Arizona trip - Arrival & Day 1 & 2

Greetings from Flagstaff Arizona! It is beautiful, clear and pleasant here and I am enjoying a cup of coffee on the balcony. The view is of 2 of the mountains of the San Francisco peaks – gorgeous!

We had an uneventful flight from Philadelphia (the best kind!) on Friday, and arrived in Phoenix where it was a blistering 112 degrees! I have never felt anything like it. While it is true that dry heat is much more tolerable than humidity, nonetheless 112 degrees is just unbelievably hot! I could actually feel myself dehydrating. It felt like standing in front of a hot oven.

Anyway, we picked up our rental car (a Nissan Quest), and headed for our first stop. I had booked us for one night at the Camelback Inn (I’d gotten a great rate when I packaged it with the rental car). It was a beautiful hotel, located between Camelback and Mummy mountains in Scottsdale. All the rooms are located in adobe casitas, and they are decorated in a very pleasing Southwestern style.

Here are some photos before we messed the rooms up too badly (we needed two connecting rooms to fit all 6 of us):





We cooled off in the room for a few minutes, and then went down to the restaurant to eat. It was on 5:00 in Phoenix, but our bodies felt like it was 8pm and we were hungry! We elected to eat outside under the misters. Here we are:




The food and the service were terrific! In fact, every single staff person that we met was friendly and went out of their way to be of service.

After dinner Hannah (16), Annika (10) and I decided to go for an early evening walk around the resort. We went up towards Mummy Mountain where they have a kind of fake Western town. They must do a show there when it is not 110 degrees! Anyway, we went for a little walk in the desert, and got some really nice pictures of some of the mountains and desert flora at sunset:





I have never been in the desert before and the beauty of the landscape was a real revelation to me! I don’t think I could live there – I like green too much, and I actually like humidity – but I would love to go back and visit again.

Anyway, at this point I was getting totally exhausted, and the kids wanted to watch Camp Rock (?), so we went back to the room. Tom and I crashed and the kids watched their movie and then put themselves to bed.

We got up, and had a wonderful buffet breakfast at the hotel restaurant. My son loved the pancakes, and our waitress went totally out of her way and got him the recipe, which was very, very sweet of her. We decided against a swim, and got ready to leave the hotel – which involved everyone showering and packing. Believe it or not, that took a while! We had a lovely time at the Camelback Inn, and would have liked to stay longer. If we come back to the Southwest we will definitely return!

We had a couple of hours before we wanted to head up to Flagstaff so we decided to go to the Heard Museum, which focuses on Native American culture and art. Tom and I were both Anthropology majors, so we knew we would find this fascinating. We were there for about 2 hours – it is a very nice museum, and I definitely recommend it. After a lunch at Taco Bell, we were on our way to the mountains.

The trip from Phoenix to Flagstaff is truly amazing. I’m afraid that I don’t have any pictures (any pictures I have ever taken from a vehicle on a highway have not been worth looking at anyway!), but essentially you move from an ecosystem of low desert – saguaros, other cacti, and an arid landscape – through a high grassy plain, to green mountains of pines and beeches, all in the space of 2 ½ hours. You climb from about 1500 feet above sea level to 7000 feet! Meanwhile, our minivan was laboring up these amazing steep hills, with periodic vistas of valleys and cliffs. Truly amazing! It is totally worth the trip if you ever get the chance.

We arrived at Flagstaff at about 4:15, checked into our timeshare, and settled in. I think this post is long enough for now so I will save pictures of our condo for my next post.

Our plans for today: visit the Renaissance Faire in Flagstaff, and perhaps hike in Walnut Canyon. And I have a little 4 mile run planned as well!

Quick update

Well, I've been reading other people's blogs, and I've decided that I'm a little wordier than most! So I have resolved to keep my postings shorter and more frequent.

In that spirit, this will be a brief update of what I have been up to!

Mostly what is on my mind this week is our upcoming family vacation. All six Gartners are flying to Arizona on Friday. We are spending one night in Phoenix, and then driving up to Flagstaff for a week in a timeshare there. A little over a year ago we won a week's Fairfield timeshare at a silent auction benefiting The Waldorf School, and decided to do something different than our usual Florida vacation. My husband is the only one of us who has ever gone to the southwest, so we looked our options and decided to do a Grand Canyon trip. Since we are based in Flagstaff, we will also be able to see Sedona, the meteor crater, possibly the petrified forest, and lots of other things. My husband is very excited about going to the Hopi Indian reservation. I added on one night in Phoenix (where it will be HOT - about 110 degrees!), and we may try to do a few things there as well.

I am going to try to keep up with my running schedule. Believe it or not, but right after my 10K it became time to start my training for the Philadelphia Distance Run half marathon in September! I am using Bingham's Marathoning for Mortals run/walk plan for a half marathon, which is a 14 week training plan. It actually starts me off with less running than what I had been doing to prepare for the 10K. I'm glad about that since I seem to have a little less energy and enthusiasm than I had a few weeks ago. I seem to be really motivated by races, and the next one is really far away! I think I will add a local 5 mile run at the end of July, and I am looking at an easy 5K in August. We'll see.

After we get back from Arizona we're home for one week, and then off to Maine for 2 weeks. So the next month or so my adventures will be as much about travel as fitness!

My plan next week is to post every couple of days and include lots of pictures. Hopefully the internet connection at the timeshare will allow me to do that.

Wissahickon Trail Classic 10K

I am taking a pause on my "historical" postings to give a race report about a 10K I did last weekend. I apologize in advance to any readers from the WISH boards who have come over here, since this report is almost exactly the same as the one I posted there.

On Saturday morning I completed the Wissahickon Trail Classic 10K! There were a lot of reasons that I did not feel particularly confident going into this race. Let me list them here:
- I had never run longer than 5.7 miles
- I don't usually run on trails - I pretty much stick to the roads around here
- I really HATE hills, and I knew there were a bunch on this route
- I had been on a low carb plan for about a week (a REALLY low carb plan!) trying to jump start some weight loss
- Finally, I knew it was going to be hot and humid (and it was!)

In my favor I had my last five months of training, no attachment to running this race fast, and lots of support from the WISH boards! I actually never seriously considered not doing it, which says something about how far I've come in this process.

I had recently read a race report from someone who had been on a low carb diet, so I knew I needed to give myself some extra carbs going into this race (in fact, I am now really questioning how well this plan is working for me at all, but that's another story entirely!). So Friday night I gave myself a pasta dinner, and I planned out my breakfast to include some extra carbs as well. I also made sure I had some Cliff Blocks with me, which also made a huge difference as you will see.

I hadn't walked the course, but I had looked at a terrain map of it pretty carefully. The park we were running through (the Wissahickon branch of Fairmount Park in Philadelphia) has two aspects to it. There is a wide path called Forbidden Drive that runs along Wissahickon Creek, which has a gently rolling but basically flat terrain. However, the creek is at the bottom of a very small, steep valley, so any paths that branch off it are very steep. I tend to avoid running on these trails very often since they are so intense, both on the uphill and downhill. Well, most of this race is run on the trails, with only a couple of small sections of Forbidden Drive in between.

So, my race strategy was very simple - walk up the hills, run downhill and on the flats, and simply finish the race!

I got there around 9:10, found a relatively convenient parking spot and went to pick up my bib & T-shirt. It was already about 84 degrees by then, with very high humidity (90-95%). This race was not chip-timed, we just used the tear-off on the bibs at the end. I wanted to put my shirt in the car, and I stopped of at the Port-o-Johns on the way. There seemed to be about 520 or so registered for the race. I stopped back there after dropping off my shirt, and then hung around near the start and stretched a bit. Everyone was very friendly, and a couple of them admired my WISH shirt. The crowd had a really nice vibe to it.

The race started right on time, with me at the back of the pack , and the first 1/2 mile or so was on Forbidden Drive. Then we went onto a trail on the right, and it got very steep very quickly. One of the funny things I discovered about a trail run is that you run much of the race in single file! In some places there was no room to pass at all. Anyway, I kept with my plan of walking up hill, and running on the flats and downhill sections. Originally I had thought I would take a Cliff Block around halfway, but I started to feel a little punk between 1 1/2 & 2 miles, so I had 2 of them. I carried my own water also, and drank a lot (it was really hot and humid!). Around miles 3 & 4 I was feeling really great, but lost it again when we got back on Forbidden Drive and had another Cliff Block. The race saved the best hill for last - right around 5.3 miles we went up a really nasty one! I mean, generally I would be talking about hiking a hill like that, not racing it. Very steep, somewhat treacherous, and it seemed endless! But once I got to the top I could see the finish line through the trees at the bottom, and I was OK the rest of the way.

My place - 391
My time - 1 hour 20:36 (or so - I forgot to turn off my Garmin at the end!)

There was pizza, bagels & bananas at the finish, and lots of cold water. I could not even imagine eating a slice of pizza at that moment, but I enjoyed the rest of the spread. I chatted with a couple of people, picked up a free water bottle, and headed back to the car.

Overall thoughts:
I had a really great time on this race! I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would, and I think a lot of that was due to the fun atmosphere. There were some serious runners there, but no one took this race overly seriously. It was tough, but fun.

I learned a couple of things about myself:
- I'm better on hills than I thought. While I was walking them, I was keeping a good steady pace, and did not get exhausted from them which has happened to me in the past. I actually passed quite a few people going up.
- I really like running downhill! I know some people have trouble with that, but I really like flying down, even on trails. I think all the hiking I have done every summer for years on Mt. Desert Island in Maine actually helped a lot. I was very sure-footed.
- I was really glad that this race gave me some practice with preparing and pacing myself on a longer course. I'm very satisfied with how I did in the face of being pretty far out of my comfort zone.

The race was well-run, with plenty of food & water at the end, and the trail was well marked. This is only the 3rd year of the race and apparently they had some problems last year (I heard one woman say she had gotten lost in last year's race!) which they seemed to have ironed out well. However, there are 2 things I would change:
-Start the race earlier - 8am or 9am at the latest! June in Philly is very unpredictable, but on a day like today started at 8 would have been much more pleasant for everyone.
-More water stops! They had only 2, which is not enough on an 85 degree day with this kind of course. They could easily have added one more, and it would have made a difference for people. I brought my own water, but most people didn't. I would have had a much harder time if I had relied on the water stops.

Thanks for reading! I'll try to post again in the next few days.

My History of (non) Fitness

Or - how did I get here!

The world of committing to structured physical activity is one that is totally new to me. I have never ever in my life taken on events that demand that I train myself physically. And as I have begun that journey I have discovered that it is important to reflect on where I have come from. I have realized that I have essentially taken on creating a new "self", one that does not avoid physical activity, and has that aspect of my life be as important as many others.

Growing up I was a skinny little bookish kid who hated gym. I was always really healthy, and was active in the way that all kids growing up in the 60's and 70's were active - we ran around outside, walked to school, and had nice long recesses - but I never voluntarily did structured physical activity. Of course, the opportunities were a lot fewer for a girl at that time. There were no girls playing on my brother's little league team, there were no all-girl soccer teams or anything else that I knew about. I could have done gymnastics (I thought about it - I was very flexible), but classes were few and far between. There certainly were some athletic girls - I know because they picked on me in gym class! - but it was difficult for girls to find ways to participate in organized athletic activities.

Anyway, by the time I was in High School and College I identified myself as "non-athletic." I hated the feeling of "pushing" myself physically, I had no interest in participating in sports, and specifically looked for a college where I was not going to be required to do much P.E. I ended up going to the University of Chicago - which is a great school for skinny bookworms! The social life there revolves around the library for heavens sake! However, as a broke college student, living off campus without a car I still got lots of daily activity. I walked everywhere, and worked part time at an after-school Pre-Kindergarten program, which had me running around a lot. So I was able to stay thin and happy with my body without really taking it on.

A year after college I married my college sweetheart, Tom Gartner, and we settled into life in Philadelphia. We didn't have a car (in fact, for a while neither of us had a drivers license!) and walked, biked and took public transportation. Again, I maintained a fairly healthy lifestyle without having to think about it much. For a while I worked at a really stressful job and lost a ton of weight, but almost immediately after I left that job I got pregnant with my daughter Hannah. I was thrilled to be pregnant, and it totally changed my life and my lifestyle to be a Mom. We moved out of center city to the Northwest part of the city, got a car, and of course I put on some weight. I had three more wonderful children (Will, Annika & Ally), and suddenly I was in my early forties, tired, sedentary & heavier than I would like.

About 3 1/2 years ago I realized that I needed to something about this. My years of taking my body for granted were over - or at least they needed to be if I wanted to move into the second half of my life as healthy and happy as I was committed to. The realization really hit home when we were on vacation in Maine. Every summer we go for a couple of weeks to Southwest Harbor, on Mt. Desert Island where Acadia National Park is. When we are there we really like to take advantage of the all the beautiful hiking and biking there is to do there. Well, we were biking on the carriage trails and I could barely do it anymore! I was walking my bike up hills that had not been a problem for me in the past, I was easily winded - in short, I was seriously out of shape. And this was not OK with me!

For a couple of years I tried a number of different ways to deal with this. I joined Curves for a month or two, but didn't think it was really working for me. I joined my local gym, and was fairly consistent for about 3 months, but then that petered out also. Nothing seemed to be sticking.

Finally I thought I would try running. I really don't remember why this occurred as a good idea to me. I had always hated running my whole life; I basically thought of it as a form of punishment. I hated the stitch in my side I always got, the burning feeling in my legs - you get the picture (and if you are a runner you probably also know the mistakes I was making!). But my husband had been doing it off and on for years, and I was coming to realize that it satisfied some of the most important requirements I had: I could do it when it worked for me, it was an activity I could do anywhere, and it didn't take any special training.

So a little over a year ago, I started the Couch to 5K program. I did not get all the way through it, and was not reliable to keep it up consistently, but I did keep trying on and off all year long. In the process I discovered that, lo and behold, I did not hate running! In fact I kind of liked it - as long as I was taking it easy, doing a little at a time, and slowly increasing my mileage and effort. I figured out that I had been doing it wrong my whole life. Every time I had started to run, some competitive button got tripped in me and I would push myself incredibly hard. What ended up happening is that I got a stitch in my side, pain in my legs, and I hated the whole thing. But if I took it slowly, it was kind of enjoyable to push myself and watch myself slowly improving.

This past January, I was hanging out on the Disboards, reading trip reports, when I discovered that Disney World held a marathon and a half marathon. As a Disney fanatic, I realized that this would be the ultimate motivation - I would finally really take on running, and then reward myself with a race at Disney World!

So now I have registered for the Half Marathon in January 2009, and in addition I am doing the Philadelphia Distance Run (also a half marathon) in September 2008. I also have a number of shorter races scheduled in between. I have become a runner!

Next - how did being a runner go from an idea to a reality?

Why a Blog?

I feel like an unlikely blogger. I don't read many blogs; in fact until the past few months I didn't really know what a blog was. And while I participate on many forums and message boards, I am almost always a lurker. I have been a member of the Disboards, an incredibly active Disney message board, for 6 years and have only 260 posts!

But I am embarking on so many new adventures in my life right now, that I find I want to write about them, share about them - well, blog about them I guess!

I'm not sure what it is. I turned 43 last summer, but 43 is not generally considered a particularly significant birthday. My youngest child entered first grade in the fall, which is a big milestone, but it did not change my lifestyle too much since she had been in school full time for 3 years already. Is it hitting 21 years of marriage? Some other more subtle milestone I haven't thought of? Well, whatever it is, in the last year I have been gradually redesigning many aspects of my life.

Last summer I decided that I was going to complete being a Course Supervisor for Landmark Education at the end of June 2008 (if you are interested in what Landmark Education does, check out their website here). I have been a Course Supervisor for almost 17 years, and have been the chairperson of the program since 2002, so this was a really big deal. Really after doing this for 17 years, I am not entirely sure how I will feel in July when I am done!

Then in early fall, I decided to start my own travel business. After doing quite a bit of research, and lots of preliminary work, I created Blue Sky Destinations, and became a travel agent. I am associated with one of the largest and best-regarded "host" agencies for home-based agents, Nexion Inc. This is a wonderful new venture for me, and I am loving every aspect of it! I love planning travel for people, and I love the challenges of starting my own business. I have been doing a lot of training (including a Nexion "Boot Camp" in February), and feel ready to take the lid off my marketing and really start to grow my business. This is one of the "adventures" I plan to chronicle in this blog!

In January I embarked on another new undertaking. After a lifetime of being more or less a couch potato, I decided I was going to become an athlete and I registered for the Walt Disney World Half Marathon in January 2009. I also talked my husband into it as well! This is perhaps the most unlikely venture I could have begun. I have hated running most of my life (and hate really is not too strong of a word) - however, I had flirted with running the previous year with a couple of half-hearted attempts at the "Couch to 5K" running plan. While I was never really able to stick to the plan reliably, I did discover that running was not so bad - in fact, I kind of enjoyed it! However, committing to doing a half marathon, even one a year away, was a much bigger step!

Since then, I have worked my way up to running about 12 miles a week, completed my first 5K race (I'm doing a 10K in 2 weeks), and committed to a second half marathon - this one in Philadelphia in September! More importantly, I have changed my relationship to myself, my body and what I am capable of. This adventure is the other big reason for this blog! I figure if I write everything down here maybe I won't have to bore my friends and family with it all the time!

I am making or contemplating making other major changes in my life as well. After teaching Cultural Anthropology for 14 years at a local small college, I gave them my notice this Spring and I will not be back doing that again next year. We have been talking about moving for a while (and that may happen), but in the meantime we are planning some major work on our house in the next 6 months. I am considering shifting some aspects of my job (I work as the Admissions Director at The Waldorf School of Philadelphia in addition to my travel business). I think the only areas not up for grabs are my husband - not making a change there! - and my kids.

So, in this blog I plan to focus on the two big new adventures I have taken on: my half-marathon training, and building my travel business. The scope of this blog may change if I make other major shifts in my life, but what I want to share with you now is an exploration of these questions:

• Can I become an athlete for the first time in my 40s?
• How should I train to avoid injury?
• How am I preparing for a distance event for the first time?
• What are the emotional/mental spaces I am going through in the process?
• How is this process impacting my family and my life?
• How am I building my travel business?
• Training, marketing and learning the business from the ground up.
• Mistakes, frustrations and challenges.
• When do I jump into this full-time!

This will likely all be mixed in with general news and stories about my family, my house, my pets and my life!

Thanks for reading!