GIRLIE WISDOM

Some pearls of Wisdom today from SuperMom:

1. A friend of mine confused her Valium with her birth control pills...she has 14 kids but she doesn't really care..

2. One of life's mysteries is how a 2-pound box of chocolates can make a woman gain 5 lbs.

3. My mind not only wanders, it sometimes leaves completely.

4. The best way to forget your troubles is to wear tight shoes.

5. The nice part about living in a small town is that when you don't know what you are doing, someone else does.

6. The older you get, the tougher it is to lose weight, because by then your body and your fat are really good friends.

7. Just when I was getting used to yesterday, along came today.

8. Sometimes I think I understand everything, and then I regain consciousness.

9. I gave up jogging for my health when my thighs kept rubbing together and setting fire to my panties.

10. Amazing! You hang something in your closet, for a while, and it shrinks 2 sizes!

11. Skinny people irritate me! Especially when they say things like...'You know sometimes I forget to eat!' .... Now, I've forgotten my address, my mother's maiden name, and my keys, but I have never forgotten to eat. You have to be a special kind of stupid to forget to eat!

12. The trouble with some women is that they get all excited about nothing -- and then they marry him.

13. I read this article that said the typical symptoms of stress are eating too much, impulse buying, and driving too fast. Are they kidding? That's my idea of a perfect day!

LETTERS

Right, so I’ve officially had a few days to recover/think about what exactly happened on Saturday 3rd April 2010 and a few letters have sprung to mind:

Dear Dancing Gorilla,

While your dancing skills and hip thrusting movements are certainly something for the record books, I feel their skills should be used in a more appropriate environment. While putting a smile on my face up Chappies was much appreciated, the resulting drop, tuck and roll (or un-ladylike lack thereof) was not exactly what I was counting on! Your enthusiasm on making sure my executive shuffle kept in pace with the background tunes could indeed have been matched by your unhelpful nature of peeling my now embarrassed and bloody body of the tar. My resulting race was therefore somewhat hindered by the complete annihilation of my right knee cap and I’m pretty sure all the runners behind me (thankfully there were still some at this stage) were not so enamored at the little trickles of blood finding there way off my elbow and into the resulting breeze.

I have included some photographs for your information. While I’m sure viewing the fall was a very humorous event, the resulting bodily injuries are making no-one laugh and thus I request that you maybe take your fabulous skills to the finish line/zoo where a smile at this point is a very very welcome surprise indeed.

Yours in agony,
Crazii

Next Letter:

Dear Body,

You are amazing! Not only have I abused you during the last few months, but come race day you had to contend with my crazii brain announcing that should you, in any way decided you cannot finish the race, tough shit. So I must thank you dear kneecaps, ankles, elbows and hips for taking full advantage of the 3 myprodols readily consumed after the above mentioned fall and floating me the remaining 26kms to what can only be called a first and last finish experience for me.

First for obvious reasons, and last only because of the style in which I finished. I will most certainly be doing the race again, I just shall not be finishing in the manner in which I did on Sat. SuperMom put it the best “You finished in true style Ballerina (she calls me Ballerina), with a pirouette and a puke". Yip, it’s true. But I finished and in under 6 hours and it’s all because of you. So thank you dear Body, you are amazing.

Yours in admiration,
Crazii

Second last letter:

Dear Brain,

You are stubborn, this we know. However I do believe you had a moment of epiphany on Saturday with regards to your Comrades aspirations. The continuous reminder that one should not complete a Comrades Marathon before the age of 30 was somewhat of a mysterious concept to you, until I believe you met Constantia Nek. It was at this point you suddenly fully appreciate the concept of memory. Running memory on your legs. Years of training your body to do what it needs to do to get you the distance.

While I accolade your fierce determination to conquer 5 to 56kms in the period of a year, there is nothing that can beat experience and time on the legs and for that you will need to take a breathe, congratulate yourself, and give yourself a break.

Yours in patience,
Crazii

And last, but certainly not least:

Dear Running Family,

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU! I could not have done any of it without you guys! SuperMom, Speed Machine, 2IC, Adventure Queen, Running Mom and everybody else, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!

Yours in gratefulness,
Crazii

0 DAYS TO GO!

OMG! I just ran 56kms! And tripped over a cat’s eye while watching a dancing gorilla, and finished in under 6 hours, YAYAYAYAYAYAY! It was amazing. All the training, sore knees, absurd amount of carbs was totally worth it! I, Crazii Redhead, managed to complete the Two Oceans Ultra Marathon, battered and bruised, weak and with my most unhappy face on, but I did it. And by George I would to do it again in a second!

Thanks to SuperMom and all my running family, I made it through. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without you guys, or The Chef, The Barman, Thunder and Pint Size. My amazing support crew kept me going for the glorious/agonising/heart breaking 56kms… I wouldn’t have wanted it to be any other way!

Thank you all, next stop, London Marathon!

1 DAY TO GO!!!

In less than 24 hours I will be starting the 2010 Two Oceans Ultra Marathon with 9000 other people. There is currently an interesting debate going on between the runners and none runners as to whether or not you can actually call us people. Other names being bandied about include Crazii’s, Freaks, Cuckoo’s and my personal favourite, Machines.

In exactly 24 hours, (this crazii machine, hehe) will hopefully be running along Rhodes drive (after triumphantly having conquered Constantia Nek) cursing about the severe camber in the road but thanking my little speed racers, my running family and the crowd for getting me this far.

I think what I’m looking forward to the most is meeting SuperMom at the start and running together, seeing Thunder and The Barman off for their first half experince, getting through Death Valley unscathed, doing the executive shuffle up Constantia Nek and then finishing, arms raised in triumph, having run with some of the most incredible running names in history.

Good luck to my wonderful running family, Thunder and The Barman, I promise to see you at the finish smiling like the Cheshire cat while hobbling to the tent for an energade and some hot cross buns!

1 Day to Go!!!

2 DAYS TO GO!!!

With only 2 days to go until I learn how much my calf muscles truly do despise my achilles tendons, I am suitably nervous and excited. In about 30 minutes I’m off to expo to join the ranks of 21 000 other crazii’s (9000 of which are Ultra Crazii’s) in collecting our personalized numbers and hopefully a few free goodies along the way!

Tomorrow I shall be running 5kms, as apparently it’s a good idea after so much rest (4 days in my case!) to remind your legs and body what you fully intend on putting them through on Sat morning. Personally I am more in favour of the shock therapy treatment, that way they get such a surprise on race day after thinking their life of paralysis over the past 4 days was permanent that they speed across the finish so fast Roadrunner would look slow!

Okay, so obviously I’m living in Cuckooland, but I like it here. It’s warm and fluffy and very very far away from the reality of 6 hours pounding my little speed races into the tar all the way across Cape Town. (As a side note, I’m actually surprised we don’t get issued with passports for The Republic of Hout Bay, tehe). Anyway, I must be off, I’ve a meeting with the King of Candy Floss Mountain, something to do with excess sugar in the Chocolate River which is apparently affecting the growth of the Chocolate and Carmel fudge Trees??? In my world, there’s no such thing as too much sugar… mind you, I’m not made of Candy Floss.

Adios amego’s… until tomorrow!

2 DAYS TO GO!!!

EX vs. XXX

I thought for the sake of my readers sanity, I would deviate the topic today ever so slightly from running to a somewhat more salacious subject, that of ex’s. As fate would have it, a few months ago I got the most mysterious sms from a person I do not know. It said that we should meet, woman to woman and talk. Suddenly finding myself in a very bad soap opera (sorely lacking in the retarded cousin and spiritual guide), I responded with my usual sweetness and asked “Who the frek are you and what do we need to talk about”. Long story short and I found myself drinking tequila with the ex’s ex. Yip, hell hath no furry like a woman scorned and I’ll tell you what... you don’t want to mess with this little piece of dynamite. So there I was talking to the woman who, not 2 weeks ago, hated my guts and had visions of stabbing me to death ala Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. With a volume of new information acquired over the following 2 weeks and the ensuing break up, she felt the need to fully explain and talk to me about this man we both, clearly, had misunderstood.

Cue a 3 hour discussion, some highly enlightening and rather heart breaking realizations and we were kindred sprits. As apparently a number of other woman we needed to find would soon become. Yip, it would appear our supposed Mr Perfect turned out to be slightly less than perfect after all! Rather amusing for me and highly painful for my new found friend, we analyzed and over analyzed every inch of the past few years as only woman can do.

Since that fateful day when I aquired a new friend and sounding board, two realizations came to pass:

1) No matter what happens in life and love, woman will always be there for each other to wipe away the tears, call him nasty names and feed each other ice cream and pizza whenever the need arises. We will feel each others pain, laugh with each other in times of happiness and always hold each others hands when things seem a little to big.

2)  “A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one” - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

(3 DAYS TO GO!!!)

4 DAYS TO GO!

The panic seems to have subsided marginally and my lungs seem to have remembered how to process oxygen to a point where breathing is just possible. My fellow running family have continued to run until this morning, which is causing a great sense of unease and a fear that I may, in fact, be completely under trained. I keep repeating the old adage of “under trained is better than over trained”, but thus far it’s not working. I think that saying is very much like the saying of “It’s good luck to be shat on by a bird”. It’s not, it’s the universe’s way of telling you you are equivilant to a pigeons long drop. The only reason people tell you it’s good luck is to make you feel better because you are now covered in pigeon poop! So now I sit at my desk, contemplating the reasons how I actually ended up here in the first place.

12 months ago it seemed like a good idea to start running. Life was very chaotic, love life was in a shambles and the one lonely pair of running shoes I owned suddenly grew a voice. So I began running alone along the promenade for 5 arduous kms before collapsing in a heap on the grass wishing my car was an automatic. I continued this torturous experience until the Men’s Health 10kms Run where I signed up for what became the biggest life changing adventure of my life!

With the introduction of a new life before sunrise, a group of incredible people and a support structure I realized I had been lacking, I find myself today, ready to embrace the challenge of long distance running as well as the realization that no matter how big the mountain may seem, when you have helping hands all along the way, it’s only a little bump in the road.

So a big thank you to my wonderful running family, for taking me under their well run wings and teaching me that no matter how many times you shower, if you get home at 4am and join the 5:30am run, you will still smell like tequila!

4 Days To Go!!!