Two weeks before CIM (California International Marathon in Sacramento) in December, Aja texted me saying that she and Misha were sick. Misha tested positive for Covid. We’d all been training hard for this marathon, and Misha had missed it last year due to injury, after multiple missed Boston marathons due to the Covid pandemic. So this was supposed to be the comback, but it was not to be. We all cancelled. “Besides”, I told myself, “it’s forecast to rain on the morning of the marathon”. (It did not rain, and I continued training through the rainiest winter I remember in California.)
Instead, we ran the Mesa marathon. For me, while I did not run as fast as I’d hoped I would, I did get to run with Misha for the first half. If anyone had suggested, ten years ago, that I would run even a mile in a marathon with Misha, I’d have laughed at their ignorance. Yet, here I was running alongside my athletically far superior sibling. Most of this was due to Misha’s misfortune at catching Covid right before CIM.
Here we are the day before, posing in front of the only growing thing in Phoenix. The rest is concrete and asphalt.
That the US has made the utterly ridiculous transportation pattern of Phoenix the dominant one in the whole country speaks to the power of money in this country. Here we are, stuck in traffic trying to get to a running race. Madness. But at least we were smiling.
We started in the dark, so the photos were not great, but here it is: Evidence. I ran with Misha! Yes, and every photo of Misha shows them floating in the air:
I managed to keep a grin on my face to the end, even though it was a hard marathon for me. It got so much hotter than I thought it would, and I just felt like I could barely move at the end.
Here we are at the end – that was a tough race. Even though the organizers and volunteers were fantastic, I don’t want to do this one again.
And that’s it for the marathon stuff. On to more interesting things: Janeen and I on a huge (13 mile!) hike around San Francisco:
