Holidays and Xterra World Championships

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I survived. It was a bit rough there being a big family holiday and not being at home. There are certain things I missed (like that green bean dish I have every holiday) but fortunately I was not without family. I had lunch at a Japanese buffet with my grandma and 2 of her sisters and 2 of my cousins, which is always entertaining. I always feel a bit sorry for the waiters and waitresses as my various relations play tug of war over the bill. I managed to control myself as I walked past the various sushi goodies to hold off for dinner. I had a nice quiet thanksgiving dinner with my family here, complete with my favorite, cranberry sauce from the can.

Works been pretty quiet lately, with the holidays coming up, everyone is trying to not add too much to their plate before taking vacation time. The thing I have noticed from working here is how much into the future I have to think. My calendar has things all the way in March already. I am really excited about a couple of things I am working on though. One is a rule change, which sounds awfully dull to most of you I am sure. But for me it's an opportunity to apply some of my law background and get experience in the procedures required to change statutes. Another is this Big Trees competition run by American Forests. I wrote a press release last month and it received a lot of response. These next few months will require going out to where ever these big trees are that people submitted, measuring them, and then submitting them to these national competition. Hopefully we will have some "big trees" and make the national register. I also will be speaking about how I am applying online mapping to integrate with this competition at a conference in March (which I am really nervous about). I have also made it my goal to start a statewide big tree competition just for Hawaii by the end of my internship.

In non work news, I ran my 2nd trail half marathon on Sunday, and boy, did I pick the right race. It was the Xterra Trail World Championship at Kualoa Ranch which is this absolutely gorgeous location where they filmed LOST, Jurassic Park, Pearl Harbor, and various other movies. It was a race of about 700 people and we started off on with some nice rolling hills. I moved up passing people on the hills (my specialty) before we headed to a single track that had been cut into the hillside. It was pretty incredible to turn a corner and see sets from movies, especially things LOST related, not to mention the green cliff sides and the beach you could see for most of the race. Then things got difficult. Mile 8-10 was straight up hill which led to all the contestants to resort to walking and few expletives. Once up the giant mountain, we turned a corner and found...MUD! We then had to slip and slide down the mountain holding on to ropes tied to trees for mile 11 and 12, not exactly what you would call a fast course. Once that was out of the way, it was only another mile and a half to the finish (our race turned out to be 13.5 instead of the usual 13.1 half marathon). Once I was less than a mile out, I knew I wanted to kick it into gear and finish hard, which meant I passed 3 people in the last 800 and 3 more in my sprint finish, which felt pretty good. I had forgotten how much fun racing can be, since its been almost a year since my last race. Once the results were posted I had found out I ran 13.5 miles in 2:17:03, was in 239 place out of 687, was the 35th female and had one 2nd in my age bracket (20-24)! I was really excited, especially since it had been such a difficult course and I had only been training for a month and hadn't run a trail since I got here. I got a nice little swag bag, a lei, another medal, and a chance to go on stage and take a picture. It felt pretty damn good! 

So just to end with some Christmas spirit, here's a picture of my cousins dog Chutney :)