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.

We did it again!

My happy face

Beautiful team, big blue bird

It doesn't rain, we don't need tents

Second race of the season; University of North Georgia's invitational, a 5k for us. Coach had promised us a bit more competition than last time on the course described as "flat and fast". Turned out it wasn't really either. We were running at 8.15, at a place called Gainsville, which is about an hour away in good traffic. At 5.40, the time we left, there was NO traffic. Of course not. Who other than us wakes up at 5am to go running? We were all pretty sleepy. I was actually a bit worried about my race, because I don't like morning runs at all and I think even in training I struggle to get up to speed properly when I'm not awake.

 

Taken with the dark-scene thing active on the camera, this is the start/finish field with the moon overhead. Sunrise had just about begun in the opposite direction. We snoozed on our groundsheet for about half an hour before we had to start warming up. The start was quite bizarre. They did a silence for some service people who had gone to North Georgia, then they did the national anthem. I've never known anything like it. 

 

This is the start- I pinched it from North Georgia's website, so it's mostly their people, but you can just about see the back of my head as I run off like a startled rabbit (white vest, short hair, far left of frame). So yeah, 5k, two laps and a loop of the start field. We had a quadbike! A 'lead vehicle' to make sure we were going the right way. On the first loop it had a lad in a great big bird costume on it. Mascots. Apparently that kind of thing is normal practice, so I had a blue bird staring at me for 400m. 

 

Sorry about the disastrous quality, I haven't got proper photos yet, but you can see a great big blue bird here. Nigel the Nighthawk, mascot of North Georgia. That photo is the top ten finishers, we got t-shirts, and I managed to hold mine wrong. What a tourist. But I won! And not only won, but set a new course record by 55 seconds! 

Another shocking photo, but that's me looking totally chilled with some impressive tan lines (look at that leg) coming out of the finish with no one else in sight. I was over 20 seconds ahead of Kalie, who came in second. The first four girls all apparently broke the old course record. Our team did brilliantly; 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 8th and 9th to defend the team title they won last year. 

Another trophy for Coach's office

The terrain for this one is probably most comparable to Royden Park- short grass, dusty trails and rocks and tree roots all over the place. I bashed my foot on a root, and it was a painful affair in spikes. Don't really know why we were in spikes. At home it would be multi terrain or something, not needing spiky shoes.

This was taken in the almost-dark, so it doesn't show up too well, but they mark out the courses with these tiny little flags on wires that get stuck in the ground. It's the maddest thing, and a total nightmare if it's shady or whatever, because you can't see the little poles, so if the flag is stuck in at a funny angle you catch them with your feet. Or at least I do, but I'm not the most coordinated person. 

Oh and this was funny. Look who turned up to race us! The amount of place names they've just pinched over here from back at home. No imagination.

I'm a model, you know what I mean...

 

We started classes! How exciting. It's only Tuesday, so everything so far has been introductory stuff, which is reasonably boring, but we started drawing wine glasses and things like that in my drawing class. Everyone seems to deathly serious; the professors all say things like "This is not an easy class- As and Bs are earned," which sounds ominous, but Greta says it's probably not that difficult. We had a very interesting chat last night where she basically said the American high school system is madness. Apparently if you just do the homework and whatnot you're nearly guaranteed an A, so kids go to college having never really done much work, so the professors try to put the fear of God into them. I hope she's not exaggerating. 

And we have life drawing every Friday! Such deep joy. For something that really ought to be quite an awkward experience it's so much fun. I was just reading an article for my English class later on, which was telling me that in order to write with style I must sound like myself. This must be an American thing; if I were to turn in essays written as I speak I'd probably fail, and style be damned. 

The photograph at the top is of the skyscrapers at Atlantic Station- the sky last night was the most fantastic array of colours (probably air pollution doing some dirty work there), it looked like Andy Warhol had got out his highlighters and done to the sunset what he did to Marilyn Monroe. My camera didn't record it properly, stupid thing. But if you start with the assumption that all the buildings are usually basic building shades, you can tell that the sky was throwing some serious shapes. (Writing how I think, it's stylish).

 

And I did some modelling! For the gym! Leslee, the formidable gym manager asked if I'd take part in this photoshoot thing happening there, for publicity or something and she's a difficult person to say no to. So I ended up stood on a mat, pretending I was doing weights with a yoga ball until my arms were about to fall off, and trying to make that look natural. I was hoping we might have got to see the pictures by now, but if I get one I'll put it up for general amusement purposes. 

Room for some small ones

The front of our main college building

Dad said people might be interested in my room...doubt it. Probably just him being a nosy biddy.  Maybe people thinking about doing this American thing. I promise you it's not very interesting. One thing that is worth noting though is that this room that we're in came very nearly unfurnished; beds, desk and stool and one chest of drawers each. Having spent the last two days helping people move in, it is very normal for people to bring the whole house with them, or order it in from Ikea. That's the kind of thing I would have thought might have been emailed to us- I'm pretty sure we were told what would be in our rooms in Edinburgh prior to moving in, but no one has commented on it, so I can only assume it's standard practice over here. We even had to buy pillows and shower curtains and bins. I'm alright because I didn't bring a lot of stuff with me (13kg of running clothes in a suitcase), but I've seen people moving in chairs and shelves. Greta, my room mate went and bought a collapsible wardrobe.

Another thing, room mates are the norm. I know at home people can share rooms, but I've not met anyone who did so. Here, everybody does. Some of the girls on the team have their own flat and they sit share rooms in it. It's alright, our room is big enough that it doesn't feel squished. But that said, we're actually in a three-person room with just the two of us, and another person in here would be nasty. We're on the top floor of the building, which is great because they seem to have filled it from the bottom up, so there are still some empty rooms up here, and it's peaceful.

So yeah, that's most of our room, as seen from the door. It's long and thin, so it doesn't photograph very well, but you get the general idea. Two beds, two desks, some drawers and then a bathroom behind.

 

That's my bed and my shoe collection, which represents most of my worldly stuff at the moment. Fam, take note of how neatly those shoes are kept. Bet you don't believe they're mine. It's not quite the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, but we don't spend very much time in our rooms. We do spend quite a bit of the day at the pool. Because we have a pool, and it's fantastic. When it's mid afternoon, the aircon is giving you a headache and it's 34 degrees outside, the pool is heaven. So much love. The best thing about it is that it's only really the sports teams who go in it, so we can jump around and splash and not worry about upsetting people who might be doing something as banal as swimming.

What a beautiful view

  Last night we went to a lantern festival on the Beltline (like the Wirral Way; a long path that used to be a railway), and I took loads of really terrible photos. My camera can do night time, or it can do motion. Both together is not achievable. This one of some sort of phoenix float is honestly the best of the lot. And we stayed up late! Until eleven! Scandal. But we had no running today, so such luxuries were available to us.

The world's longest traffic jam

A great big traffic jam (it looks spread out, but trust me, it wasn't moving) at around 7pm. Who knew that was rush hour?

Atlanta is bizarre in that it's a city with a not much smaller population than London, but it feels a lot smaller. This is probably because it's basically laid out along the motorway (freeway, interstate...I don't know?) so it's looooong rather than all-round big. I realised that we just inhabit a tiny corner of it, and it's such a strange way to live; our own little idea of what Atlanta is somewhere in the middle of its enormity. There doesn't seem to be a city centre as such, just districts like Midtown that span the motorway, and then 'neighbourhoods'- residential areas and small shopping centres, individual communities in their own right.

The city is arranged for drivers. Everything you want is just off the motorway. So the other day I wanted to go to ASDA, which is called Walmart over here. I knew that before I came here, but despite having mentally linked the two I keep forgetting. I asked Greta the other day "what's that daft name you guys call ASDA?" and she gave me the blankest look going. But yeah, Walmart. About two minutes away up the motorway; about an hour away on foot on the most circuitous, bizarre, but (somehow) quickest route on foot. Atlanta is for cars. Incidentally, the Americans pronounce route as 'rout'.

The motorway is crazy as well. There are like a million lanes, but your lane seems to be to do with when you're coming off, not anything to do with your speed, so despite the wideness of the road the traffic doesn't move that fast (hence the weird, spread out traffic jam).

Yesterday we had team photos, which was no fun at all because golf went in front of us and they took nearly two hours to do something we managed in fifteen minutes. The guys made me laugh though; they keep joking about how I must be James Bond, or some other international spy, and the pictures would blow my cover.

Yesterday also was a day of glorious running triumph. We did 3x 1600 repeats, target time 5.45. I did 5.39, 5.30, 5.29. Coach says the gravel slows up down approximately 9-10 seconds per mile compared to track times, so that's pretty damn quick. If I can get fit enough to do that kind of pace not stopping that would be such a sick 5k!

How we run

This is an aerial view of the big gravel track where we train (round and round) in the middle of Atlanta. The great big tall buildings just behind are part of Midtown, and clustered around their bases are some of my favourite places to get munchies. Panera Bread, fantastic place.

But I thought I'd write up what we've actually been doing training-wise, for anyone who does running who might be interested. This XC season we're racing every other weekend pretty much throughout, so our weeks alternate 40 miles race week, 50 miles work week.

Last week we were racing on Friday, so training went:
Monday- 6.15am, 3 mile tempo run: 6.15 pace, 6x hill sprints
Tuesday- 3pm, 65 minute run easy
Wednesday- 6.15am, 3x 1600 repeats: 5.45, 5.43, 5.42, 6x 20s strides
Thursday- 3pm, 'pre-race': 20 minutes very easy run, 6x 20s strides
Friday- race!
Saturday- sleep
Sunday- 60 minutes easy run
Total: 43 miles

This week we aren't racing:
Monday- 8.30am, long run: 85 minutes, including a 5k tempo
Tuesday- 3pm, 60 minute recovery run
Wednesday- 6.15am, 65 minute steady run, 6x hill sprints
Thursday- 6.15am, 3x 1600 repeats: probably 5.45 pace, 6x 20s strides
Friday- 6.15am, 60 minute run, 6x hills
Saturday- 8.30, long run as on Monday
Sunday- sleep!
Total: going to be quite high. We're on 27 and it's only Wednesday.

This long run business is rotten. On coach's clipboard it says long run or tempo run for separate groups, but we have to combine the two. I can run 11/12 miles, I can run a 19-19.30 5k, but I don't want to do the two things together! And 6.15 morning training may be cruel and unusual torture, but it's better than 3 o'clock. Honestly. It was hovering around 34 degrees yesterday and I think it's done lasting brain damage.

Jumping in the river. That sounds familiar...

Chattahoochee River, Atlanta

Not much has happened since our race, except the discovery of Which Wich- like Subway; you pick sandwich ingredients, but so, so much better in every way. Yum yum yum. Saturday was a rest day, Sunday an easy run of about an hour. Yesterday we went out to Little Five Points; an area of the outlying city very much like Quiggins in Liverpool, just spread over a small village-like area. If you don't know Quiggins, you're not missing out. A bit too hipster for me, but I did get a Pogues vinyl!

Today was our first looong run (11 miles) besides the Chattahoochee River. What a name. I had been really excited to go running by the river, dreaming about long, shady paths and a quiet space to enjoy a peaceful nature run. Maybe not. It turns out the trail is only about 6k- you run out a bit and then do a 5k loop, so the whole thing turned into an exercise in turning off my brain and trying to keep going for 80 mins. What nobody mentioned was that after 7 miles they were going to throw a casual tempo run in, so we suddenly dropped down to around 6.30 miles. It's doable, but thanks for the forewarning!

So when we were finished I was knackered. But then we got to go in the river! There was a sign for alligators when we were on the trail, but the guys said there might be one...maybe, but really we're too far north for 'gators. Thank god. The river was really lovely; warm enough that I could have been tempted to go for a proper swim if I'd had any spare clothes. We're going back there on Saturday, and I'll bring towels.

Status Report: we smashed it!

My beautiful teamies

First race yesterday, 6pm start, 4km 'Cross Country', about 40-50 runners, one clear winning team. Coach had told us that we would probably run away with it, and we definitely did.

From left-right: Gabby, Maddie, Xaviera, me, Greta, Kalie, Olivia, Kaitlin, Ivana and Liz. Me,  Greta, Kalie, Olivia and  Maddie were our counters, in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th respectively. So I won! Which came as a bit of a surprise to everyone, I think. I'd expected to probably be our 3rd counter.  And we absolutely obliterated the other teams; although it's only early season, it's a good forecast that we're all running well. That said, given that most of the teams we were against are part of our Conference (our group, of which we have to finish top two at the champs to go to nationals) I do worry that I've just painted a huge target on my back.

This XC thing over here just doesn't seem to be the same as at home. The nearest thing I could compare the course to would be the NW Road Relays at Edge Hill last year- gravel, grass, some small undulations- a terrible road race and a fast XC course. And most people run in spikes, which is bizarre. I ran 14.40-something- on for about 18-18.20 for a 5k, so not very fast for a road race, but faster than XC would be at home. And they take the times seriously here. Most of the races at home it's probably not worth timing for all the mud and hill and everything else, but Coach was giving us times to hit for each mile and half mile and whatnot pre-race! I was quite surprised, but they seem to pay serious attention to pace and time, probably because (if this one is an accurate representation of the XC scene broadly) you can run pretty quickly.
Some of the parents had come to watch, so we had all sorts of supporters on the course; we did 2x 2k loops, and it felt like you couldn't go more than a few hundred metres without someone screaming support at you. And they don't half shout some funny things- the best being something like "you go girl! You look strong, you are fierce!"...am I??? Am I really? Coach said I did a 5.30-something first mile, which is pretty fierce.

It's great to know that we're all running well at the start of the season, and we've now got weeks of hard training ahead of us before some serious races- although it's great to be winning stuff, this was only a very low-key event. Think like the Merseyside Schools XC League. I was slightly miffed that the top 10 all got medals, all of which said 'Top 10 Finisher', not 'Glorious Champion' or something similar.

Our lad's team also did very well, especially considering that one of their best runners is currently injured, so to finish 3rd team when not on full strength is good going. Post-race we were all soaked and tired (it rained! Rain! Proper XC weather!) and we went to eat in a magnificent place called Sweet Tomatoes: all you can eat salad, soup and baked goods for $11. God bless America. Today is our day off (hurray), next race two weeks today!