2024 Mesa Marathon

I ran my 27th full marathon in my 14th U.S. State on February 10, 2024 at the Mesa Marathon in Mesa, Arizona. My official finish time was 3:47:20, an 8:40 pace. It was 25 seconds slower than my marathon personal record, which I had achieved in 2017 at the Marine Corps Marathon.

The start of the race was weird. It started late. I never heard the national anthem. I didn’t even hear a countdown or a horn or gun to begin. People started moving and it was like “oh, we’re going now?”

I really enjoyed myself for about the first 10 miles, but then the rain picked back up. I got cold, my feet were soggy, and my legs tightened up. The crowd thinned out. I started to lose my focus mentally as I began to worry, and I fell out of the game emotionally. Fast people were passing me, and, without the crowd support, this was pulling me further and further out of my confidence zone, which I really needed to get myself through it. I stopped filming to conserve what energy I could. I turned the camera back on at the end.

My goal had been 3:45, which would have given me a 10-minute buffer on the qualifying standard (3:55) for what my age group (F 50-54) will be at the 2025 Boston Marathon. I have a 7:40 buffer with this time, which is still most likely adequate to secure my entry. Only once in recent history was a greater buffer needed, and that was in 2021 when they had reduced the field size by 10,000 participants due to the pandemic. So, in all probability, I will be able to celebrate my 50th Birthday at the Boston Marathon. My birthday is the week prior, and I really want to have a huge 50th birthday celebration with 30,000 runners on the streets of Boston. This is meant to be. It will almost make it ok that I missed out on my other BQ (because it got cancelled in 2020) if I can celebrate my 50th with my first run of the Boston Marathon.

This is my GoPro footage from the first half race and the finish.

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chimera – PRP mixtape 11 – February 2024

Since the Lunar New Year is tomorrow, I wanted to get this mixtape out first, as it represents the songs of my past couple months, and I will want to start a new one in the new lunar year. As always, this isn’t necessarily new music, although some of it may be. It’s just what I’ve been listening to recently. Let me know what you think. Subscribe to my page for more mixtapes, along with running and marathon stuff, cave diving, writing, quotes, and just bits of my personal journal. I can’t really have a proper blog because the stuff I share is all so unrelated to each other, so I just publish a window into my life, for anyone who wants to be a part of it. Welcome to my world. Stay a while.

A reminder that Spotify introduced a new feature in 2023 that allows listeners to exclude a playlist from their taste profile. It’s a great option for when you are listening to someone else’s stuff from their profile, or you have guests visiting, and you aren’t sure you want Spotify crafting playlists for you based upon their taste. If you want to explore my playlists and not have it affect your listening profile and song suggestions on Spotify, here’s how to use the handy “exclude from my taste profile” feature.

1 – Wisborg – Fall From Grace
2 – Love Ghost, Skold – Payback
3 – Rotersand – Silence
4 – Varials – Romance
5 – Necessary Response – Vapor
6 – Nostalghia, Tyler Bates, Joel J. Richard – Plastic Heart
7 – Cyberaktif – Nothing Stays
8 – Emilie Autumn – Swallow
9 – Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble Of Shadows – The HA! Squares
10 – Oceans of Slumber – Poem of Fire
11 – The Cure – Push
12 – Solitary Experiments – Stars
13 – Mindy Jackson, Colt Crevar, Josh Hagee – Desire
14 – Moonspell – Vampiria
15 – Lights Of Euphoria – True Life
16 – Kirlian Camera – Nightglory
17 – Living Things – Oxygen
18 – Ruined Conflict, Lady Wicked Goth – The Silent Ones
19 – Seabound – Scorch the Ground
20 – Rotersand, Evendorff – Grey – Light Grey
21 – Icon Of Coil – Shelter – Single Edit
22 – De/Vision – Who Am I
23 – Beborn Beton – Another World

Here are the other mixtapes: https://pinarosana.wordpress.com/category/mixtape/

Here is my profile on Spotify.

four to transform

I woke up at 4:44 and knew that I wasn’t going to get back to sleep, and so this day began.

The newlywed minister, wearing a bright green shirt, returned, with his new wife, and my Mom, to my condo in Sarasota, at 7am. The three of them had all been out dancing all night. I had been waiting up. The woman introduced herself to me. Her name was November. That was the dream right before I awoke.

I prepared the table, shuffled the deck, and drew a tarot card. It had been over a year since I had done so. I use the Salvador Dali deck. I pulled the 4 of swords.

There was certainly a theme emerging today in the number four. The four of swords represents stress, the need for recovery, and contemplation. The first things I saw in the card were the writing and the serpent. What that meant to me was that writing may allow me to transform myself and emerge from the state I have found myself in of late. It was also cautionary, that I should give great care to my words.

So be it. This was already the plan, but the card confirmed it.

There were a few other things:

The recurrence of the 4. This number represents foundation and grounding, as in the four seasons of the year or the four suits in the deck. It also has an association, for me, to death, although not in the literal sense. Tetraphobia is common among Asian cultures due to the similar sound of the word for four to the word for death. I am not afraid of the number, anymore, although I once was, as I have evolved to understand it as the transformation that death implies, rather than a literal end.
The green shirt on the minister in my dream. Green symbolizes life, healing, and renewal to me.
The idea that the minister was newlywed and had his new wife with him. A wedding symbolizes a literal death, generally, in my dreams. But this was after the wedding; there was no wedding in my dream. This was the rebirth. The new life, together.
The woman’s name, November, and the fact that my Mom, who was also born in November, was present. This one is a little harder for me to be sure of, but with November I associate primarily Scorpio, and secondarily Sagittarius. Scorpio’s symbol is the scorpion, which to me is representative of self-protection, the ability to thrive in a harsh environment, passion, and power. I don’t have any particular individual association with the centaur, but Sagittarius represents to me many good people I’ve known throughout my life, who played key roles during pivotal times for me. November is the 11th month, an angel number, and I have associated with that month the conquering of fear because of what I chose to do on November 11, 1998 (make my first skydive, to honor the Navy SEALs who my emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend had dishonored by lying and claiming to have been a SEAL.)

Those various symbols and associations may be irrelevant, but I can tie the theme together through the concept of transformation and regeneration, so I think that unification makes them relevant. Today is groundhog day. The groundhog did not see his shadow; they say this implies an early Spring. Spring would be associated with the color green, as in the color of the minister’s shirt, and also with rebirth.

Four to transform, so mote it be.