Posts from the “Team Monster” Category

Day 29: The Plan

Posted on August 11, 2014

Okay, friends, now that you have a little motivation, some proper shoes, and possibly a Fitbit, it’s time for the training plan. Drill Sergeant Joe emailed me a spreadsheet, detailing how often, how far, and in what length of time I should walk every week. Feel free to follow it with me, whether you’ll be in San Antonio in December to watch me face plant in front of the “lag wagon” half way through or are supporting from afar. (You read that right – “lag wagon.” Remember when I joked there would be an official who could scrape me off the asphalt, pour me into a golf cart, and convey me back to my car that unfolds into a movie theater playing a Rocky marathon”? Turns out that’s half true!) Happy walking, team.

Training Schedule PDF

Categories: Team Monster

Tagged: #teammonster, half-marathon, marathon, training, walking

Guest Post: Quantitative V. Qualitative Data

Posted on August 5, 2014

By Rachel Morgan

It’s 10 steps from my office to the closest bathroom; 99 steps to the furthest bathroom. Roughly 3,341 steps from my front door to my office, and most frequently 35 from my kitchen to washing machine. Yes, I have a Fitbit.

In the mid 1980s my cousins and I paraded across the kitchen floor, wearing our grandparents’ pedometer, a machine roughly the size and design of a post office timestamp. A loud click poorly documented every other step or so. Fast forward some twenty years and I’m outside my classroom with a yardstick measuring a colleague’s footsteps. Her average gait is 25 inches compared to my 22.5. We’re both wearing bulky pedometers that eat the same batteries as hearing-aides. But 4,217 steps later we can see most of the San Fernando Valley nestled under a hazy marine layer. Below Fryman Canyon our jobs as high school English teachers, cell phones, and cars wait while we talk about our families, what we’re reading, our childhood— anything we don’t have to fact check.

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Categories: Team Monster

Tagged: Fitbit, pedometers, Rachel Morgan, walking

Day 17: Gear, Part One

Posted on July 30, 2014

As an undergraduate in college, I worked as a shoe salesperson for the now-defunct Mervyns department store. The soothing strains of Faith No More on Musak played as we straightened neon hiking boots and striped ballet flats and assorted white high tops on plexiglass rounders. There was a strange power in disappearing into the dimly-lit stock room with a display shoe, leaving the customer waiting in socked feet in the wash of fluorescent lights. In the stock room, ladders ascended to the largest sizes, boxed near the skylights. To stand at the top was to stand in your own light beam like a deity. If you came to Mervyn’s for athletic shoes of any kind and asked me for advice, you probably left with whatever I thought coordinated best with the pants you were wearing. What I’m telling you is, I once sold shoes for a living and I know nothing about shoes.

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Categories: Team Monster

Day One: Team Monster

Posted on July 14, 2014

Saturday morning, with my cell phone slipping in my sweaty hand, the weight of it yanking the tangled cord of the ear buds, I stop on a street corner to GPS my location. I’m in my own neighborhood. It’s the sort with aging oaks and pecan trees angling over mansions with the occasional 1950s ranch house where the 1950s ranch houses haven’t been torn down to accommodate more mansions. Guess which kind of house I live in? So I wander around the neighborhood in the ambitious ensemble of running shorts plus coordinating tank top, gawking at the grand structures past the giant agave and iron gates, taking more than one wrong turn along the way.

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Categories: Box of Monsters Blog, Team Monster

Tagged: #teammonster, half-marathon