Last weekend, I decided to take a relatively spur of the moment trip to Otavalo. My old flatmate, Benedicte, had just left, so it had been really quiet and boring for a few days and I really didn´t feel like sitting on my ass all weekend. So, I just hopped a bus and headed out of town.
Otavalo is a nice town a few hours North of Quito known for its crafts markets. Any kind of South American or Mexican crafts market that you´ve seen could fit in a tenth of the central market in Otavalo. It was incredibly overwhelming but it was nice. I spent a good amount of time practicing my haggling skills, which I honed in and eventually became a haggling machine.
So, I bought some gifts for friends and family and then did some nice running out of the city. On Sunday, I did one of my hardest runs yet, which started in the town (about 9000 ft) and then ran up to a series of high mountain lakes (about 13,000 ft) and back down. So, about 4,000 ft of elevation change and about 30k. Not too shabby. The lakes are at the top of this mountain:
I also did some hiking around in the forests and mountains which was nice.
Oh, and there was also a really cool rehabilitation center for Raptors (bird of prey). I spent an afternoon wandering around here checking out the super cool birds. I even got to see a few Andean Condor, the largest flying bird in the world! Sweet!
Trying to get back to the town from the park was interesting, since it was in the middle of nowhere. I was afraid I was going to have to walk the 6 miles back (after my long run), but luckily, I hitched a ride with a bus full of German tourists. Always an adventure...
Anyways, so then this past week was pretty uneventful. I went to work, ran, ate, slept, watched some Spanish cartoons (which is actually remarkably helpful). It was pretty quiet.
This past weekend, I stayed around here. I tried and failed to get face value Phish tickets. Sunday night, a new girl showed up who is going to be here until January. It was really, really nice just to have somebody to talk to for once. She doesn´t speak a lot of Spanish, so I kind of showed her the ropes. It was nice.
Then yesterday, two other English girls showed up who are only here for a few days. They were pretty social and so we went out last night, which was fun. It was good to get out and do something and go to bed after 9:00. I didn´t drink though, because I had intervals to run this morning.
Speaking of intervals, my workout didn´t go too stupendously. I´ve been used to being able to run a few seconds faster than Jon tells me, and this was the first workout where I´ve been a few seconds behind. The workout was 6x800m in three sets of two. The first one a bit slower than VO2 max pace and the second a bit faster (2:36, 2:32). Anyways, I actually felt pretty solid warming up and doing striders, so I had high hopes. But alas, the times just weren´t quite there. I would go through 400m right about on pace and then run out of gas (oxygen) around 500 or 600m. So, my paces were closer to 2:38, 2:36, but oh well. It´s still much faster than the last 800m workout I did at sea level!
Anyways, so that´s about it. I´m thinking about racing 5k this Saturday in Quito. It´s for charity and I could just run it as a tempo run, so we´ll see.
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