Hayfever

 

Here is some funny news; I am officially an elite 2000m runner! Not a 2000 steeplechase or anything that sensible, just a flat 2k, that well-known, commonly raced distance. Somehow Coach got me into this 'elite' event, which apparently had qualifying standards of 9.35 for the 3000, or something like that. Basically quite a lot faster than I am. I was kinda nervous about it, especially after I got there and found he'd given me a 6.12 seed time. Two 3.06 kilometres seems pretty quick, right? There was eight of us in the race, all from Atlanta Track Club except me. Above is a nice picture of me really not matching, and looking madly nervous on the start line. We ran, I came third (pretty damn surprised) in 6.22, which still seems pretty fast. After that Foon and I did a 200s workout, which was painful, but I felt like such a serious running person doing a session after a race. 

This is a really bad photograph, I'm sorry. It's hard to get a proper one because it's glass. It says "2016-17 SCAD Atlanta Athlete of the Year - Emily Kearney". Pretty cool. We had an awards ceremony for all the sports people, so all the Coaches got up to talk about how their team is definitely the best team in the school (we had the most to say, because we're really cool), and then I got athlete of the year! It was very embarrassing though, because Coach had told us to dress nicely, so I was in a pair of heels and I fell over going down the stairs to pick up the trophy and swore in front of most of the senior faculty. #smooth

In other news, Foon is graduating, which I am very upset about, and he is going on an enormous world tour next year (he wants to go to the South Pole!) so he won't be here, which is even more upsetting! But he gave us all some beautiful photographs that he had taken, including this mega mega cute one from when Ma and Pa came over here back in November. I cunningly chose to stand on tip-toe so I look tall. I showed this to one of my mates and he genuinely thought mum was my sister, so with a bit of luck I'll get those genes....

I found a bookshop! This is actually a story of great success, because I sallied forth to purchase a book, and wandered down to Georgia Tech (I might have said this before, but GT is the Georgia counterpart to MIT, but they miss the 'Institute' bit because that would spell 'GIT'). This was an absolutely brilliant idea, because I got a book priced at $9.99 and somehow paid $8.70 for it even after tax. The guy behind the counter must have thought I was a GIT person. We had a little flash flood on the way home, and I got more soaked than I had ever been before ever, but it was definitely worth it. 

And I have hayfever. So upset. I dunno what it is, some nefarious species of tree or something, but I can't go outside without sneezing all over the place. This morning I sneezed coffee out my nose in a particularly tragic hayfever attack. I would love to say at least there was no one there to witness it, but alas this was not the case. I may never live it down.

Life goes on

 

I feel like not much has been happening recently, although that's probably a good sign, if this is becoming my normal life.We've had some nice weather (like the day in the photograph) and we've had some disgusting weather (the humidity is back with a vengeance).  After our last race, Foon, Max and I went up to the hills for some running and annoying the fishers and sunbathing, pizza and general good craic. It was quite upsetting actually, because the last time we were there, there was literally no-one else. Once we got off the road, we didn't see another person for hours. This time, half of Georgia seemed to have had the same idea as us, and they were all up on the trails driving around or camping or whatever. There was one particular lorry-load of chubby women who drove past us three times during our run! We went back into Helen and ate pizza, and then went and stood in the lake, just to upset the anglers who were failing to catch any fish. There was a little sign saying 'no swimming', but we were actually icing our legs.

 

This is Valhalla. No pets allowed in Valhalla, there's a sign that says so on the gate. You know how all the American colleges have mascots (usually animals); so we're the Bees, our bitter rivals Milligan are the Buffaloes- Berry College, where we were running, are the Vikings, so their stadium is honestly called Valhalla. Berry is outside a place called Rome, which is about an hour's drive from a place called Athens (top marks for originality there America), and it is right in the middle of the rural bits of Georgia. Like Gone with the Wind, all rolling grass fields, dark pine trees and bright red soil. In the very background you can just about see the American equivalent of a stately home- a big white house with pillars and verandas and beautiful gardens. It was a nice track, although apparently it's always windy there, kind of like at Wavertree. I got to do my first track 5k, lucky duck that I am. It wasn't very great. 5k is not a long way, but it feels sooooooo much further when you're just going around in circles. I did 17.24, which at least was a qualifier for nationals, but pretty disappointing either way. 

 

Last weekend was Easter of course, and me, Maddie, Olivia and Jaylon went to watch his beautiful girlfriend and the rest of the SCAD golf squad play. Golf is a bit boring, but golf carts are a lot of fun. The Americans don't really seem to do Easter eggs in the same way as us, instead they get little plastic eggs and fill them with sweets. They have creme eggs, but they're not the same and they're not nice. We took lots of plastic eggs and hid them in the golf carts for the golfists to find. We're pretty sure we found a cabin in the woods that someone died in, I got a spider on me, Olivia got a tick, and we all got scratched by thorns. There were lots of plants on the golf course, and we found strawberries and raspberries and spring onions, which for some reason the golf girls were very impressed with. Is knowing what a spring onion looks like really that impressive? This golf course had some interesting features that I never thought anyone who played golf would have dreamed up. The bridge we are posing on goes to a little island, from which one must shoot the balls across the lake and hope they don't end up in the water. Jaylon is a really terrible driver, so Olivia and I had to strap ourselves on to the back of the cart like some luggage, and she still managed to fall off. Golf is a terrible sport, because you have to stay very quiet while they are aiming and whatever. We are not very good at being quiet, but at least we didn't get kicked out. Olivia woke up a goose, and we had to run away quickly because it got very angry. 

 

And here is the entrance to Jurassic Park. Back in Montreat, North Carolina for conference on the track. We were actually pretty high up in the hills, and it was raining a lot on Friday, so all the clouds were really low, and billowing through the valleys between peaks. It rained A LOT. We all got pretty soggy. Some of the morons forgot to bring extra clothes, so then they froze. The rain meant that events got delayed by an hour on the track, so we were there very late waiting for the 10k. I don't know how Maddie does the 10k. I really couldn't cope. 25 laps, it would just seem to go on forever and ever and ever and ever. Yesterday was very, very hot and sticky, and I wouldn't have minded a bit of rain. I don't think any of us had a particularly good run, except maybe Adrian, who came third in the guy's 5k. I won my race, but I can't even count that as an achievement given than I was seeded 80 seconds ahead of the next girl. Once again, my time was disappointing. 

I qualified for Nationals in both the 5000 and the 1500, and I'm thinking the 1500 might be a better choice. We're going to southern Alabama, where the temperature is likely to get up to 36-37 degrees, and I do not want to do 12 laps twice in that. Plus, amusingly enough I'm actually ranked higher in the 1500...told you my 5k wasn't very good. And I think I could be faster over 1500 yet- I have only done two of them so far. Maddie has the half marathon to qualify for the nationals marathon next weekend, and hopefully I can go see her run. I really hope she does a good time, I don't want to be going to Alabama by myself!

Up and up and up

This picture has very little to do with anything else in this post, but it's funny. For my drawing final we had to create a collage including a self portrait and one of someone else, and then draw a picture of the collage. Don't ask me why, I don't come up with this stuff. The whole project was ugly as hell, but I drew a picture of myself which wholly embodied my attitude to the drawing. It's ugly, but at least it's amusing. Coloured pastel is not a media I want to ever have to use ever again.

In happier news, we had spring break, and my Michael came to see me!

 

Here is a picture mostly of his face, looking very over-excited about something. I don't think there's another person alive on whom a museum mostly devoted to monetary policy would have such an effect. What a strange boy. We got up to some fun stuff, and some running (he doesn't find that very much fun). He also got rather excited about being able to use Uber over here, apparently there are never any drivers at home. I don't really understand- surely it's all just taxis?

This place is a bit worrying; it's the Centre for Disease Control, which is just behind Emory University, where I was racing. This is one of only two places left on earth where they hold Smallpox. The other one is in Russia, which really doesn't leave me feeling very safe at all.

On the other hand, this place is amazing. Georgia Aquarium, in downtown Atlanta. If any of you people are ever in Georgia you really ought to go. They have Whale Sharks and these huge rays and a massive cinema-screen kind of sized glass wall that you can see them all swimming around behind. I really could have stayed there all day and watched them swimming around.

Here he is again. I had never realised quite how big all these fish were, or how graceful. I have A LOT of pictures from this fish window, but the rest of the world probably don't want to see endless fishy photographs, even if they are beautiful.

Running news though, and big news! We had races at Emory both this weekend and the last, and I ran two PBs in the 1500 and the 800 both weekends! And I have entered into the sub-2.20 800 club! Okay, so it's not that fast in the grand scheme of things, but I am famously disastrous at 800s and I honestly never, ever thought I'd be this quick. 4.34 and 2.17, and I'm happy, especially with the 800 time. I'm starting with 5000 on the track now, so if I keep working, when I get home in the summer hopefully I can get that 1500 down to under 4.30 and that would be really great! Next race in two weeks, and we must all pray for good weather, because apparently it's a fast track and I want a fast 5k time.

Not the All-American Rejects

We went to Indoor Nationals! Back in Tennessee, on that terrible round-the-basketball-court track that we ran our first race on. 280 metres, honestly. They give you some poor lad who has to run around and pop up at the 400m marks to yell your times at you, but you kind of lose track of how far you've gone, so it doesn't mean very much. You have to try and listen out for your coach yelling "that one was too fast" or "you're right on pace" or (worst of all) "you need to pick it up", but there are so many people in there all shouting and clapping and generally being noisy that you struggle to pick out individual voices.

 

This is what it looked like inside. They put up great big 'Be Epic' NAIA banners all over the place, which made it look a little bit less like a massive basketball arena. It was a long weekend; we left on Thursday morning and got back late Saturday night. It's a pretty long drive up there, about five hours, but it is soooooooo pretty. We got to go up the mountain road again, and it was daylight this time so all the hills looked blue. I love that road, it almost makes me wish we could spend ten hours in the car every weekend. 

NAIA Nationals indoors is a bit like the English Schools. We had to run 10.28 for the 3k or 18.18 for the 5k, and a lot of the people there had just about made those times. There were two heats for the 3000; first four from each heat went through, followed by the next fastest four times. The heats were won in 10.14 (that was me) and about 10.20. We had to run on Friday and then finals on Saturday, which seemed a bit mean because the 5k people got a day's break between races. 

Our final was A LOT faster than the heats. A girl in orange took out the pace on the first lap, and we did 75, which was a bit quicker than I had planned to, but not really a problem because what Coach and I had really not wanted to happen was (as went on in the heats), a slow start with a crazy sprint to finish. Basically we just carried on being fast. It was won by a girl from OCU, who was easily the pre-race favourite. She was very annoying. She kept talking, possibly to her team-mate. Seriously though, if she can be talking through that then she ought to be further in front. I came third, and I ran a new PB (9.48), so that was great, and I'm now an All-American! 

Greta was running in the 5k, and she did really well, coming in seventh overall. The 5k was a mad race; the heats seemed to be really fast, with quite a few girls running times much faster than those they'd qualified with. In the final, two of them completely took off, and it was won in 17.01, which was nearly half a minute faster than anything that girl had run all season. Great to watch, but it was a surprise.

 Here we all are afterwards; Brandon, Greta, Coach, me (repping the non-SCAD shorts!!!) and Josh. Coach obviously had to come with us, but Brandon and Josh are an absolute pair of heroes for driving all the way up there just to yell at us for a few minutes. 

And away from Nationals, here are some of us clearly running away from our finals. Who wants to do finals? Definitely not me. I've got some mad drawing nearly the same size as me to do.....yikkkkkkesssssss. At least it's nearly Spring Break, although that means outdoor track, and everyone who knows me knows exactly how much I love that. Hopefully at least I'll get a bit faster. We convinced Coach to rent a beach house for Outdoor Nats, so I better qualify!

Indoor track, indoor track, indoor track

We had our first indoor race! Coach says there isn't an indoor one in Georgia, so we have to go adventuring to find them. This time we went up to Johnson City, Tennessee, which was a looooong drive- but not as far as the one we're doing next weekend to somewhere in North Carolina. The Johnson City track is really daft; the building looks like an aircraft hangar, but it's really a massive basketball stadium with a track around the outside of the courts. Consequently, the track is a squiffy length - 280m?! Doing the 3000 was all sorts of no fun. 10.7 laps. They have some bloke shouting out 400m splits, but he's pops up at random unexpected intervals and it was difficult to keep track of how far I'd gone how fast.

 

So here's the outside of the building. It doesn't look so big in this picture, but honestly it was HUGE. Really like something you could keep planes in. 

 

And here's the inside of it. It was a pretty skinny track, it didn't have a load of lanes, so the sprints had about fifty heats. The actual meet went on for days, but we were only there Friday, Saturday. My race was very nearly last thing on the programme on Saturday. We got there at around 9, so I sat around worrying about it all day! In the end it was a bit of a disappointment. I won it, and I qualified for Nationals but my time was slooooooooow. Still, next week we're on an actual 200m track, so keeping an eye on distance/time ought to be a bit easier.

Here is a bit of roadside Tennessee. It was completely beautiful; great big hills all over the place catching the sun in the evening. We went down this road that was a lot like when you're driving in the direction of Colwyn Bay and you come out between two hills and there's a Welsh plain and then some more hills in front of you (dad ought to know what this means, if no-one else does), expect these hills and the length of the road we were going down, and the hills in front of us were all much bigger.

Back at school I have just survived all my Mid-term due dates. I don't know why, but I seem to have so much more work this term than last. It's quite welcome really, because I spent a lot of my free time last term sunbathing, but it's too chilly for that currently! I've been spending a lot of time in the creepy animals room. We have a whole room full of taxidermy creatures, like this voodoo chicken. I was in there by myself yesterday, and it was uncomfortable. So many dead things. They have a load of dismembered heads on the wall as well. For our last project, our professor directly forbade us to use photographs, insisting we draw "from the live object". Sir....there's nothing live about it!

Emily and the Flood

This morning we awoke to rain on an almost Biblical scale. It is absolutely chucking it down, bouncing off the pavements and generally causing chaos. There was a thunderstorm (tropical storm, more like) earlier as well, which was the real reason I woke up at all. I think this is only the second time I've seen any rain at all in Atlanta, so maybe it feels like it's got to make up all the lost opportunities. It did rain overnight the day before yesterday, and all the grass started to turn green again, like those quick-blooming plants that put out flowers for two days after it rains in the desert. Coach had been telling me that the winter weather here is very unpredictable, and I hadn't really believed him (it's been consistently very hot), but this is almost like being back in Edinburgh. 

Today is also SCAD Day, which is like an open day. They are trying to show off, so instead of our usual brunch food, the menu this morning included 'Spinach salad with cucumber, oranges, dried cranberries, corn and a champagne vinaigrette'. Champagne?? They have flashy prospectuses and t-shirts and all sorts going on, and some poor person dressed up as a bee wandering around. I never knew we had a mascot. That would have been a great thing to have at our home XC race!

On Thursday we had a pep rally. This was not something I had ever heard of before, but Wikipedia informs me that these are events, typically held for students before a sporting event to encourage school spirit and enthusiasm for the sporting season. Cheerleaders and bands are usually involved. We don't have cheerleaders or bands, so all the sports teams lined up outside the canteen, and walked through chucking t-shirts at the assembled non-sporty people while Glenn read off some of our achievements from the previous season. It was a slightly mystifying experience, not least because of how crazy some of the audience were going. We wished we'd got to keep the t-shirts instead. 

Yesterday we had a local fashion designer, Megan Huntz, come in and speak to us. She was really interesting; she spoke about what is known as 'Slow Fashion', which really means a focus on working locally, to help boost the local talent and creativity of a place, and to minimalise environmental impacts. Her collection was really nice, and she is obviously very talented, but I can't help but feel that trying to do something pretty high-fashion in Atlanta, which is not really known for that sort of thing, and working in a way that means your costs and prices are going to be high, means that your business and brand are going to grow very, very slowly. And environmentalism and working locally are very fashionable in many ways currently, but who knows how long that will continue to be a selling point? She spoke about how she was committed to very high standards of craftsmanship, and wanted to create pieces that women could hand down as heirlooms to their daughters, but while her creations are very beautiful, they're also very modern, and probably are not the sort of things people will be wanting to wear in 20 or 40 years' time.

Back on the track

I've been back here about a week, and there isn't that much to report. Today is Martin Luther King day, something of an American bank holiday. The weather cannot decided what it's about. The very first day I was back it was genuinely chilly, but since then it's gone back to being the 25-degrees and sticky sort of Atlanta weather I remembered from the Autumn. It feels like it needs to thunderstorm, but of course it doesn't even rain. All the grass has died off since I left as well, so now everywhere looks parched. One of the guys said that we were in an official drought last term (which makes sense given the massive fires that happened in the north of the State just before we left), so maybe they've had a hosepipe ban or something.

Running in the heat is a massive slog; I'd just about got used to the British cold and now I'm going to have to re-acclimatize to this. At least we're racing indoors at first. All the Atlanta locals think we're mad. I was chatting to Greta yesterday, and she's come back from massive snow in Colorado and thinks wearing shorts and flip-flops is totally normal, but all the Atlanta people are in jeans and jackets! I don't know how they don't melt! They even have an ice rink in Atlantic Station!

I must confess I haven't really been taking pictures. Coming back late into term, I've been quite busy catching up with school. One of my courses is basically painting, and I'm a really slow painter, so that's taken a while. My new drawing project is slow going as well- I've done a bit more than the one in the picture, but it's all got to be done with 'linear mark making', rather than shading (although we're using black ink pens, so shading isn't possible anyway) and it takes FOREVER. At least it looks nice. So the only photos I have from the last week are selfies the boyfriend sent me, and they don't really match my college goings-on.

I have a new person to share a room with, which is all right, although I think we would have both been happier if we'd have known about it beforehand. She keeps some very strange hours; coming in at 3am, or even 7am and then sleeping all day. It wakes me up, which I freely admit I resent. I don't know why we have to share rooms, or who on earth decided that was a normal way for people to live.

They're having an open call for models for the end of term fashion show currently as well. The minimum height for a girl? 5 foot 7. The maximum height for an Emily? 5 foot 5. I am really not happy about that. Curse my short genes. Compared to a lot of the girls around here I think I'm taller than average anyway (they're very short), so God knows where they'll get enough tall people from. The most annoying bit of the whole thing is that the blokes only have to be 5 foot 10, which isn't even that tall!