snow white

I saw the movie Mirror Mirror with Julia Roberts (finally) on Netflix the other day.  Again the wise old woman is demonic while the innocent youthful one is the herione.  What's wrong with educating women?  Maybe it was her star power, but I was drawn in by the Queen character.  Had she ever had children of her own?  Had she ever been in love once?  How did she learn all that magic?

I told my students the other day, you can spend many years denying your own abilities, but eventually you have to own them and grow up.  No wonder women and girls are busy flipping their hair and posing about uselessly.  Disney tells us that's what girls do.  Check out the body language alone in this video.  Now I can see out my window a dog walker pausing to observe the plants in my front (educational) garden.  Lovely.

International Women's Day passed in my life, while I was clueless as to its intent and history.  One powerful image has stuck in my mind though, a girl with a pink bike.  It was in the lobby of the Athenaeum next to a big poster advertising a film called Girl Rising.  A lame photoset which is totally unrelated is here.  I have been thinking ever since about the power of educating and empowering women around the world.  And giving them bikes.  And teaching them to farm.  And teaching them chemistry.  Practical magic.

Race Report: Glendale Downtown Dash 5k

We had a GREAT time at the Downtown Dash this year.  It was funny since we didn't lay our clothes out the night before, and we assumed our phones would wake us including daylight savings time, but it turns out that it woke us at 0600 according to the pre-Daylight Savings time, so we woke up at 0700 instead.  The race was to begin at 0830.

We got dressed and hit the ATM, parked on Wilson.  We hustled over to registration, picked up our numbers and T-shirts, then headed back to the car.  After dumping our goodies and pinning on our timing plates, we headed to the starting line.  We didn't wait longer than 6 minutes of stretching with the Radio Disney dancers, and the race was off!

The amazing thing was that we ran the entire time and a fairly steady pace, stopping twice for water.  I LOVE supported events like this that bring athletes of all levels of experience together.  I love running in a massive pack and this event hosted over 1000 runners ages 1-99.  I placed 19th out of 64 females in my age division, 448th overall!

There was also a big band stationed near the old post office.  We got to hear them twice, both coming and going.  It was also a great idea to have a two-sided water stop at the turnaround somewhere around the two mile marker.  All the volunteers were cheering us through the race, which was so sweet!  And one guy was watching us while eating a huge ice cream cone just outside the Americana, that was hilarious!

Our co-finishers were a family: five kids under the age of 12 and the mom was wearing two leis, one with purple flowers and one with green.  All the kids had some element of green in their running outfits.  Even though the kids were always stopping and starting abruptly, they were cute!  To help us across the finish line, one little guy jumped out of his stroller to sprint the last 0.2 mile.  Awesome.

shoe blues => new shoes

That old pair of Diadoras has logged 2,296.56903005 mi. They are now a puppet. I can haz new shoez.

I found out that I've been rocking MTB shoes/pedals on my road bike all this time. Also, there was a considerable amount of grit in the bindings. Thanks to Glendale Cycles for hooking it up in the 'hood.

Also, we saw a horse of a different color at the show Cavalia Odysseo in Burbank, CA. Acrobats, stunts, dancing, music, it was like the Emerald City brought before our eyes. And William Chatner was there too!

What a Super Tuesday!  Tags: clipless, cycling, dancing, diadora, distance, education, green, love, Map My Ride, motivation, mountains, pain, pedals, plants, shimano, shoes, spring, summer, teamwork, technology, weight loss, winning, winter, writing