Josh Writes a Blog

Author: zornog

  • Foot Traffic Flat

    Location: Portland, Oregon (Sauvie Island)
    Distance: 1/4th Marathon (10.55k)
    Chip Time: 1:17:43
    Pace: 11:31/mi (or 11:51/mi, more on that later)

    I feel like I have a lot to talk about on this one so let’s get into it.

    The Foot Traffic Flat takes place on Sauvie Island, nestled between the Willamette and Columbia Rivers and the Multnomah Channel. It’s one of those islands like Manhattan: technically an island but when I think of islands, I think of Hawaii and Guam and shit like that, not something surrounded by rivers. They need a different name for landmasses like that.

    Sauvie Island, rotated for blogging purposes. Right is north.

    If you’re a worldbuilding nerd like me, you can use the Multnomah Channel as an example of a river that splits instead of merges. Congrats, you dork.

    Anyway, this race was at 6:30am! That’s early! But necessary as it’s supposed to be a hot one in Portland today, and I’m sure Foot Traffic takes account of the temperature when they schedule this thing.

    Pre-Race

    So Sauvie Island is interesting because for the entire island there is only one bridge to enter or exit from. Because of this, the event organizers were telling people to buy shuttle tickets to reduce the amount of traffic. I ended up buying one, which meant rather than just driving to the event and getting there 45min early, I drove to a parking lot and took a shuttle. Was this a good idea? Well, yes. And no. It was good because I didn’t have to drive. Also, the full marathon started at 5:30am, so driving to the event meant waiting for marathoners to pass by. Traffic to the bridge was virtually non-existent, which I would chalk up to the amount of people who used a shuttle instead.

    But this meant getting to the parking lot earlier, which meant waking up earlier. I set my alarm for 4:45am; because of my brain, I woke up at 4:30am. Gathered up my stuff, including the race shirt which was basically a singlet, my headphones, my water bottle.

    I decided to make my own electrolyte drink for this run. I sweat like my body despises water and I knew I would need to hydrate. For longer runs in the past I’ve been adding a couple of teaspoons of sugar to water. It’s not tasty at all, but it gets the job done. For this run I opted to include, in addition to the sugar, about 1/4th of a teaspoon of salt. This was … it worked, okay? At least it felt like it did. Did it taste terrible? Yes. Should I have made it the night before and put it in the fridge so it would be at least somewhat cold during my run? Yes, absolutely, yes. I probably could’ve mixed it with my Crystal Light drink, to be honest. But it got the job done, okay. I’m not expecting a tasty drink while I run, I’m expecting carbs and salt.

    I also grabbed my pre-race breakfast: a slice of bread, a bit of peanut butter, and some honey. Nothing too dense, plenty of easily digestible carbs.

    So I mixed that up and drove to the shuttle and took the shuttle. The shuttle was a school bus, which makes perfect sense; who else wakes up this early to drive people from Point A to Point B? This was bad for my legs however as I am not a 10 year old child.

    The shuttle took around 30 minutes or so to get to the destination. Part of the reason why it took so long is because the shuttle literally took the long way around the island, I think mainly to not interfere with the marathoners but also, everyone was running on the road anyway so it’s not like people weren’t aware of cars. I’m not sure what the reasoning was here, but at least Sauvie Island is gorgeous.

    We get to the Pumpkin Patch, where the event starts, around 6:10ish. The race itself (my wave at least) starts at 6:38. My goal was this: to take my patented Pre-Race Poop (PRP) and then to do a quick warmup run. What actually happened was this: stand in line for the toilets for TWENTY GODDAMN MINUTES. The lines were so long. I can’t stress this enough. But I wait, because I know my bowel history. I get to a toilet at around 6:35, push like I’m having a baby1, and then get out and into the crowd, doing some jogging in place and nonsense like that because I didn’t have time for a proper warmup.

    “But Josh, why didn’t you poop before you left the house?” What am I, an amateur? Of course I pooped before I left the house. Obviously you don’t understand. There is a morning poop, and there is the PRP. And everything is out of whack because my regular morning poop is around 6:30. The PRP only happens on race day. It is my body understanding the assignment, you know what I mean? It must happen. I must … release the bowels.

    Then I ran!

    This was taken mere minutes after I pooped. Now you’re thinking about me pooping, aren’t you?

    Swag/Atmosphere

    This wasn’t a “swag-heavy” race. The only big thing was a free ticket to the corn maze. Yeehaw. I’m not sure why all the tchotchkes have dwindles over the months–probably the economy or some shit. It’s kind of nice though, a lot of that stuff is cheap garbage.

    The atmosphere for this race was very weird, in a good way. It felt like this strange juxtaposition of well-kitted out runners and the rustic lifestyle of living on Sauvie Island, a place full of farm fields and pumpkin patches and corn mazes. The Flat’s marathon course is a Boston qualifier, but it felt more like a bunch of rich hippies going out for a jog.

    Also, I don’t know where to put this so I’ll just put it here, but: just a lot of great butts on this run. I saw a YouTube clip once of a weightlifter guy talking about how if guys want to get better glutes, they need to adopt women’s training plans, because women are the experts on butt training. It’s funny because years ago it was almost a joke to riff on women on the stairmaster all the time, but … it’s working, ladies. The moral of the story is: don’t stop doing something just because people doubt or laugh at you.

    (I don’t run to look at butts, but it is a nice bonus.)

    The Race

    They don’t call it the Flat for nothing. It was primarily flat, with a couple of short inclines, which meant for steady pacing for the most part.

    Speaking of pace, Garmin says my general pace was 11:35, while the chip timing says it was 11:51. The latter is more correct, so I’m not sure where the 11:35 is coming from, other than grade adjusted pace.

    I posted goal times (for the 10k) on my Instagram:

    And my 10k time according to my watch was 1:11:29, so I would call that my S Goal achieved.

    I kept a steady pace for the first three miles or so.

    My splits are kind of garbage after mile three though. This makes perfect sense if you factor in that I do parkrun every Saturday and that most of my runs are in the 3-4 mile range lately. I intentionally walked at the aid stations, though I didn’t get any water because I had my bottle. But later on in the run I walked more because my body wasn’t used to the distance at that pace. And I honestly was probably underfueled as well. If anything, this race was a great indicator of my lack of fueling methods. Like I said earlier, right now it’s just sugar water (+salt this time). That plus a slice of bread and PB and honey in the morning likely isn’t enough to sustain me, especially considering that Garmin estimates that I burned 1,300 calories on this run. I’m a big guy, I gotta get more calories in before I head off. Time to invest in gels or M&Ms or something.

    What I’ve learned here is: fuel at the start of the run, and fuel every 5k or thereabouts. For now at least. Maybe when I get more efficient (i.e., lose weight) I can fuel every hour. We’ll see. I could’ve also kept my pace a bit lower at the start–11:30 instead of ~11:00.

    At one point there was a big inflatable unicorn with a hose spraying water in someone’s front yard, which meant a free cool shower on the way. I didn’t take a picture of this but I wish I had.

    The only other thing was that since I was convinced that this was 10k, after I hit 10k and my watch was like “Congrats you did a 10k,” I looked around and there clearly was no finish line. I figured my watch had some GPS misstep or something, but usually the finish line is relatively near where my watch distance is. But there was nothing in sight. So I ended up stopping and walking more after 6.22 miles because I was looking back at the other runners to see if any other 10k runners were behind me, or if I had some how inadvertently joined the half-marathoners. For a moment I thought, “Well, I guess I’m running a half-marathon now?” I even saw a woman with my bib color walking in the other direction at one point, making me wonder if she screwed up too and was walking back to the start, defeated.

    But I pressed on and after turning a corner I saw that finish line for the quarter marathon, which was just in some farmer’s front yard. I ran into (pun intended) my friend Lisa as I was running and discovered that she was also running the quarter, because she was there, and she was the one who reminded me that a quarter marathon is more than 10k. So, thank you, Lisa.

    Thanks Lisa, sorry you look kind of like a terminal cancer victim in this photo.

    All the other routes looped back to the start except ours; we had to wait in a farmer’s front yard until the shuttle arrived to pick us up. Us few, the privileged quarter marathoners. But while I was there, I saw a chicken.

    Chicken.

    I can’t stress to you enough just how sweaty I was at the end. It felt like I was like one of those frogs who has a constant sheen of mucus on them at all times, except the mucus was sweat. I am SO THANKFUL that I remembered to put anti-chafing stuff on my nipples before I left. Truly a godsend.

    Post-Race

    The shuttle took us back to the event and I got some snacks and a very, very delicious ice cream sandwich from Ruby Jewel. Foot Traffic hyped up the ice cream sandwich a lot in their emails, which you wouldn’t do unless it was delicious. It was so good I want to eat another one right now.

    And that was it, basically. Lisa was nice enough to give me a ride back to my car and then I drove home and now I’m here writing this thing right now!

    Next up is another Parks & Rec 5k. Meanwhile the Portland (half) Marathon is 12 weeks away. I’ve got far fewer 5ks in the books for the second half of 2023. While I’m grateful for them for helping me build a running foundation, I’m also thankful that now that I have a foundation, I don’t need to keep signing up for every 5k that I see.

    Until next time!

    1. This is a joke, I didn’t really push this hard, please don’t push this hard when you poop. If you’re pushing this hard, you need some fiber or something. ↩︎

  • parkrun #17

    Another PR in the books! A lovely sunny morning at Rock Creek Trail. This morning I decided to do my Garmin suggested run within parkrun, which was a 10 minute warmup and cooldown, with 17 minutes of running at threshold, 10:10/mi, in between. It made sense to adapt this into my parkrun at the time, and in the end it was great for my pace in general, but boy was it tough.

    I ran .5 miles as a warmup beforehand, and then went off too fast because that’s just what I do. I was going to slow down when another runner came up beside me and asked me about my bone-conduction headphones. He was going fast too so I kept pace for a bit to talk and then just said “I gotta slow down” and let him go ahead. But even then I was running a little faster than my warmup pace (which is around 13:00/mi). However, this has become a thing now; I’m getting better at running which means 13:00/mi is a little slow, and I’m really going about 12:30/mi.

    Anyway, then my warmup was over, and as you might suspect, my threshold run began uphill. There are two hills at my parkrun: the first is called “Deepak’s Torture Hill” on Strava and I have to agree with that assessment. This is where I started my threshold, and I hadn’t really factored hills into the whole thing. The second hill is at the turnaround point and has a boring name on Strava so I’m going to call it “Deepak’s Torture Hill 2: The Reckoning.”

    The red circle is DTH, the yellow circle is DTH2:TR.

    So I started my threshold going uphill, which was hard. But I made it, and my pacing wasn’t … terrible. But I knew what was coming, so I made a decision to walk a couple of times in between DTH and DTH2 so I could bank a little bit of energy for my pacing overall. This is the legacy of Jeff Galloway, the man who told me that I could walk during my run and it would be okay.

    The second uphill was hard, but thankfully, the rest of the course is mostly downhill, since you’re coming back the way you came. And so, when my threshold run ended and Garmin put me back on my warmup pace, a weird thing happened: I couldn’t go slower. I just couldn’t. I tried! I even stopped at one point briefly to wiggle out my numbing foot, but when I started up again, I went faster than I expected. My watch kept beeping at me to slow down but I didn’t, and at the last minute was me running even faster to reach the finish line.

    I ended up 34:18 official parkrun time, which is a mind-boggling difference of 36 seconds. That’s a lot in running! It really opened up my mind and my body in terms of what I am capable of doing on a 5k race. I could feel the months of running and walking and exercise finally starting to click into place.

    And that was that. I bought McDonalds afterward.

    Next up is my first ever 10k race! The Foot Traffic Flat on Sauvie Island on the 4th of July. See you then.

  • Redmond

    I forgot to write a recap of the Redmond Run! Let’s do that.

    Location: Redmond, Oregon
    Distance: 5k
    Chip Time: 35:25
    Pace: 11:25/mi

    On Friday, June 16th I packed up some stuff and drove out to Redmond, Oregon to run yet another 5k. The reason is purely principle: my 2023 New Years resolution was to run a 5k every month. In my mind, that meant running a timed 5k race once a month; untimed “fun runs” didn’t count, nor did parkrun.

    For June, the only run I had signed up for was the Starlight Run, which was a fun run, and so I decided to hunt down another, timed, 5k that I could run. After some searching, I came upon the Redmond Run and almost immediately signed up for it.

    Then, about an hour later, my brain finally realized that Redmond, Oregon is nowhere near Portland. It was in central Oregon, near Bend.

    oops

    But it was too late; I had paid my fees. So I decided to go for it and make a little weekend trip out of it.

    Pre-Race

    The drive to Redmond was gorgeous. First, you’re driving toward Mt. Hood, looming in the distance, and then driving through Mt. Hood National Forest, and then the forest drops away, revealing the cliffside down into the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. I wish I had taken photos but I was driving. C’est la vie. I rented a small cabin out in Terrebonne, about 15 minutes north of Redmond. It was technically in the unincorporated community of Crooked River Ranch, which has a golf course and RV park and restaurants and such. The whole place was great, and the cabin was tiny but well furnished and when I arrived they had a jar full of root beer barrel candies, aka one of my favorite candies ever. So that was a plus.

    I drove into Redmond first to pick up my bib. I didn’t take very many pictures of the city because it looked a lot like any other city you’d find in Oregon. In hindsight I realize many people don’t know what that means though, so I wish I had taken more. I did take a photo of this fish statue thing though:

    A very strange art piece depicting a fish about to eat another fish.

    The Swag

    Basic t-shirt and bib with a table full of little things to pick up. I grabbed a box of matches because they had that. Another free thing was Bend Soap, which I already grabbed at previous run. Pretty basic, nothing fancy.

    I then drove back to Terrebonne, dropped off my stuff, and then took a quick trip to Smith Rock State Park.

    Smith Rock is a well-known rock climbing spot, a mecca of sorts and one of the spots that jumpstarted the modern day rock climbing frenzy. It is absolutely gorgeous and I desperately wished at the time that I had stayed an extra day so I could do a day hike of it or something. But, instead I took a walk around the path for a mile or so, saw some fauna and some people rock climbing, and then returned to the hotel. I wasn’t dressed for a hike and even if I was, I didn’t want to hike too much as I didn’t want to compromise my run the next morning. But I’m definitely going back.

    So I went back to my cabin, watched The Birdcage (holds up), and went to bed.

    The Atmosphere

    Arriving the next morning, I wandered around and got a quick warm up jog in before the race started. It was a great atmosphere. The whole event felt very chill and there were just enough runners for it to feel like an event, but not so many that it felt like a corporate event (*cough*shamrockrun). It was warm and sunny but not too much of either, and I brought my little water bottle and spritzed myself down with sunscreen just in case.

    The Race

    The goal I had set for myself for this race was 35:00, and I hit 35:25, which I’m happy with. I ran almost the entire thing except for a hill at the end that I just didn’t feel like running up. (Also about 10 seconds when I had to stop and tie my shoe.) I ran my ass off for this one though and was pleased with my body’s ability to keep up for the majority of it.

    I’m getting to a point now where 35 minutes feels like it will soon be an average slower 5k pace for me. I can feel 11:00/mi creeping up, and I’m hoping by December to get as close to a 30 minute 5k as possible. Garmin thinks I can do one in 29:30 and hell, maybe I can. We shall see.

    After the race they had a smorgasbord of easily digestible carbs. Like, they really went all out: cookies, fruit, bagels with cream cheese, trail mix, and more. I also grabbed a beer this go around, and the man pouring the beers let me know that very hoppy IPAs can damage your taste buds. So I didn’t get the IPA.

    And that was it! I drove home, which was also beautiful. At one point you turn a corner and Mt. Hood appears from behind the trees, right there, gigantic and looming. Wish I had gotten a photo of it.

  • A Post-Grants Pass Life

    This is Crater Lake, not Grants Pass. Unless something very bad happened to Grants Pass.

    Last Thursday I drove to Grants Pass, Oregon. It was part of a trip I had planned, to visit my brother Russ and his girlfriend Lori, and to visit my parents, who were driving there as well. We had planned it for a few months now, originally to be in the small town of Shady Cove, Oregon, which is a few miles north of Medford, Oregon (which, itself, is a few miles northwest of Ashland, Oregon, aka the home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival), but, as always, something Shady happened in Shady Cove and my brother and Lori had to move to Wolf Creek, Oregon.

    To be clear: my brother and his GF didn’t do the shady thing. They were escaping a shady situation.

    Thankfully, you can cancel hotels easily now so I swapped out the Shady Cove hotel for one in Grants Pass. I didn’t know much about Grants Pass other than that my friend Will was born and raised there and is thankful to be gone. GP was the hub, the HQ, so to speak, where we gathered before going somewhere else, so it’s not like I was going to spend a ton of time there. But I did end up spending more time there than I expected, and I have to say: cute little town!

    The drive was down I-5 and was essentially two chunks: the Willamette Valley, stretching from Portland down to Eugene, and then low mountains (hills, really, to us Idahoans) until you reach the Rogue Valley, in which Grants Pass sits. The first half is farmland and the second half is “This is where people go to hide for the rest of their lives.” Lots of unincorporated towns nestled in the hills, the kind of places where you ask yourself, “What do people do for work here?”

    Hotel was nice. Red Lion. I splurged and my parents paid for half since it was a double bed situation. It wasn’t anything epic, but good enough that I was glad to have picked it and not, say, a Motel 6. Sometimes you just gotta save up for a good hotel, okay?

    It was immediately good to see my parents again. My dad had been doing fairly poorly the past few months as his gallbladder decided to fail him, and so I wondered for a while if he would even be able to make the 10 hour trip from Nampa to Grants Pass. But not only did he make it, he drove the entire time. What a trooper. Naturally, they were tired from the drive and I was tired from the drive, so we didn’t do much on Thursday other than meet Russ and Lori and eat pizza in a park gazebo.

    Friday was Crater Lake. There honestly wasn’t much to this trip: we drove up there and saw the lake and then ate lunch and then drove home. Russ and Lori had their dogs with them, a medium sized black dog named Nala (dunno her breed) and a little chihuahua named Kenny. Nala is a rescue dog and kind of fidgety around people so most of the time at Crater Lake, for Russ at least, involved him keeping her from barking and being a nuisance.

    Kenny, meanwhile, at one point slipped out of his collar and leapt up onto the stone wall separating the teeming masses from the hundreds of feet drop into the lake itself. He was seconds away from becoming a footnote in a Crater Lake pamphlet. Fortunately, he wasn’t a stupid idiot and, after jumping on the wall, immediately hesitated like, Ut-oh. Lori grabbed him up and that’s when we decided to head to a spot for lunch.

    Honestly, I wish we could’ve had more time to hike around the crater, but it’s not like the lake is going anywhere anytime soon. Plenty of opportunities to return.

    Saturday I did a 4 mile anaerobic run on a dirt track by a middle school. It was actually pretty nice. Ten minutes of warmup and cool down with 7×1:00 intervals at 8:45/mi, with 3:00 recovery in between. It was humid as hell that morning, 88%! But I got it done and then spent the next hour trying desperately to cool down enough that I wasn’t sweating all over the free continental breakfast. I hung out in the hotel for a bit as my parents had driven off to take photos of bears. In Grants Pass there are a bunch of artsy fiberglass bears placed throughout town. Here’s one that I took a photo of:

    This bear looks nervous.

    They’re everywhere and this was like the holy grail of parental activities. So they went off and did that and then when they got back I took mom to Ashland so we could see a play at OSF! We arrived in Ashland and walked around Lithia Park and then got some decent boba tea. It was a Thai iced tea from a fancy tea shop that would never dare to keep sweetened condensed milk, so we had coconut milk instead, which … didn’t really taste like Thai iced tea but whatever, it was refreshing.

    This was my first time ever going to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, but my mom went once before–in 1966. Or 67. Somewhere around there. She even brought these brass bracelets that she had bought at OSF back then and gave one to me.

    The show I opted to see was Three Musketeers. It was pretty good. Not great, and a little clumsy at times, but enjoyable overall. I think my biggest complaint is that I chose it because I assumed there would be sword fights, which there were, but they were very … slow and awkward. I felt like I was watching a fight rehearsal where everyone was going at 70%. The show had a primarily Black cast with a Black director and was inspired by Dumas’s book, but also contemporized with modern language and culture. Which was fine, but it also was telling the story of the Three Musketeers while also telling this meta narrative of Alexandre Dumas writing the Three Musketeers, which I felt was A) false advertising, and B) not very well constructed. But I digress, this is a trip blog and not a theatre review blog. I enjoyed the show overall!1

    Moreover, I was just glad to be able to take my mom out to see some theatre. She really enjoyed herself and after having to take care of Dad for a few months, I think she deserved a night to just relax and put her mind at ease for a few hours.

    I never understood the concept of the “magic eraser” in photos but that woman in between us is making me understand.

    Sunday morning I ran a 4 mile base run. I wanted it to be 6 miles but Grants Pass is hilly and I couldn’t hack it. Then I went with my parents to continue their Pokemon-esque search for Art Bears. It looked basically like this:

    I found a map of the locations of most of the bears and so we drove around and Mom snapped photos of the ones she hadn’t gotten on the first go around. I love my parents but this had to be the most Old Person thing I’ve seen in a while. Just driving around taking photos of bears.

    Afterward we met up with Russ and Lori and drove to Eight Dollar Mountain, which has a “botanical wayside” just off the main road. There’s a walkway that leads to a ton of pitcher plants in a fen. A fen! A bona fide fen. I’ve never seen so many pitcher plants in my life.

    We mostly moseyed around this section. High moseying quality here. The path couldn’t have been more than a quarter of a mile at most, but my mom and dad loved looking at all the plants and reading all the placards about the plants. My dad had an app which could tell you what a plant was based on a photo. It was nice.

    The fam, looking at stuff.

    Then we all drove back to Grants Pass and ate Chinese food at a place called China Hut. It was very, very good.

    … in bed.

    After that we said goodbyes to Russ and Lori and then Mom and I went and swam in the hotel pool for a bit. And then it was Monday morning; time to drive home.

    Overall, a great trip. Wasn’t anything to stress out about, just a few days to enjoy family, the great outdoors, and the Magic of Theatre™. With my dad being 81 and my mom in her late 70s at this point, getting to spend a few days with them is always a blessing. I miss them, even when my dad annoys the hell out of me with his tomfoolery. It’s bittersweet, to remember that your parents are going to die one day. That your siblings are going to die one day. That you are going to die one day. It’s the only constant in the universe. So make sure your days on Earth count.

    1. But I kind of wish we had seen Twelfth Night instead. ↩︎

  • Invasion of the Crab People

    “Alright, I’m going to explain this in laymen’s terms and then we’re going to figure out how to get the fuck out of here.

    “I don’t know how much you know about biology, but there’s this concept in evolutionary biology which states that the crab is the ultimate evolution. I’m … ‘ultimate’ is subjective here I guess, but they even have a term for it. Carcinization. Convergent evolution. Different species evolving into a similar thing. And on Earth, it’s crabs. Five different times in the history of the Earth, things evolved into crabs, separately from each other. You got crabs, but you also got lobsters, shrimp. Some are crabs, the ones call crabs are crabs, ‘true’ crabs they call them–“

    Something thuds against the concrete wall in the distance.

    “–holy fuck. Okay but also there are ‘false’ crabs, which are creatures that evolve crab-like traits. The king crab, for example–the fucking king crab!– is not a true crab.”

    “What is it?” says Laura.

    “False crab. Crustacean, a, ah … decapod crustacean. Strange taxonomy because they usually only have eight appendages but whatever. The thing everyone used to eat all the time wasn’t even a real crab.”

    “Why are you telling me this now–?”

    “Because. It’s important. Let’s extrapolate this concept, okay? If life on Earth regularly and eventually evolves into crabs, then it follows that crabs or creatures with crab-like traits are advantageous for, for living. Right?”

    Laura nods, hesitantly.

    “Crabs, everything should be crabs, right? Well … what about life in the universe? Is life everywhere meant to be crabs?”

    Laura stared at Paul for a few seconds. Another thud in the distance, reverberating dirt off the ceiling into a fine mist in the dimly lit room.

    “Are you saying,” she began, before pausing and staring at the ground for another couple of seconds. “Are you saying they are here because we’re not crabs?”

    Paul smiled, the kind of smile your dad gives you when you walk across the stage to get your high school diploma. “Yes. Maybe. But probably. Now. We gotta get the fuck out of here.”

    ++

    The Crustatians, or crab people if you will, arrived about six years ago? Hard to remember. First contact seemed innocuous enough; they landed in their spaceship created entirely out of the chitin of their intimately strange “queen” crab, a spaceship that was also a giant crab, with enormous hollowed out sections for living quarters, lavatories, food storage, etc. Upon embarking, the queen crab’s appendages are torn from her body, the jelly-like meat inside stored within a brine solution which keeps indefinitely. The crabs eat this while they travel through space. The queen crab survives this, by the way. They are not traveling through a corpse.

    Their hyperspace, or subspace, drive (we’re not sure which) is mind-boggling and during initial talks, their attempts to describe it to us were met with blank stares. In essence, the queen crab is capable of producing a level of energy we spent centuries trying to harness, which she uses to fold space, allowing for near instantaneous universal travel. It seems related somewhat to a mantis shrimp’s ability to strike their claws with the force of a gunshot; a level of energy creation that far surpasses the size of the shrimp itself, much like how an ant can carry 10 times its own weight.

    The queen crab does this in space. She, and I can’t believe I’m writing this out, but she clacks her claws together like you or I would snap our fingers, and then folds space using the energy, which is so massive that it defies mathematical explanation. The crab snaps her fingers and boom, they’re here. Apparently, queen crabs can only do this so often and occasionally their claws break, leaving the Crustatians stranded as the queen crab slowly regrows her limb, often using the sustenance of her own stored brine-meat, literally eating herself to grow herself back again.

    Needless to say, the scientific community was both aghast and agog during first contact.

    ++

    The concrete wall broke with a loud crash, revealing the blunt and thick end of an enormous green and white claw. Laura screamed and Paul grabbed her arm, and the two of them rushed through the network of now dry sewers beneath the city.

    “The crab people are the judges,” Paul said as a crash of debris sounded behind them. A shaft of light revealed the silhouette of the blunt-clawed crab person, only around five feet tall but broad, with one enormous hammered claw and one smaller, pincer-esque claw. Two others appeared behind them, another with a blunt claw and a third, slightly more slender, with two very thin, almost needle claws. They began pursuing Paul and Laura.

    “What do you mean?” said Laura.

    “They judge the evolution of species in the universe!”

    “Judge what? If we’re crab enough?”

    “YES!”

    They turned a corner to the right, into a smaller side tunnel. Standing in the tunnel about 20 feet away was not a crab person, but one their crablings: essentially a giant crab, not sentient like the crab people. A dog to them, in a way. Its body was wide enough to block the majority of the tunnel.

    Paul pulled Laura back and they backtracked for a bit, attempting to cross into a tunnel in the opposite direction. As they did, one of the hammer clawed crab people approached and swung their hammer claw, striking Paul in the back of his left shoulder, knocking him hard enough to send him flying and losing his grip on Laura’s hand. He slammed into the sewer wall and crumpled to the ground.

    Laura screamed but stopped then the needle-clawed crab person placed one of their claws gingerly on her lips. It made a trilling sound that was the closest thing a crab person could do to say, “Shhhh.”

    ++

    The first year or so was routine and surprisingly mundane. The Crustatians exchanged ideas with us and learned much about our history and evolutionary path. We were amazed at these humanoid looking crabs with their giant queen crab spaceship; they were amazed that apes had evolved into using tools and even inventing space travel. This is where, of course, things took a turn for the worse.

    I was a junior science officer aboard the TI Manifest, the space installation that is now about 65% in the Marianas Trench, when the crab people ordered a meeting with the chief science officer, Admiral Bening, along with the cadre of senior level scientists. I was called to join because Bening was grooming me for senior level advancement within the burgeoning exploratory xenobiology field (not re: the crab people, but more for possible alien life forms found on the planets we were exploring at the time).

    The crab people were short. The tallest one was a lithe female standing around 1.3 meters. They all had the broad abdomens that crabs typically have, a single abdomen with eyes and antennae sticking out the front, except that the crab people are also bipedal and, over millions of years of evolution, their second and third sets of legs became vestigial, dangling helplessly from their sides like the tyrannosaurs of the dinosaur age. They worked, but were used mainly for communication; the crab people utilized a language of simple words coupled with intricate sign language. Admiral Bening was at the meeting where they brought a deaf colleague, Dr. Sybari, who was able to achieve communication with the crabs twice as fast as prior attempts.

    The crab people wore no clothes and their exoskeletons were vibrant, full of different colorings. The females were bigger and more colorful than the males, and did all the talking. And talk they did: it was at this meeting where we learned that the Crustatians were performing a galactic survey of the Milky Way and discovered us, the only sentient life forms in the entire galaxy. Hard to describe the level of nihilism that passed through the science crew when we heard that–there’s something about a giant crab who can snap her way through the universe that made us not doubt their ability to discern how much life was in an entire galaxy.

    They found us and found that we were apes. Hominids. Mammals. Soft, squishy meat bags. And they were … disappointed. The only way I can think to describe it is like when your favorite horse breaks a leg and, even though you love it, you know you have to kill it. The Crustatians looked at us like that, and told us that apes were not the apex of evolution. Crabs were. That meant that we would not progress to the apex of evolution. They sounded sad when they told us this, their soft vocalizations coupled with the weary limpness in their limbs.

    And then they started killing us.

    ++

    Paul awoke on a bed with a blinding headache that seemed to ripple down into his shoulder and left side. He moved to press his hand against his head to ease the pain but found that his arms were tied to the bed frame. As were his legs. Even his head was pressed back with some kind of strap against his forehead. The most he could do was turn slightly left or right to survey his surroundings.

    The room he was in was dirty and smelled of brine and seawater. This was a perpetual effect of the crab people–their colonies were mostly established along the beach and especially in estuaries, but some also in more distant lands like forests and mountains. Regardless, they all smelled like the ocean.

    Eventually Paul realized he was in a medical room, though one repurposed for crab people. There was a bed beside him; Laura was in that bed, but unconscious, her head facing away from Paul. Her skin looked sickly but Paul couldn’t place why.

    “You have questions,” said a voice. The vocalization was a crab person, one chosen to speak with humans. Their voice had a permanent sort of “buzzing” sound to it, making “questions” sound more like “quezztions.”

    The unique clicking of crab person footsteps approaching. One of their “liaisons,” crab people who wear clothes, try to integrate with human culture. It was wearing a lab coat and a stethoscope that it could not use as it did not have human ears. It was male, its two bulbous eyes moving back and forth quickly, studying Paul’s body in the bed.

    “What are you doing?” Paul asked. “Why am I bound like this? What’s going on?!”

    “You are not wize to run from uzz,” the crab person replied. “Your true evoluzzun has begun. Zee your zizter.”

    The crab person took their claw and gently ran it under the strap holding Paul’s head. With a quick clack, the strap broke. Paul turned to look at his sister Laura in her own bed. “Laura! What did they do to you?!”

    Laura stirred, then turned to face her brother. Where her human eyes once sat were now two bulbous black eyes, sticking out from stalks. Above, on her forehead, two baby antennae were growing.

    “Paul? What’s happening?”

    Paul felt a stabbing in his arm and turned frantically to watch the crab person pushing a syringe full of what looked like brackish water into his body. “The true evoluzzun beginzz,” they said.

    “You bastards! You fucking bastards!” was all Paul could get out before the liquid inside him wracked him with pain until he fell unconscious.

    ++

    So, now we are entering the new era of humanity. Our own carcinization, forced upon us by a benevolence of the King Crab, who pities us for our poor evolutionary divergence. All of these other creatures saw the beauty of the crab–why not humans? We, who can’t even fit our wisdom teeth in our fucking jaws anymore.

    I hope when the crab people find you, that they are merciful and kill you quickly, or deem you worthy of carcinization. Because they will find you, eventually.

  • Parks & Rec 5k/EPIP: Lents

    SE 92nd Avenue and Holgate Blvd
    Neighborhood: Lents
    Portland Parks & Rec Page

    This was the second of five 5k runs Portland Parks & Recreation puts on (here’s the first), and the first that crosses I-205 into East Portland. This is the farthest east run, which makes sense if you remember that the city of Portland doesn’t give a shit about anything east of 102nd.

    Lents is important to Portland, though, as it is the home of the Portland Pickles, our local baseball team. Minor league? Probably not, I have no idea. I know nothing about baseball. I know it’s the only sport I can think of where they count how many times you fuck up.

    The park is huge and has a ton of stuff to do. This 5k was primarily a trail run, with a few bits on the sidewalk and paved paths. I’d say it was 75% trail, which was a nice change from my typical road runs.

    I ran pretty good, considering I had run parkrun yesterday morning (and achieved my fastest 5k time of the year thus far). My feet keep going numb while I’m running and I’m not entirely sure why other than just your typical overuse injury, but this time it made me a little more nervous because it’s hard to tell where you’re stepping when your feet are going numb, and trail is uneven terrain … you get the point.

    I think my 5k time was around 36:08 but Garmin has 3.16 miles at 36:33. It was a fun run so none of this really matters, other than I’m pleased with my time considering I ran fast yesterday. The atmosphere was cool and everyone was having a good time. Lots of kids running around too, which is fun. They do a little kid race before the 5k and it’s always great to watch these little teeny kids ambling toward the finish line, completely unaware of what the hell is going on.

    Anyway, the park itself. Huge, tons to do. Sports sports sports. You’ve got three baseball fields (though I guess one is strictly for the Pickles), a turf soccer field, a grass soccer field, tennis courts, basketball courts … plenty of Sports Zones. The southern side also has a neat playground, a dog park, and a “nature patch,” which I believe Fernhill Park had as well. There are also a lot of neat houses in this part of town, the kind that remind you of a time before HOAs ruined creativity. Just a big, cool, dynamic park.

    Aesthetics: Gorgeous, a lot of open air. Maybe a bit too busy with sports stuff. 8/10

    Function: Function out the wazoo. Sports, big fields, go see the Pickles and take your dog to the dog park. Plenty to do. 10/10

    Sketchiness: I didn’t notice anything sketchy while I was there, but considering how close it is to 82nd st (a notoriously sketchy street), I wouldn’t be surprised if stuff went down there. That said, I bet the Pickles have some kind of security to keep that at bay. Felt fine otherwise. 9/10

    Next month is Columbia Park, in North Portland!

  • parkrun #16

    No photos this week and no friends joining up but I did run the best 5k I’ve ever run in my life, ever. My official parkrun time was 34:54, marking a parkrun PR and a 5k PR in general. Running under 35 minutes has been a goal of mine since I started running 5ks again, and for some reason today was the day to do it.

    Still a long way to go to get to sub-30, which is likely going to be my absolute best time for quite a while, if I ever get to it. I think I can, it’s just going to require more running and probably more weight loss. Since I started running parkruns, my time has dropped about eight minutes, over six months. Not. Too. Shabby. But lots of room for improvement.

    Not much else to say about this parkrun. Beautiful day, good running. I did it!

  • parkrun #15 & Starlight Run

    This week I invited my friend Nate to come out to parkrun. We haven’t talked in a while and when he caught up with me (in text, not in running) I suggested he come out and enjoy the spring air of our local parkrun. He showed up and did great for a guy who hasn’t exercised in a while!

    I, meanwhile, managed a 36:38 time. (Strava didn’t count the 10 seconds where I stopped to tie my shoe.) Ten seconds off my parkrun PB so I’m hoping I’ll make that up and more in the coming weeks. I’ve also convinced my other friend Missy to come out to parkruns as well, so soon we will all be fit and healthy and live forever!

    Then I went home and played some Tears of the Kingdom for a bit and then walked over the Hawthorne bridge to the Starlight Run.

    The Starlight Run is part of the Portland Rose Festival, and I gotta say, didn’t see one rose anywhere. It’s a fun run, not chip timed, and people dress up in costumes and have a good time. My thought was, a couple months ago, that I would run legit for my parkrun, but since Starlight Run is a “fun run,” I’ll take it easy and slower. No big deal, right?

    Well, instead I ran 36:35. And that’s with a couple of forced stops due to MAX trains passing by. If I hadn’t been forced to stop it would’ve been more like 36 minutes even. And this is WITH me holding my tote bag with stuff in it.

    I won’t do the whole shebang I do for other race posts. The swag was minimal, a t-shirt and a tote bag (to be fair though, this tote bag is FAR better quality than the others I’ve received. It’s like an actual linen or muslin, not cheap woven plastic). I did snag a free Celsius can from people walking by. The atmosphere was awesome, though–lots of people seated along the sidewalks getting ready for the Starlight Parade later on. Kids giving high fives, everyone giving lots of encouragement. Plus costumes and whatnot. It was great.

    My only regret is that I didn’t hydrate very well prior to the run. I saw people with plastic water bottles but couldn’t tell where they were getting them from. I assume from the actual Rose Festival event, which I could’ve gotten into with my bib, but didn’t have cash and didn’t care to use the ATM. So I ran a little “dry,” so to speak. Thankfully, it wasn’t as impactful as the Pacific Coast 5k.

    The medal is a cheap plastic thing, which is fine; I wasn’t expecting to get a medal at all. Plus water and a protein bar. Nothing fancy, probably because they want you in the carnival part to spend money there.

    Overall, I’m very chuffed, as the Brits would say, with my running on Saturday. For a few reasons: first, consistency between both runs. Second, my heart not giving out and me just collapsing to the ground, dead right there. And third, it’s the day after and I don’t feel totally sore or injured! I feel pretty good, honestly.

    That said, I will take Garmin’s advice and rest the next couple of days, before I do it all again.

    Next race is the Redmond Run in Redmond, Oregon. Until then.

  • HAGS

    HAGS

    that stands for “have a great summer” if you didn’t know. i don’t think you’re all hags.

    Well now it’s June. What the hell. It’s almost like time is unwavering and will wear you down like the endless river that creates the deepest canyon. You know what I mean? It’s exactly like that.

    Summer Vacation

    I’m taking a summer vacation from the ol’ newsletter. That just means I won’t be posting twice a month, but more like less than once a month. Whatever I feel like, really. I’m not leaving for good, it’s just nice outside and I’d like to go out there. Out there!

    I hope summer treats you with respect and kindness, and that you get that raise you’ve been wanting. Ask for a raise! You deserve it!

    I’m on Mastodon Again

    Gonna try and make it stick this time. Follow me here. I’m basically writing about the same things in four different places. Isn’t the internet great? It’s certainly not an existential nightmare!

    40 in Retrospect

    I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be 40. Like, what was every decade for me? The first decade, 0-9 we’ll say for number’s sake, was learning on a macro scale: how to walk, how to speak, how to not piss and shit myself whenever I felt like it.1 What numbers meant and how to add them together. How to read. (And, according to my kindergarten report card, how to correct the teacher on grammar mistakes when she would read to us.)

    The second decade (10-19) was learning how to exist in the world: how to interact with other people, how to form rudimentary friendships. Learning about my place in the world both in the small scale—friends, family, classmates, and the various locations around my hometown—and on the large scale—U.S. history, geography, cultural differences, who says “soda” and who says “pop.” By the end of the second decade, I was deemed a man and sent off to fend for myself.

    The third decade (20-29) was learning on a micro scale: really getting into the nitty gritty of everything. My brain could handle it now, all the nuanced aspects of life, politics, interpersonal relationships. Dating, sex, breakups, moving from home, drinking, drinking a lot. Discovering who my real friends were and who were just people I went to college with. Pursuing hobbies and jobs and theatre and music. Learning how to balance a budget by absolutely failing to balance a budget. This feels like the most important decade, doesn’t it? The one where you’re thrust into the real world, away from school and the safety net of your parents.

    Decade number four (30-39) was learning how to survive: the world was harsh and unforgiving, and after ten years of living in it on my own, I was feeling the roughness, like sandpaper against my psyche, sanding my rough edges away. This is probably the family decade for many—marriage and/or children, some perhaps close to if not teenagers by now. This is where I and many others branched off from that group. I tried to survive via numerous avenues: going back to school (it’s what I was used to), weight lifting, meditation, therapy. You know how in cartoons when a character gets thrown a long distance, and at first they’re tumbling, tumbling, tumbling, before the skiddddddd to a stop. My 20s felt like tumbling, and my 30s felt like skidding.

    And now I’m in decade number five (40-49), and after skidding for ten years, it’s time to stand up, brush myself off, and start to walk again. I don’t know what this decade holds (I know some of you readers do, in your own lives), but I’m eager to find out, on my own terms, and in my own pace. My rough edges are now rounded, polished a bit, even, but I’m still learning, still discovering things about myself. Like, I know how to balance my budget now. For real!

    It’s interesting to be here, now, in my 5th decade, watching my brother in his 6th decade, my mother in her 8th decade, my father in his 9th. What do those decades mean for them? What does it mean to be in your 9th decade? I’m hoping I’ll find out one day, and I’m also hoping it means that my consciousness will be ready to be transplanted into an android or something cool like that.

    Running

    Hey guess what? I haven’t run a single 5k race since last issue. I’m taking it easy. I’m chill, dudes. My vibe is … relentless. Or something. It felt good to take a break, even if part of it was to rest my stupid calf muscle. So, you’re welcome! No run talk this week.

    The Zelda Game

    [Note: There are some light Tears of the Kingdom spoilers ahead.]

    I’m playing the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom. It’s fun, lots to run around and do, but it is part of a trend now in gaming which is basically that the new games are inserting so many new things that it stops being the game franchise, to me. TotK provides this huge open world sandbox that you can run around in, which the older Zelda games did too, but it also diverges wildly from most of the older games, and even the story is not really in line with the older games.

    I think one of my nerdiest things is that I was obsessed with the Zelda timeline growing up. A lot of us nerdy Nintendo kids were, but my obsession was tracking the items from the different games and seeing how they could be timeline related. For example: in the original Legend of Zelda for the NES, Link has a “Magical Sword,” but in A Link to the Past, it’s called the Master Sword. Is it the same sword? In ALttP, Link has a Power Bracelet that lets him lift heavy boulders. In Ocarina of Time, he has Silver and Golden Gauntlets which do basically the same thing. Are they they same? Etc etc etc.

    This is what you do when you’re a nerdy kid who likes to stay at home. But the Zelda timeline is now notoriously complex, with three timelines branching off of Ocarina of Time to explain the variety of games in the series, including a timeline where Link fails to defeat Ganon, which is, IMHO, bullshit.

    The two new games, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, diverge from the timeline by placing the games around 10,000 years in the future, with all the prior games representing some sort of, you might say, “legend.” But this only fucks things up more if you think about it. For example: in ToTK, we meet King Rauru, the founder of Hyrule. Rauru is a Zonai, a species we’ve never seen before, who reportedly all descended from the gods and are all extinct by BotW. He’s married to Queen Sonia, who is likely a descendant of the line of Zeldas. (Haven’t finished the game yet so I don’t know if this 100% true or not, PLEASE DON’T TELL ME let me experience it on my own thanks.)

    There is a sage in Ocarina of Time whose name is Rauru and who is human. So it has to be that King Rauru is named after this sage. Rauru and Sonia founded Hyrule. But we already know Hyrule existed before they did, because we literally saw in so many games. So what Hyrule did they found?

    My theory is that the Zonai were sent to the world after the divergence to converge the timelines, by literally pulling the three separate worlds together into this new Hyrule, which Rauru and Sonia founded. My reasoning for this is, ironically, because you find items from all the previous Zelda games in these ones. For example, you can find the Wind Waker armor set as well as the Twilight Princess armor set—two games set in two different timelines. How’d they get in this game? Simple: when the Zonai merged the separate timelines, the items from those timelines came with, and then were lost to the 10,000 years of additional time.2

    This also explains why landmarks are named from various games as well: because the inhabitants of these disparate timelines remembered different things and named landmarks after those things.

    I will say this though: the Zonai must be pretty damn powerful if Rauru could seal Ganondorf under Hyrule Castle for 10,000 years. Nobody prior to him could do that!

    So, maybe the new Zelda series doesn’t diverge from the old games after all. Maybe it converges them, into a single narrative.

    Thanks for letting me talk nerdy to you.

    A Thing for You

    This is just a funny thing that I enjoyed a lot, both as a fan of these guys, a fan of Hans and Franz, and guy who studied dramatic writing in college. There are two episodes out as of this writing. Check them out!

    The End

    Life is pretty even-keel these days, which is great. Not much to chat about, not much going on. Hope the same is true for you. Until next time, friends! As my high school drama teacher would tell us every Friday afternoon: Be safe, be smart, make wise choices.

    1. still working on that last one tbh. ↩︎
    2. Why is Midna’s helmet even in BotW/TotK? Maybe the Zonai were powerful enough to merge the disparate realms as well. Perhaps the Depths are the Twilight Realm converged into Hyrule. Who knows? ↩︎

  • parkrun #V1 & Running Update

    CW: there is some weight/food talk in farther below.

    That’s right folks, this past Saturday I volunteered at parkrun for the first time.

    It was great! I was the barcode scanner, which means that I took all the times the timekeeper got from the runners and scanned them into the results! Had a great time and it was especially helpful for meeting some of the other volunteers and runners. I highly recommend volunteering if you want to get to know your fellow parkrunners! Afterwards I joined some of the volunteer folks at the nearby crepery for the first time, where I discovered that it was probably better for my waistline and my wallet to have not gone to the nearby crepery.

    Since the disaster that was the Pacific Coast 5k, my leg has gotten much, much better, to the point where I think it was actually just a muscle strain rather than a tendon issue. I’m not sure why I thought it was a tendon issue, to be honest–I remember learning in some YouTube video or whatnot that tendons are incredibly strong, and to really injure one takes a lot more effort than, say, just pulling a muscle instead. This past week has been some tenuous walks, some not-so-tenuous walks, and finally a longer walk on Sunday that included four quarter-mile, very easy runs, which all felt good.

    This week includes more slow and steady running to build back the mileage I’ve lost. Garmin Coach is on the backburner. Sorry Papa Jeff, you bumped my mileage up 200% over the course of one week and got me injured. It’s all your fault! I’m aiming for 6 miles this week and have already gotten about 2.3 in so far. My calf feels a bit betrayed so I’m going to really take it easy and remember to stretch and do my strength exercises, and also get up and walk while working because sitting at a desk is not helpful for all of this.

    I also ate a lot last week. I was aiming for getting more protein to help repair muscle but kind of spiraled out a bit. It felt strange to return to a type of binge eating I hadn’t really done since my last apartment. Some of it was the product of being a little depressed because of my leg and because I’m 40 now and my body is withering away like an old banana. But to dive as deep as I did with the sort of behavioral self-awareness that I have now was very interesting. It was Rational Brain watching Lizard Brain take over for a bit. “You’re hurt and you’re an old banana? Don’t worry, I gotcha. Just sit back and relax and here’s All The Food.”

    A prior version of me probably would’ve spiraled all the way down, but I contextualized this moment as part of the 80/20 philosophy. Sure, 80/20 can be a weekly thing, but it can also be a monthly thing, or a yearly thing. Eighty percent on track, 20 percent deviation. An easy thing to accept when it’s walking down a trail in the forest, right? Stay on the trail but sometimes you wander out to sniff a flower or take a shit behind a tree. So I try to approach food in that manner as well. Get your chicken and rice and veggies but sometimes you eat a pizza or a bag of Doritos. C’est la vie. I’m never going to be perfect on nutrition. I don’t want to be perfect on nutrition. I want the cauliflower and the cannoli. If that shaves a few years off my life, so be it.

    My next 5k is a fun run, the Starlight Run, and it’s not until June 3rd, so my intent over the next couple of weeks is to rebuild mileage very slow and very easy. I can bring speed in later. Now it’s just getting back to a 10 mile or so foundation before I build (SLOWLY) onto that. You hear me, Coach Jeff?!