, my head spontaneously fell off and landed on her feet.
• When I was instructed to flip over, I stared at the therapist’s nondescript shoes and felt disappointed. She should really mix things up a bit and wear clown shoes or flippers as a joke (you know, to lighten the mood — she is kneading the skin of a naked person, after all).

Thus concluded my first massage in about four months. I’ll try to start getting them more regularly (doctors suggested once a month and, unsurprisingly, the massage therapist recommended once every couple weeks), since there’s nothing more relaxing than dropping trou and allowing a complete stranger to mildly molest you for an hour. (And you’ve got to tip them afterward. That’s pretty messed up.)

The instructor began the class by having us all hold onto the bar and do little squat thingies down towards the ground. We were supposed to stand with the heels of our feet pointed towards each other and our toes in opposite directions, kind of like Charlie Chaplin. Or a penguin. I dunno. We then did a series of awkward ballet stretches that were in 2nd position or something. I didn’t know what any of these ballet terms were. The only French I know is whatever I can remember from ten weeks of seventh grade foreign language class and that one song from The Little Mermaid.

Anyway, the rest of the class pretty much consisted of the teacher explaining something for thirty seconds and then making us do some ridiculous ten step process immediately afterwards. Remember that episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy’s assembling chocolates on a conveyor belt, but then the belt speeds up so she can’t keep up? That’s pretty much how I felt trying to follow the teacher’s directions. It was a lot of “point your toes, pull in your stomach, straighten your leg.” Every so often I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I often looked bewildered and vaguely irritated, and the stuffy studio and piano player weren’t helping. (Yes, a woman plays piano next to us during class while the instructor tries to talk over her. No, she wasn’t playing ragtime. Yes, I wish she were.)

L2 and Chelsea asked me how I liked ballet Pilates after our first class finished up. They seemed amused with my reluctance and told me that they felt equally clunky and awkward when they took it in the fall. However, apparently they became much more flexible at the end of the class, so hopefully I’ll at least get some benefit out of skipping across the room and pretending to feel graceful. At the very least, my favorite falafel place is right across the street so I can always reward my efforts with a jumbo gyro and rice (which I did tonight).