run and jump

Jumping off bridges- no big deal.





the jumpers- me, Jen, Richard, Nate (Chris is mid-jump)



Nate, Chris, Me, Jen, Richard-  still alive!

                                                                                        Google the Corinth Canal to see what it looks like, pretty impressive. It's a famous tourist site which is a long narrow canal that seperates Greece from the Pelopponesian island. We visited it once on a prior excursion that our group went on. Zulu Bungy is the company we used. They have a smaller bridge walkway with all the bungy setup that is underneath the main Corinth Canal bridge. Amazing Race also used Zulu for one of their episodes.
So 5 of us made the risky jump strapped to a thick cord of rubber bands.

My jump was terrible. They instructed us to jump out as far as we could with our arms outstretched to our sides. Easyyyy right? I had it all worked out in my head after watching about 10 people go before me. Looked simple enough. I would bend my knees, push off, and dive out. I saw some odd jumps and some professional looking ones so I had it pretty much down pat. I thought.

With my toes hanging off the platform, staring out into a huge empty canal with nothing visible going to catch me, my mind emptied itself of all my plans for the jump. The crowd started the countdown from 5 to 1 which was waaaay too fast for me to try to get my body situated again. Hence, as Nina says, I succumbed to doing a sort of messy cannon ball into the abyss. And rather than stretching my arms out to the sides I grasped the rope in front of me for dear life. Basically everything I could've done wrong I ended up doing. I was a bit annoyed by that because I knew my jump was terrible mid-fall but I had no time to think about that.

It's probably only 3 seconds of free-falling but it seems like forever waiting for the rope to catch your body so you can be assured that something has you. Nothing else can ever give you that feeling. I watched so many people go before me that I was thoroughly convinced that the rope would catch me and I would come back alive just like everyone else. The seconds before the jump and while your flying downward mid-air all that you are aware of is the lack of anything that has you.

A wonderful experience and I'm glad I did it. We all got videos which has all of our group's jumps on them. Victoria also took videos on my camera of everyone so we got double the documentation. Yaaay

Ahhhh so crazy.

That was my Saturday.

This was my Sunday.



me and Jen after running our 10k



The 2500th Classic Athens Marathon was yesterday. That's counting the real first time in 390BC when Philepides ran 26.2 miles (what we now call a marathon) to tell his city who won some war, to 2010. 2500 years of celebrating that legacy. Wow. So a bunch of the girls in my apartment wanted to get involved in the events. They also have a 5k, 10k, and a power-walking. It was too expensive for us to register  to run in them so a couple weeks ago we tried to sign up for being volunteers for the marathon but we never heard back from them. We decided to run in the 10k anyways. Me and Jen headed out Sunday morning for the 10k which started and ended at a stadium just a short walk from our apartment. The run felt great until the last stretch. Probably about 200ft at the end is ran inside the stadium. Once I hit the stadium I felt an overwhelming urge to throw up. As much as I wanted to sprint out the end I wanted more to just hold down my food while I was in this ancient stadium with crowds of people around. Twice during this last stretch my food came up into my mouth and i just swallowed it back down. Gross, I know. I successfully crossed the finish line without vomiting though!!!!

finish line!

 Two steps past that line I had to turn to the side and throw up all my breakfast though. All the officials standing there laughed at my misfortune and I apologized profusely for making a mess all over the ancient stadium but I had seen other throw up along the way so figured it wasn't the first time they had seen that. I got a medal for running the 10k which made me so happy. My time was about 55 minutes. Very happy :)



One of the marathon runners about to finish.
Yes I finished in here as well.
And puked there too.



We came back later to watch the marathon runners come back. We missed the first of them sadly but definitly were catching the elite athletes arrive way ahead of the pack. I could've cried watching them. They had run so long and were just soooo extremely ecstatic entering the stadium to finish. Wow. One day maybe. Have to train hard for that. Those athletes were ALL muscle. Amazing.



I loved this weekend. Have a paper to write and a test to study for and my mom and sister come on Thursday. Things are getting crazy here. Six weeks down. Seven weeks to go.