Not too tough for bruisin'

2005-07-27 - 9:09 p.m.

I feel cruddy again. It's been about a week of cruddiness for me for some reason. My guts are feeling all yucky and I haven't been sleeping well because of it so I'm tired all the time too. Ugh.

Yesterday I went for a hike. I was going to tell you all about it in excruciating detail, but...I don't know what I happened. I just never got here yesterday and today I'm feeling too cruddy. Let's just suffice it to say that at the end of yesterday I was feeling very lucky to be alive. I did I lot of stupid, crazy stuff yesterday. On top of the fact that I forgot to tell anybody where I was going (I went by myself) and I forgot to bring my cell phone. So what was so stupid? Well, ok, so I went to this lake called Lake Serene. It has this one big rock that you can get to easily from the trail. When I got there, there were two naked people already there doing what naked people do when they think they're alone in the wilderness--swimming. There was basically no other patch of shoreline easily accessible from the trail, but I looked left and saw another rock that looked like it would be nice for a picnic lunch and a little swimming. The only problem was a sheer cliff between it and me. I decided I would climb up behind it and go back down on the other side to get to my rock. What I couldn't see from where I started was that this sheer cliff didn't have a way to get down on the other side of it like it looked from where I was. Instead, it looked like this:

I started on the left side of this picture and as you can see, once I got up there, as I continued towards the right side of this picture, there was no way down. And there was no trail up there and the bushes were thick and the biting flies were thick and things were steep and drop-offs were abrubpt. I kept thinking, "I've come this far, I don't want to go back." Finally, when I had just decided I would have to go back the way I came in defeat, I spotted what looked like it was probably a way down. It turned out it was indeed a way down, but it was only slightly better than the sheer cliffs I had been facing before. It was steep on slippery and loose footing. I kept wondering how many days it would be before I was found if I were to fall and hurt myself or stumble across a hornets nest that I wouldn't be able to run from or something. On that descent I was really and truly scared and at one point decided it was no longer a matter of 'if' I was going to get hurt but 'when.'

But I made it down. I went swimming and ate lunch and was really happy to be in one piece. The only problem was that I had come down between two sheer cliffs. Like my original obstacle, these came all the way down to the water so that I couldn't walk around them. I could swim around them, of course, but I was carrying a big heavy pack. The water was easily 30 feet deep at the base of these cliffs, if not more and my pack was so heavy that I doubted I could swim with it without drowning let alone keep it above the water and dry. So my choices were a) go back up the way I had come or b) build a raft. Yup, I built a raft for my pack using bits of wood and my boot laces. I swam and pulled the raft, which my pack was sitting on. It wasn't pretty, but it did the job perfectly. The only thing that got wet was me and my boot laces.

Anyway, I survived the day, but I promise never to do anything like that again. I also got pretty beat up in the process. I'm covered in scrapes and cuts and bruises and bug bites. Ah well.

Today I actually went for a jog. This is the first time since my last race back in mid-June. I lost my pedometer back then so I just recently bought a new one I'm still getting used to. It said I went a 8.4 miles. I don't really know how it knows that, though, because it never let me calibrate it to my stride length. I told it how tall I am, but my stride could still be really different from other people my height, couldn't it? And it's supposed to automatically detect when I'm running versus when I'm walking. It seems to do that pretty well since the time it came up with was exactly the time I came up with using a stop watch--1:20:54.

And that's about it for today. I also went to Target and bought a few new pairs of pants. I bought two new pairs for work and another pair to replace the ones I wore yesterday (I'm telling you, I used them hard yesterday). I finally decided to buy one of those water bottle fanny pack things for running today and the one I liked the best I had seen at Nike Town so I went there to buy it. Except they didn't have it anymore. They didn't even have a space where it used to be. I always feel really uncomfortable in places like Nike Town. I feel like I'm not cool enough to be there. Isn't that stupid? I definitely feel more in my element at Target.