Anyway, because there aren't enough irrelevant things in the world to bore you, here's what my weekly mileage has looked like lately:
3 July: 15 miles (110 minutes), on a super-hot day, through some super-bad neighborhoods
4 July: 10 miles (75 minutes), downtown Baltimore vicinity
5 July: 12 miles total: 25 minutes on the treadmill, at a 15% incline (2 miles), 2 miles on either side of that (15 minutes), 2 mile warmup before track workout (15 minutes), 6x800m (2:48, 2:51, 2:49, 2:49, 2:49, 2:52), 2 minutes jog rest between, 2 mile warmdown (15 minutes), 95 minutes total
6 July: 12 miles (90 minutes), with the Wednesday night run group
7 July: 2 miles easy (15 minutes)
8 July: 2 miles easy, in creepy Las Vegas Sunset Park (15 minutes)
9 July: 2 miles easy, also in creepy Las Vegas Sunset Park (15 minutes)
Total Time: 425 minutes
Total Distance: 55 miles
10 July: 2 miles, just outside of Stovepipe Wells resort (15 minutes)
11-12 July: Badwater Ultramarathon - 135 miles in 34 hours, 18 minutes, 14 seconds (round to 34:20 for ease of calculation)
13 July: 3-mile shakeout in the ol' Sunset Park in Vegas (25 minutes)
14 July: 5 miles in and around Sunset Park (35 minutes)
15 July: 5 miles at good ol' APG (35 minutes)
16 July: 11 miles (80 minutes) in Baltimore, before my flight to oblivion . . . um, I mean, Israel
Total Time: 2230 minutes
Total Distance: 161 miles
17 July: 13 miles (90 minutes) along the Mediterranean (out to Jaffa-ish and back)
18 July: 10 miles (70 minutes) in the morning, 5 miles (35 minutes) in the evening - south along the sea in the morning, and north in the evening
19 July: 5 miles (35 minutes) in the morning, heading south, and 10 miles (70 minutes) along the sea in the evening, heading north
20 July: 5 miles (35 minutes) in the morning, heading south along the sea, and 13 miles (90 minutes) in the evening, running off the script and heading into town, getting lost, and taking an extra 3 miles to get back to the hotel
21 July: 8 miles (60 minutes) in the morning, adding 3 miles to the planned 5 due to being lost in the city
22 July: 6 miles (45 minutes) in a late-night Jaffa jaunt
23 July: 24 miles (180 minutes) on my journey to Trash Mountain and back
Total Time: 710 minutes
Total Distance: 99 miles (so close to 100! oops :P)
And now, for something different . . .
If you haven't noticed, I've been taking full advantage of my first trip to anyplace outside of the US, and I've been turning every run into as much of an adventure as possible (without heading into disputed territory, of course). 23 July was my first truly "free" day since I've been here, so I took advantage of this opportunity for a long run to venture east from Tel Aviv, towards the mountains, to see if I could make it to something worth climbing. I wasn't entirely optimistic, but as it turns out, I did . . .
I wound up in an overgrown lot behind a run-down neighborhood - a lot which was full of this:
Which soon gave way to this:
Which I have dubbed "Trash Mountain." (The real story behind this is that it's a landfill about 87 meters high, containing about 16 million cubic meters of waste, in Hiryia that's being converted into a park, to be named after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Please note that I mean no offense to him with my informal name for the mountain.)
So, counting the climb from the ditch, I had the opportunity for about 100 meters of gain, which, running from pancake-flat Tel Aviv, was an opportunity that I couldn't pass up. I'll skip the part about the watermelon patch and the rose field in front of the mountain, and get to the climbing. As it turns out, there's sort of a trail up the mountain for construction equipment, which is smelly and dusty and ends like this:
To venture beyond the construction equipment plateau, you have to navigate a series of uncovered trash mounds, which look a little like this:
And then, the trail ends, and you have to go straight up this:
Did I mention that it was dusty and hot and smelled bad? Like, fecal-waste bad? Because that detail bears repeating.
Anyway, why go through all that trouble? Well, if only my cell phone camera were good enough to do this justice, but you have a 360-degree view of Tel Aviv, a bunch of other cities, and even, way off in the distance, Jerusalem. Also, you get a little preview of the park at the top. Here's the payoff:
and
and
and
and
And then some guys in a white SUV drove over to me and told me that I couldn't be there, Shabat be darned (so apparently they weren't Jewish). I left peacefully, since at that point, I had all of the exclusive photos of the view from the top that I could reasonably take with my camera phone.
Then I had to run all the way back to the sea, which ended up taking longer than the way out, because they made me run down the backside of the mountain, which, it turns out, has a very convenient (but also very clearly prohibited-to-traffic) paved path to the ground. Then I wound up running further south than I thought (using the "follow the sun" method to work my way west), so I had to run about 3 miles north from Jaffa back to the hotel.
I hope you enjoyed hearing about my little adventure as much as I enjoyed experiencing it. In conclusion, I leave you with the following: The question all week is, do the streets smell like urine in Tel Aviv because people are peeing on the streets, or because of the stray cats peeing on the streets? (My vote has been mostly for people, as I am well aware of what cat urine smells like, and the urine smell is not that smell.) Here's the picture; you decide. :)
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