I haven't been doing much blogging. Let me sum up the past few months: It's hot. I haven't been running or biking much. It's hot.
However, the husband and I are presumably running a half marathon on 9/11 (not in any anniversary sort of way...it's for the Montgomery County parks and we've run it the past couple of years.) Anyhow, we started running again recently in the vein of not needing medical attention at mile 5. So I can say, in all honesty, that I ran today. And Saturday. And last Wednesday. Woo hoo!
And now I will talk about what I feel like talking about even though it's not necessarily associated with athletics. Although, if I can say that I am still here to run, and talk, and blog, then I guess it is somewhat associated.
Yes, I survived The Great Virginia Earthquake of 2011.
It was a charming (aka cool) Tuesday in August. I ran at 5:30 am with my friend Kelly and we chatted about how marvelous it was to start the day on such a high note (read: not dreading it later.)
Bridget was up and on the go as soon as I walked in the door at 6:33. We played. Ate. Watched the news, ran errands. Blah, blah, blah,...
Fast forward to 1:40something pm. We were in my walk in closet hanging clothes when I heard rumbling above us. As we live in an apartment building (on the 11th floor!!!!!) with a relatively high turnover, I assumed it was people moving furniture and bumping every corner on the way out. But then that same rumbling sound was reverberating down the walls. This is weird, I thought. I turned to B, who was looking at me like "WHAT THE HECK, MOM?!?" And then the ceiling, walls, and floor were shaking. B started crying. The shaking was up and down, side to side. I walked out of the closet to look out of the window and I didn't see the other buildings moving. I figured it was just us. I was mad!! How could they do construction on our building without telling us!?!? This is unacceptable, I thought. I grabbed B, grabbed my purse and keys, and stumbled into the hallway to see my neighbor, Jessie, who has an office on the 14th floor but who lives across the hall from us with her husband and son, walk out of the stairwell. She was in tears. Seeing her so visibly upset made me upset. I started crying. "What the F is going on?" I said. She was crying too hard to answer. We walked into her apartment where her husband and two year old son, still in pajamas from his nap which he was awoken from, were about to leave. We all left the building and retreated to the parking lot where there were maybe six people. "What now?!?" we were thinking and saying. Calls were not going through. I had access to Facebook and it confirmed that we had, indeed, experienced an earthquake. I couldn't reach the husband for an hour at which point he said he was waiting to get out of his parking garage.
Well, there was no way we were going back in anytime soon. Uh-uh! Several people came and went from the parking lot. We decided to walk into Old Town and hunker down in a restaurant. It was one story and we were too jilted to walk back into sixteen stories of potential rubble in the event of another earthquake.
So there we sat, eating and having a couple of beers until we figured we had to go home at some point. I saw recently that there was a 4.2 magnitude earthquake at 4:36pm. We didn't feel it. (Maybe it was the beer or chasing around toddlers that distracted us).
Anyhow, I am glad to report the DC area is relatively unharmed aside from the ceiling cracking at Union Station and some falling bricks from a parking garage in Reston, VA (both reported from NBC Washington.)
I still can't believe the east coast had an earthquake and I was in a high rise to experience it. I suppose tomorrow everyone will be back to work and life will go on...and in that vein, join my running group tomorrow night...Belle Haven Marina, 6:30 pm :)
