The coolest car in the world

 

Here he is, with his car. It was pretty cool. 

Dad has been nattering at me for ages to write about Nationals. And I've been avoiding it, but he's been getting progressively more annoyed, so I had probably better do it eventually.

Thing is, there isn't that much to say. Mum and dad came over about a week before the race, which was nice, but the timing of the whole thing was a bit poor because it was finals week in school, so I couldn't spend as much time tearing around in the car with them as I might have liked, because I had final projects to do. But we still managed to go to a few places.

Dahlonega, which looks like this, and is probably the birthplace of the phrase 'one-horse town'. It's historic, apparently. Outside the US, this really means it's about as old as our house. It turns out we did a race near the start of term in this town (oblivious, me?), which looks terribly exotic on my Power of 10 profile, even if it is just a random town in Georgia where they sell sun-dried possum.

Top scran, that.

This is the parents at Stone Mountain. What's Stone Mountain? A great big rock just outside Atlanta. Established in 1923, so the shop at the top claims. Halfway up there is an inscription from some bloke in 1800-something, so clearly he wasn't with the plot. Established in 1923 though. What does that mean? Pretty sure it was around before that.

It also has this great big carving of some Confederates on the steep side of it. I couldn't get a good picture of it because all around the base of the rock was a Christmas market thing that we weren't going in to.

Nationals were in the St Louis area, a city known best for having a massive arch.

An arch, see; it's massive. No explanation, no particular reason, just a huge, great, big arch. Mum was impressed at how new it looks, even though it's over 50 years old, but that's probably because it's made of metal rather than stone or something that weathers.

Here it is again, reflected in some of the buildings behind. St Louis was pretty cold, especially after Atlanta, which is a warm, sticky place.

 

It doesn't look all that cold in the pictures, but there was a cold wind, almost like being at the coast. St Louis is interesting because it is the meeting point of the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers, so there is wide, wide river all over the place. I was amazed at the Mississippi; even as far north at St Louis it was enormous- like a UK river estuary. How wide it must get further down I can scarcely imagine. Nationals itself was not that great. I'd been suffering with the sore foot (still am), and it was very difficult to work on stride length and push on with that. That said, the course was the hilliest we'd seen all season, and I ran around 18.15, which I don't think was bad at all under the circumstances, so it was a bit disappointing, but not actually embarrassing. 

   Unlike this picture of me and mum, which is pretty damn embarrassing!

Bet you didn't see that coming?

That man won the Presidency...and the House...and the Senate, but we can still be happy, because my team won our Conference Championship! This is quite a big deal. Milligan College, our big rivals had won it thirteen years consecutively, and were pretty smug about it. They beat us at Sand Shark by just one point, and their coach was going around saying "well done" to us in a way that just screamed "you losers". So we kicked butt on them. Our team are all fairly exhausted, I think we all want the season to be over so we can sleep, but now we've only got Nationals left. The Milligan girls were NOT HAPPY when they had to go up and collect their awards for second. Coach is really proud of us, because apparently this is the second-best team they've ever had; the best team being about ten years back when they came third at Nationals, so it's not like they were even running on diminished strength. And we beat them! There's a photograph someone has got somewhere that I will have to try and find to put up of the moment someone's dad called through to tell us that we'd won, and we're all screaming. On the day it was actually Gabby who won it for us (she's the girl on the far right of the photo in the highlighter-yellow top), she put in a crazy finish to move up about seven places, and we won by three points! 

 

Here we are, with our banner of glorious triumph. We are planning to hang it up from our tent every time we're at a race with the Milligans, just to wind them up. 

And here is the back of my head with our banner. We're not actually sure if we were allowed to keep it, but we ran away with it anyway. I suppose the Conference wouldn't have much use for it now, because it does say '2016'; they couldn't exactly hand it out next year. 

In other news, here is my latest drawing. Isn't it pretty? The drawing professors made fabric ghosts in the classroom and them put stage lights on them, and we had to pick an angle and draw them. This is a strange drawing, which never quite photographs how it looks, but they really liked it in class. I got a 97, which is my best mark so far. It was funny actually; on the days we hand in we do a 'critique', which effectively means everyone pins their work on the wall and says things like "I really like the composition, maybe they could have made their shadows a little bit darker", or something equally meaningless, and then the teacher gives an actual analysis. They held a moment of silence for mine! Nobody said anything, they just looked at it. The drawing class are easily impressed, it would seem. It's a good drawing, but not THAT good. 

 

In other, other news, last weekend after Conference, some of us went wandering up to the North Georgia mountains to a place called Helen, which is turns out is some bizarre little town in the middle of absolutely nowhere decked out to look Bavarian. They call it 'Alpine Helen' and they have Oktoberfest and all sorts. 

Outside Helen there is this lake, surrounded by the trees, and it all looked a lot prettier than my camera has recorded. It wasn't really steely grey, all the colours from the leaves were all over the water. As my mum knows, I like to pick up leaves, so we went up on some of the trails in the hills behind here, and I probably collected a whole tree. 

Look at them all! It was actually the first time I have seen the freaky spiders that Treasa was warning me about before I came. On the trees that had no leaves the horrible things had been building webs and webs and webs and it was really quite nasty looking. A tiny one was on the roof of the car and it could stand up on its back legs! I do not need that in my life. It was so, so pretty though. All the colours everywhere, and hardly any people. We went for a short, slow jog and took in nearly a quarter of all the elevation we ran last week!

Halloweekend

Pumpkin Spice EVERYTHING!

Halloweekend is apparently a legitimate phrase around here. People are far too excited about it, but I guess they don't have Bonfire Night, so something has to compensate. Some of the houses really do look amazing, with fake cobweb and massive decorations on the lawn, and millions of pumpkins all over the place. Everyone in college seems to be making plans for parties and trick-or-treating and it's bizarre, because I can't remember the last time I went out to canvas sweets on Halloween, but apparently that's a normal thing for 20year olds to do here.

Someone in this building has a sick and twisted sense of humour. These great
big, fat plastic spiders are all over the place. It's really not cool. Every time I see one I think it's real. My nerves will not survive Halloween season.

 

This one is my latest piece of drawing. Charcoal; not my favourite thing to be using. It gets everywhere! I'm sure there was charcoal dust in my eyes, making me itch. And it took so, so long. He had us draw from a very out-of-focus image which gradually sharpened up, but that only works if you draw reductively-  put in lots of dark bits and then rub out, and I can't get my head around it, so I started again when I got home. But still. SO LONG. He had better give me a decent grade. 

This one came off my phone, so it's a little photo in a big screenshot, but it's still really funny. When we were at the beach last week the boys were doing muscle poses, and I joined in because I definitely lift... The impact my definitely impressive and not at all spaghetti arms would have had on this picture is somewhat mitigated by my jacket, unfortunately. 

 

And the squad! We had to take a death stare photo for some reason pertaining to Liz's ex boyfriend, which was surprisingly difficult to do without laughing. This one has been a pretty heavy training week; our last week before Conference! That's come around so quickly. We've been doing more fast, shorter things, rather than 1600s and tempo runs all the time. This week it was 800s on Tuesday and 1000s on Thursday. Thursday was actually really hard work, but we managed. Today we went on a bit of an adventure, to a very hilly park for our long run, to get in a bit of hill practice before next weekend, when the course is supposed to be quite tough. Anyone who knows me will know I dislike running uphill, so I've been trying to get in more climbing whenever we've had a run for a few weeks now. Hopefully it'll pay off. 

I am a model American...

 

The Midtown Atlanta skyline, as photographed by me on the way to explore a thrift shop. I went to the thrift shop! Very exciting. It wasn't quite as much fun as in that lad's video when he's got the fur coat and the friend with the pink suit that dad thinks is a good idea, but an interesting adventure. 

 

And I saw this on the way..."Shoot Happens", a gun shop. Only in America. It's bizarre how normal owning a gun seems to be- everyone's dad seems to have on, and to use it. Hunting is much less of a posh person's thing, nearly everyone seems to have gone at some point and to have enjoyed it. 

 

Which maybe is why you can buy something like this for the house. What even is it? Besides tasteless tat, obviously...

I found this funny little park the other day. It must be something to do with the Olympics they had here way back when, but it's such a strange thing. A triumphal arch and a pond in the middle of a housing area for no apparent reason. There were some people taking family photographs at one end, who frowned a bit when I tried to get this picture, but it's a free country; I'll photograph the park if I so wish. 

This little fish is called Larry, and he is part of my most recent drawing project. 

We had to draw this corridor (boring) and then put in some things that didn't belong there, so I put in four angel fish. I am definitely a model student-artist-athlete. Last week, after winning the race in NC I was national runner of the week! This was pretty exciting, because no one from SCAD has ever done that before. Since the drawing teacher gave me a proper mark for the fish drawing and I got full marks in our mid term test, I've now got As in all my classes, which is a nice thing. 

 

This weekend we went up to South Carolina for another race, but the afternoon beforehand we went to the beach! We very nearly didn't get to go, because the hurricane had caused all sorts of damage, making parking difficult, but we got a few minutes on the sand anyway. The water was so warm! Who knew the Atlantic could ever be warm? 

The beach was actually a bit dull. It was so, so flat, and there were no shells to be found, but we had a good game of frisbee, and I got thrown in the water twice (angry face). Getting there, we basically drove from Atlanta to Savannah and then up a bit to get into SC, and it took SO LONG! There is just too much space in America. We stopped in a place called Dublin on the way as well- the real one, I am assured. None of this British fakery. 

This was just in one of the service stations we stopped at for petrol on the way home. We stopped twice for fuel going each way, which can probably tell you something of the distance we drove. Google says 280 miles, and we only just left Georgia. Craziness. 

This was our first race up against the hated Milligan College, and I am sorry to say they beat us. But only by one point, and as a team we were not having a great day. I've been ill, and ran 17.54 feeling like a dying person, Olivia sprained her ankle pretty badly and dropped places falling over. At conference, in two weeks' time when we're up against them next we apparently have quite a tough course, so their lead girl, Hannah, who is a phenomenal 800m runner will not be able to just open her stride and run away from everyone like she did yesterday. Even our team average time was faster than theirs, and if you removed all the runners from the race who aren't a part of our conference, we beat them by two points. Basically, I think we're going to beat them in a few weeks and ruin their 13-years-long conference champion streak. And I'm going to kick Hannah Segrave's backside off the course :)

Serious season

 

It's us, last race! I promise you I am more tanned than I have ever been before, but I still look ghostly pale, damn it. 

We have been practicing hurricane survival recently. We're too far inland to be bothered by that kind of thing, but Savannah got hit, so we've had several thousand kids from that campus sleeping in our classrooms, eating our food and so on. It's like a refugee camp in school. Last weekend we drove up to North Carolina, which took a very long time, and we had hurricane rain all the way. Thankfully when we actually got to the race it was only moderately soggy. 

 

 

 

Damp, see. NC is a strange place, full of churches built like warehouses, and at least one warehouse that was an old church, and giant red glowing crosses all over the place. Charlotte, the city we were going up to, was another strange mix of massive MASSIVE beautiful houses and some really slummy-looking places, all piled in together. It was also full of people who had run away from Florida. Why would you live in Florida? The houses must get trashed so often.

This was our first serious race. It would have been Nationals Preview, but Nationals has moved, so it was just a big race instead. Nationals Preview is the kind of abomination only the Americans could dream up- it's a race supposed to be run on the same course, with all the people who think they might qualify for Nationals running it, but none of the championship glory. Because this was no longer Preview, and because of the lovely hurricane, quite a lot of the really good teams just didn't show up, including our big rivals, Milligan. Apparently we've scared them to death. Somehow they're still quite a bit ahead of us in the national rankings- how I don't know, because we're much faster, but they seem to be avoiding us, probably to preserve that ranking.

 

It was quite a pretty course. Some bits were very long and straight, some quite twisty and turny, but it was very flat, and nearly all gravel paths. The start was quite scary; the ground was a bit treacherous on the 600m or so of starting field as nearly 400 girls hurtled to the front. Coach had told me beforehand to try and stay with the leading pack but not lead it, so it was both surprising and concerning to find myself leading a race where I thought there were going to be at least three girls quite a bit faster than me. Turns out, they weren't there. Basically I ran the whole thing in a state of shock, wondering what was going on. I won it in the last 300m and was very, very surprised about it. 

Everyone was amazed with me, but I only did 17.32. Which is fast, I know, but I can't help but be a little disappointed with it. I really want to be under 17, and with about 400m to go Coach was yelling at me that I could do it. Or I think he was. I could very easily have misheard, because I was working very hard at that point. But yes; four wins from four. Not a course record this time, and still not a glorious champion t-shirt (cries). 

We've finally got a tent! We needed it, it got pretty wet as the day went on!

 

And look at these imposters! St Andrews, my bottom. 

 

Back in Atlanta the weather has calmed down. It rained over the weekend (damn hurricane), but now we're down to a very, very nice British summer's day. There's a bit of a breeze, it's no where near as humid, and the heat is no longer like a blanket trying to suffocate you. The British press are reporting about how shocked everyone is about Donald Trump and his terrible misogyny, but over here nobody seems to be talking about it. They don't seem to talk politics much at all generally. It's kind of like that feeling before the Milliband/Cameron election, where nobody liked either of them, only here they don't have the Liberal Democrats as a third option. 

We've not been doing much, just training. We went to Gay Pride at the weekend, which was kind of how you would imagine it to be. Glitter, feathers, people not wearing enough and lots of prancing. The guys were trying to prevail upon me to try American festival delicacies. Funnel Cake? What is a Funnel Cake? It looks like one huge, gigantic churro that takes up a whole plate in it's layers of squiggly fried cholesterol. It's just like festival food at home really, but bigger and greasier. I declined. There's a bug going around the team, which I am desperately hoping to avoid. I feel a bit off, but I really, really hope it'll just pass and not become a serious problem.

Three races, three records

 

What's Olivia doing? I really couldn't say...

Yesterday was out home invitational! So obviously we had to win it, and we did. First, second, third, fourth and eighth. When they were doing the prizes Coach announced it as my third consecutive win, and third consecutive course record, which was very embarrassing.  

These are a few pictures of the boys' race at the start line. Our start was a little further back, up by the tree line so we had a lovely gentle downhill start. It was a much tougher course than anything we've run so far, but still more of a multi terrain race than actual XC. Most of it was on the weird, thick-bladed grass they have here, or on sandy trail. The most challenging bit really is the footing, which can be really uneven in places but isn't soft at all. It rained in the city, but this course is about 50 miles outside Atlanta, and they've had no rain in at least a month, so bits of the ground were rock solid. It's brutal on the spikes- I've lost half of mine! 

And we had hills this time! How exciting is that? Not really enormous ones, but enough that the Americans had a whinge. I have Max on record saying that noticeable hills in a race are 'unfair on the runners'. Don't know what planet he hails from, but the last time I checked XC wasn't about running a sub-17 5K each time. I was a bit slower than last race- 18.05, but given that it was much more work this time that's not too bad. 

And then we got pizza as a reward! I have come to the conclusion that there are two things I really like about America. One, the food. The place we went last night was like Subway for pizza, so you walked in and just picked all your toppings from a salad-bar kind of setup, and then they cooked it for you super quickly and it was mega. I've eaten too many waffles at weekend brunch, and I've completely gone off them, but there's still always nice things to be had. The chocolate here is ruinously priced or disgusting though (cries). I am glad that I'm vegetarian, because there is a lot of greasy junk food available, but all of it meat. It would be a lot easier to do myself damage if burgers and what not were an option. As it is, an awful lot of my calories come either from beans or chickpeas and raw fruit and veg, and past, which seems to be working well for me. 

The second thing is that they like people who are good at sport. I'm not fantastic or anything, but people recognise me from previous races and say hi, or ask what my name is or where I'm from. I know in the running community at home people do the same, and it may just be the inherent extrovertishness in the Americans, but random people at races do seem genuinely interested, which is quite nice. 

In other news, the cycling team dragged Greta and I out to a nightclub last night on false pretenses. They told us it was a dance hall. What a lie. To everyone who's ever told me off for not 'going out', because I knew I wouldn't like it- I was right! But at least at the grand old age of nearly 21 I can at least substantiate that with experience. 

 

And this is my drawing finished! It doesn't photograph that well, but it looks pretty good. I was NOT happy about this. The teacher went and gave me a C because it was 'shaded'. It was not shaded. It was definitely not shaded. It took me all weekend because I cross-hatched the entire thing, as per instruction, rather than shading it. But I blended it, because cross-hatching looks terrible unless it's representing a textured object. So for improving my drawing, for spending about twice as long as specified on the damn thing and for using technique that is beyond the class, he took nearly twenty marks off me. And then the stupid man have me 5 'technique marks' extra to the markscheme because it was NOT A C! He said it broke his heart...as if I should be grateful. He could have just given me a proper grade. If you look at it up close you can even see all the millions of tiny cross-hatch lines. What a ridiculous situation. It seems to run completely contrary to the point of further education- taking marks off someone for doing extra work. And then he went and messed up my perspective lines on the class work. But whatever, rant over.

 

All the pumpkins

 

Look at them! So many pumpkins, and it's not even October. And those weren't even all of the squash they had out in the supermarket. Absolute craziness. They have things called 'Pumpkin Patch' where you can go and get pumpkins and carve them in a little community party kind of thing. They're so into Halloween- I've seen signs for Pumpkin Parties for this weekend! The very start of October!

 

This little guy was labelled as a 'Pie Pumpkin', and it was very very cute. Peter, one of the boys on the cycling team has gone and got one just like it for Greta. He's very much in love with her, but so is every other boy she comes into contact with- it's the funniest thing because she's completely oblivious. Kalie and I have such a laugh about it. 

Training wise we're doing well. Most weeks we do a tempo run for three miles, and my target time is usually six minutes a mile. Last time I did 17.42, this time 17.37 so it's all good improvements. We're starting to move into more speed work towards our bigger, faster races. I hope we keep up doing longer runs as well though, not just always speed because over the years I've found my running goes best when I do more endurance work, but I'm sure Coach knows what he's doing with us. 

I've handed in my first bits of work for Drawing and English! (Still working on that drawing music as shapes thing, it's far too weird). Drawing was meant to be an 8-hour still life of these lads- 

 

8 hours my bottom! It took forever! I hardly did anything else all weekend. 

 

I totally forgot to take a picture of it finished, but I will when I get it back. These are a couple of work-in-progress pictures (and a beautiful shot of my chaotic desk).

 

A bit stressed over this submission though. When we were doing the group critique in class he was talking about how he wanted line work, not shading. I didn't shade mine, it's all cross-hatching, but I did smudge it to soften the edges a little, so I hope he doesn't mark me down for that. 

I've noticed recently that the American number plates have their State of origin on them, and a lot of them have a little line about that State on them, so one from Texas says 'The Lone Star State' on it, one from New York says 'The Empire State', ones from Georgia have pictures of peaches, because we are the peach State. I've seen 'First in Freedom', 'First in Flight' and 'The First State', although I can't remember which those correspond to. Virginia doesn't seem to have a particular distinguishing feature, because I've seen ones saying 'Virginia for Artists', 'Virginia for Lovers' and other ones. I really think this is a good idea to adopt at home. We could be 'The Scouse State' or something...

 

Sore feet and too much drawing

Sunrise at the training oval- around 7.30am

This has been such a busy week! We tend to have a rest day on Sunday, which is the weirdest thing, given our devotion to the Church of the Long Sunday Run at home, but it's very nice after a race. On Monday, both my Drawing and Design teachers decided to hand us a project with a tonne of work to be done before Wednesday. Thanks for that, guys. Classes go on so late it's difficult to get any work done afterwards, especially when we spend a long time in the dinner queue, so while getting through homework generally isn't that difficult, trying to fit in a lot in the space of one morning is a bit stressful.

Some sketchbook homework- drawing Greta's laundry

And stressful as well that my shins hurt. It was really quite bad on Tuesday, so I ended up not doing the session and just running around on the grass. They were a bit sore when we started today, but I did not get out of bed at 5.30 to stand around getting starving for two hours, so I ran. I did well actually. We had a tough session this morning; 4x 1600m. Our first one was supposed to be slower, and then Coach set me a target time of 5.30 for the last three. How mean is that? The boys were doing 2000s, because they're really wussy. We pointed out to them that they were only doing 75% of their race distance, while we were doing 130%, and therefore we were tougher. Max got pretty hissy about that, but he should just accept that we are the real men on the team.

It's Thursday! Hurray! Tomorrow we don't have to wake up! We wanted to go up to a waterfall place in north Georgia this weekend, but there is a 'gas' pipeline problem at the moment, so the price of fuel has gone crazy over the last few days. Gas station? Why do they call it gas? Surely they run their cars on petrol, or diesel, not 'gas'?

Look! It rained, and then it got misty on the big buildings

Classes here are quite strange. I wonder if maybe they're just trying to get us to think 'outside the box', but in Design we have to draw music- translate the sounds to shapes in a certain format on the page. and then make it adhere to principles of design. My English teacher keeps telling us to write however we want, which is understandable because apparently the way essay writing is taught in high schools here is ridiculously formulaic, but it does feel like her insistence on overt expressiveness is nearly as repressive. Drawing class I like, although he is vexing me currently insisting I crop bits of my project composition. Mate, I arranged it that way. I don't want to chop bits off it now.

This is what music looks like, honest

Some more homework

For Design one of our pieces of work involves collecting our ten favourite artworks and writing about them. Greta thinks I'm fantastic because she can describe a painting she's seen, and I can usually give her the name or the artist so she can find pictures of it. This was my problem with History of Art last year; so much of what is seen as good art in popular art galleries is Italian Renaissance stuff, meaning that most people are visually familiar with 'good' or famous works just because it's such a relatively small collection. Frankly the one she was after yesterday, Raphael's Sistine Madonna, I think is damned boring, but nearly everyone knows the putti sulking at the bottom of the frame.

These lads

The people here are such a mad mix. There's at least one boy in makeup and heels I've seen so far. Most of them seem a decent bunch, if a bit too loud (read 'VERY loud'). I keep seeing people wearing t-shirts with big American Eagles saying things like "World War back-to-back champions", which seems a bit much. But then they do seem very respectful and conscious of the military here, much more so than at home. Cultural differences? Like shaking hands; apparently that's a normal way of saying hello, but I doubt I ever would at home except maybe in a professional or very formal context.