Moana's Big Adventure

Remember how I said I was SO GLAD that we were taking the Superferry over to Maui instead of flying? Yeah. Um, next time we're flying and we just won't complain about lugging all of Moana's stuff through the airport.

The trip over was a nightmare. Get up in the middle of the night to get to the boat by 5:15 to get the X-Terra loaded onto the boat for the 6:30 AM departure... High winds and a big ocean swell = major boat rocking = lots of people seasick (including me) and surround sound puking (luckily not including my family). I, like many others on that floating nightmare, found that being horizontal was the only way to cope.

4 hours after getting off that boat I was still dizzy. I laid down on my back and closed my eyes, only to find the whole world spinning. Yeah. Next time we're flying.

Anyway, we learned some things about Moana on this trip. Most importantly, we found that she is an adaptable champ and relatively easy to travel with. She didn't seem to care where she was as long as she was with us. :)

Specifically, what did we learn?

Moana doesn't get seasick. (Phew!)

A tent works really well as a crib in a hotel room.

The big bath tub is a scary scary scary place. No pictures of that meltdown. But there was no bath on Sunday.

Moana can sit up in an umbrella stroller and thinks its cool to be able to look forward.


Sunday morning I ran the Maui Oceanfront Half Marathon. It was a small low-key affair, and overall not a bad race, although you'd think that for a $90 entry fee maybe they could put a mile marker on the course... or an aid station more than once every 3 miles. I wasn't worried about the mile markers because I had my trusty Garmin to give me that info. I guess we weren't supposed to be looking for mile markers anyway when there were whales out there to see. I did see a whale breeching early on which was pretty cool, but that didn't make up for the lack of drinkable water on the course. At one point (mile 9ish) I had a flashback to my high school lit class and that Ulysses S Grant poem about the albatross... water water everywhere but not a drop to drink...

Anyway, here's how it went down... My plan was to try to take the first half out at 8:15 pace and then just see how it went from there. I wasn't sure that I could keep that pace the whole time, although every long run I've done lately has been negative split, so anything was possible.

8:07
8:07
8:09
8:08
8:11

My internal self talk? I'm like a machine! No, I am a machine!

I felt solid in those first miles, although somewhere around mile 5 I noticed that my breathing was becoming more labored. I was still coughing up solid phlegm (this takes real talent to do while ticking off 8:10's). I figured rather than pushing it now and then having the machine malfunction in a few miles, maybe I should just back off the gas a little. So the next 4 miles were a little slower.

8:23
8:19
8:24
8:15

My plan was to take my GU's at mile 5 and mile 9. The mile 5 one was no problem because I was carrying my own water bottle, but by mile 9 that was long gone and since my mouth was a dry as the desert by mile 8 and there was no water at mile 9, I couldn't take my GU. Oh, I wanted to. And I needed to. The machine apparently requires water to run. Without water, the wheels fall off. Seriously, this bears repeating, you'd think $90 would get a runner a little water.

Finally there was an aid station after mile 10. I walked it so I could ingest every drop of both those little thimbles full of the prescious liquid I grabbed. Took my GU. Walked the next aid station too, because once you start walking aid stations, that's really the end, isn't it? My last miles looked like this:

8:32
8:52
8:52
8:40

I missed my goal of "under 1:50" by ten seconds. That's what happens when you walk at aid stations. You miss your goal by ten seconds.

The things is, it's probably still a lifetime PR for me which is amazing considering everything. I've run 1:50 and change before. Can't remember the 'and change' part, but it was likely more than :10.

My friends Sarah and Andrea were there running too. Andrea finished her first 1/2 marathon yesterday, and Sarah (on the left in the picture below) was the first woman in at 1:40! Like I said before, it was a little race with only 128 people. I ended up 18th across the finish line and 5th woman (2nd in my age group) which was pretty amazing for me because I don't generally place so well in running races.

The first thing I did after crossing the finish line was wipe my daughter's nose. Because we're all sick. Snot factories all around.

But we can still pose for cute finish line pictures by the ocean.

The trip home today wasn't quite as crazy as the trip over because the wind was down. So there was less puking. But no less hellish for the 20-something single guy sitting right behind us on the ferry. I was coughing up a lung, Scott was blowing his nose, and Moana decided that the boat was just as good a place as any to test out her lung function and volume. Yes, we were that family.