Te Siento Cerca

I´m sitting in a cafe munching down a whole bag of these DELICIOUS cookies and drinking a big calorie-filled fanta. I just ran the longest I´ve run since my injury and, needless to say, I´m hungry!

I almost didn´t even run today because the last few runs have gone pretty poorly, but I´m pretty glad I did now. I ran about 10 miles in 67:42. The best part was that I had no idea how fast I was going (since my watch got jacked) and I had thought I was going a lot slower. I felt really comfortable basically the whole run. I made sure to eat a whole lot today and not walk too much so that I didn´t run out of gas like my run yesterday.

Anyways, I felt really comfy and then I even had room to push a bit on the last big uphill and straightaway toward our house. It was one of those good runs that makes you think maybe I will feel like an athlete again soon (knock knock knock).

I´m trying to get some mileage into the beginning of this week because this weekend I´m climbing Cotopaxi! I´m actually really excited. My plans have changed a bit (for the better, I think), where now I´m doing my acclimitization hike near Cotopaxi and then spending Friday night at a refuge at like 15,000 feet. So, that should make the climb a bit easier. The actual climb will take place starting aroudn midnight on Saturday night-sunday morning. The summit should take 7 or 8 hours with the hike down taking only 2 or 3.

In other news, work at the hospital is going pretty well. Today, there weren´t a whole lot of kids there, so we were sent up to the floor of kids who were too sick to come down to the play room. It was pretty intense; this a a really poor hospital and there are some kids who are in really bad shape. Some look like accident victims with lots of burns and such and others look like abuse victims, with broken noses and broken legs and arms. It´s quite sad.

Anywho, on a brighter note, it´s been really nice weather here today. Yesterday it POURED for hours (leaving me no choice than to become a drowned rat walking home from the bakery). But today it´s been sunny and not too hot all day. The weather here is nuts. It´s basically impossible to predict (which is probably why the weather.com forecast always just says ¨rain¨). It will be 50 and cloudy when you wake up, and by lunch time its 80 and sunny. It´s always dry, though, which can be nice, but is also means you have to drink about 4 liters a day (especially with the altitude as well).

I´m getting a bit of a tan! Even with SPF 30, that direct angle with the sun is pretty brutal.

Meanwhile, apparently Pandora (online radio) only works in the U.S. Bummer.