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noble-pro · 4 years

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Incredible Sights and 5500+m of elevation in Greece at the Olympus Ultra

Leaving at 0230 to drive to Gatwick for a 0555 flight was perfect preparation for race day. The race started at 0200BST (0400 local). I landed around midday to be greeted by Dimitrios. I love Dimitrios- he said I looked 32years old! The journey from Thessaloniki to Litochoro took just over an hour. I could watch Mount Olympus rising before me. The village was red tiles and white washed walls. The temperature was 35 °C. I could see the Aegean ocean in the distance. It was all glorious. Just the matter of a small run to do! The distance of which has grown since I registered. It was 65 km but I have since learnt it’s 71 km with 5500+m of elevation. I spent the afternoon walking up to see the valley of the Mountain of the Gods. Blackout blinds turned out to be a winning formula as my room mate (Katie Kaars Sijpesteijn) and I slept in until 0800. I had a small jog before a greek breakfast awaited. Lots of yoghurt, cakes and delicacies. Not wanting to underestimate the race I had an easy day. Up at 0230, flapjack and coffee, bus at 0315 and start 0400. Not many starters- 65. The main event was definitely the marathon as it was part of the Skyrunning series. I did not enter the marathon knowing my skill set was not best placed to tackle such Skyrunning courses which is defined as ‘running in the mountains above 2,000m altitude where the climbing difficulty does not exceed II° grade and the incline is over 30%’. Oh how I laugh now! I should have done the marathon. It was far more runnable by all accounts. I spent 14hrs 9mins working on my weaknesses. The first 5km or so was up a road from Dion, past the archeological site and so I made sure I started conservatively. These pictures were taken the day after the race when Katie and I headed out for some sight seeing. They are from the ancient city of Dion dating from 5th century BC. In the Hellenistic period (which covers the period of Mediterranean history between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire as signified by the Battle of Actium in 31 BC and the conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt the following year). Dion became the religious center of Macedonia, gaining importance and entirely developing into a city. Zeus, the King of Gods, was worshipped here, and the Olympic games were held in honour of Zeus and the Muses, goddesses. Alexander the Great sacrificed to Zeus in Dion before he began his campaign against the Persians. Then the Romans arrived, in 169BC and added to it. Just amazing! In 1806, Dion was rediscovered by the English explorer William Leake and the site is still under excavation. Anyway back to the boring bit….. The course then hit the trail from Koromilia to Petrostrough which was steep single track and rocky but runnable on and off. There was a small water fountain “Itamos” next to the path which provided lovely cold spring water. We climbed from about 300m to just 1900-something-m in 10km. After an hour the poles came out and pretty much stayed out for all day. The trail ran uphill in varying angles of slopes, through all sorts of vegetation, with the sound of the river coming from the deep ravine of the Orlias gorge below. The route guide remarked…’the dense vegetation creates the feeling that a little further it is lost but that does not happen‘. This was true I often felt I was cutting my own trail but never felt lost as such. At Koromilia there was a refuge which held an aid station. It was about this time I was waiting for the sunrise but typically it was slightly cloudy so I missed out but the views were immense down to the ocean. The track at its beginning was hardly visible it did exist and too us up to a wooded ridge before passing through a large plateau lying in a dense beech forest. I seem to remember an infinite about of pine cones on the floor throughout the whole course. They conveniently acted like roller skates under my feet which was useful until I was fed up of slipping over on them!

Eventually the pine trees with the white trunk emerged and these grow at high altitudes so I knew I was nearing the top, 1940m at Petrostrouga . The path then descended – well I got have slid down on my arse the whole way if it wasn’t for the dense pine trees. Again we headed back up which took us up to a ridge line with sheer drops on both sides. I couldn’t look down so missed on the views. I had to just keep moving forward. Heights are my most favourite thing! The descent was steep shale and I actually enjoyed skidding down. I knew now it was just one more up and down. The journey up to 2917m Mount Olympus was so long but so beautiful. We crossed snow fields, colourful wildflower meadows and wild horses. The mountain itself has many peaks and felt like a horse-shoe shape as I climbed up through the centre of it. The descent was again comprised of loose shale before reaching more boulders and rocky type terrain and finally technical forest paths with roots and rocks. We wound our way down from 2900 to 300m over about 16hrs and it took me hours- about 4 I think! I was so lame at the descent! We past the most glorious springs of the river Enipeas which looked to tempting but on reaching the water my legs were not terribly co-operative at flexing to let me get to it. The was still 400m of climbing to do in the last 10km and this was in the form of steps- 840 to be precise. It was a tough finish on sore legs. To my memory there was about 10km in total of runnable trails. The course truly tested me in all aspects of my trail running weaknesses- hiking, descending and ridge-line crossing with confidence. I have to say it was a great days training, I nailed my nutrition and I got no blisters or felt any injuries returning, but a slightly empty finish as it was not a very competitive field. I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Greece and exploring these new trails but the event to do was probably the marathon distance for that real race experience. I finished in 14hrs 9mins. I was first women and 8th overall. Thank you to the Olympus Marathon race organisers for having me and for hosting such a well organised weekend. Result Here Read the full article

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thunderheadfred · 7 years

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Red Streak: Growing Pains

I’m not sure where this scene will even wind up in the final narrative, but I suddenly, desperately wanted to share this. Why? I don’t have the slightest idea. Lack of emotional regulation, probably. *shrugs*

Other explanations:

it’s been burning a hole in both my hard-drive and my soul

to reassure you the story is far from abandoned, even if I’m currently obsessing over Mordin?

to reassure myself that this crazy AU plot and its associated characters have value?

to give you an update even though there’s been no chapter this month???

This was one of the inception moments for the fic - it’ll probably never end up in the story at all, maybe it just matters as a jumping-off point for me? Mysteries.

I wrote this the first week I conceptualized Red Streak, way back in my other life, before I sold my soul to this fandom. I don’t think it’s the first thing I wrote for it, but if it isn’t, it’s very, very close. (ETA: please keep that in mind, because the writing in this drabble is ahaaaa... rough. Happy to say I’ve improved much since then)

Minor spoilers (regarding Hannah, also Jane’s BFF) but nothing that hasn’t been hinted at very obliquely already.

3,100 words, approximately, and enough emotion that I abandoned my entire life to write this goddamn epic piece of space trash after this... *mumbling intensifies*

Albacus Mindoir Colony April 4, 2169 AD - 0230 hours

Albacus heard the tell-tale bumping and heaving of a poorly inebriated body as it fumbled blindly through the access vents above the warehouse, and he sighed quietly through his mandibles. Jane was even later getting back than he had anticipated, and he had come to expect a certain level of tardiness from her in recent weeks.

The sloppy noise of her scuffling in the ceiling was sure sign that her system was full of some addlebrained teenager poison.

After the mid-season harvest festival last month, he had caught Jane and a half-dozen barely respectable farmer children trying to abscond with some of his storage barrels in the middle of the night. Later, Jane confessed that they had hoped to establish a crude distillery in the office of the old abandoned copper mine. Spirits only knew what they’d been plotting to brew using last year’s corn and rice, but Albacus had hoped that bringing down the underage speakeasy and scaring most of them half out of their minds in the process would have put an end to it. No such luck, apparently.

In the shadowy darkness of the warehouse’s back corner, a ceiling panel wiggled tentatively before swinging open with a steely clap. He could hear his daughter feebly trying to shush the rusty old hinge as it swung free and echoed through the room, but her efforts were in vain. One of her feet poked out, a scuffed high heel dangling precariously from her toe. The impractical footwear gave a few warning tugs before slipping off completely, bouncing down across a stack of boxes and finally meeting the floor with an embarrassing plastic splat.

Really, he would be fully justified to confine her to quarters just for the embarrassing sloppiness of this attempt at covert infiltration.

Her other leg emerged from the access panel and fished for unsteady purchase, then Jane slid out of the vent completely, clinging like an overgrown pyjak to a shelf stocked with decades-old transport batteries and power converters.

Jane had been climbing through storerooms since her mother’s time and had never quite kicked the habit, though she was getting much too tall for it now. The too-short, too-tight, too-little-of-everything dress she was wearing only complicated her descent. In all his life, he had never seen her dressed like this, had never guessed her capable of such obvious, deliberate underage promiscuity.

Had he finally let himself fall victim to the short-sighted idealism of a parent?

No, he decided. This wasn’t his Jane; all of this was recent, and hopefully impermanent.

He forced himself to wait until both of her feet were securely on solid ground before spooking her. She tiptoed over to her fallen shoe, and just as she was bending over to retrieve it, he finally growled, loud enough that she squealed in panic and let fly the only weapon at her disposal.

He caught the shoe an instant before it struck him square between the eyes, forced to admit that her aim was true, even in the state she was in.

“Pari!? Holy shitballs!”

Albacus let the curse go unremarked upon, though he filed it away for later. Plenty of time for that, once the first few rounds of discipline had softened her resolve. He turned her cheap plastic shoe over in his hand and saw that a clearance sticker had been clumsily ripped from the sole. The glossy material was muddy all over, and littered with telling green smudges. A cheap, recent acquisition then, and not a treasured one. Good.

“How was the glider maintenance? I trust Mr. Cortez is coming along well with his project?”

He asked the question knowing it would force her into some lie or other. The real question was how long she would take to crack.

“Yeah, the glider. It was… cool. We decided to paint it black.”

A likely enough story, given that Jane and her friend had been working on that glider together for the better part of the season, but that had not been the only thing his girl had done that night. Not in that outfit.

The Cortez family’s youngest boy was a good kid, one of the few on the colony. He had been a reliable assistant around the spaceport, a natural at taking stock orders and processing the dense inventory. Plus, he was a far better student than Jane - she would have flunked out of introductory calculus if he hadn’t come to her rescue. Yes, Cortez would have made an infinitely preferable match for her poorly-conceived attempts at sexual deviance. Unfortunately for Albacus’ peace of mind, Cortez was hardly the type to chase after girls.

Why did Jane have to reduce herself to the dregs instead - the unworthy bullies who sat glowering at her from the shadows?

Because she was a teenager, he reminded himself patronizingly. A lonely one. Thanks to you.

When she failed to elaborate, Albacus prompted her unkindly to continue.

“After you left Mr. Cortez? What happened then?”

This was unfamiliar territory. Though he was perfectly comfortable disciplining Jane when necessary, his trusted methods had yet to amputate the rebellious streak that had recently started festering in her.

In the past, even when she had acted foolishly, or made the sorts of poor choices that children often did, it was rare that she failed to see the error of her ways, and even rarer for her to continue on a bad path once she knew it was wrong. Whether it was a dangerous weapon misfire or a poorly handled customer, she had always been contrite before, eager for forgiveness, ready to try harder.

He could scarcely bear to watch her slip into angry, libidinous behavior now. Not out of boredom. Not out of loneliness. She was so much worthier than that.

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” she said with barely contained snottiness. “I’m fifteen next week. Once I’m the age of majority, I’ll only have to answer to myself.”

Ah. With her fifteenth birthday looming, he had long suspected they might be forced into an awkward conversation about turian coming-of-age rituals - and the fact that most of them were meaningless in the face of his exile. It did not please him to have to begin tiptoeing over that delicate minefield early.

“The age of majority? I see. Maybe next week you will wake up a full-grown tarin. At this moment, you remain fourteen years old, and still a human being.”

She opened her mouth to complain, but he silenced her - holding up her ugly little shoe, stiletto drawn like a threatening finger. He pointed to a crate (one half gross order of flame-retardant hull sheeting) and waited silently until she submitted. She was quite a sight: hobbling peg-legged to the crate on one clicking heel, finally plopping down with a tiny, rebellious hiss.

Whomever she had been tousling with had left her hair all lopsided, and her dress was riding up over a pair of ripped stockings. The idea she may have been intoxicated or somehow unwilling during those fumblings made his every parental instinct flair into a blood-rage of protectiveness. She was still woozy with the unknown drug, her sentences streaming together and her movements uncoordinated.

“Are you injured in any way?”

She shook her head, but didn’t look entirely sure of herself either.

“Did you give your consent and use appropriate protection?”

“No.”

When he shot her a look so forceful that it could have decapitated a regenerating krogan battlemaster, she shifted uncomfortably and then corrected herself.

“I mean, I didn’t need to. I - I left.”

“Jane, putting yourself willingly into that kind of situation… this is unacceptable behavior.”

“I’m old enough to be with anyone I want!”

“You are coming into your own, Jane. I won’t... disrespect you any further by pretending as though you are not.”

As if he were testing a whip, he slapped the heel of her shoe against his open palm before continuing. He appreciated the guilty height of her flinch.

“It may surprise my fool child to learn this, but I understand the complications inherent in puberty - in fact, I understand them a far sight better than you do. I am not afraid of you exploring the urges that come naturally to young people - or at least I was not, until you started behaving like my own personal morumplacus. All I ask is that you stop lying to me, and stop associating with lowlifes who have no respect for you.”

“They’re not lowlifes! They’re my friends!”

“If that is true, then why have I yet to meet a single one of them?”

Jane refused to answer, but the red glow that bloomed across her face said more than enough.

“As I thought. Why waste your time with anyone who takes advantage or makes you feel ashamed?”

“Maybe I should be ashamed! I’m a total freak!”

He held fast, her shoe squeaking under the renewed pressure of his grip. He would lose the last scrap of authority he wielded, if he let her see how deeply those words had cut.

Jane wasn’t finished with her self-hating tirade, not by a long shot.

“What the hell am I, anyway? I don’t belong here.”

“What you are is my fool child. But you have one thing right: you do not belong here at all. At the moment, you belong in your bed. Asleep.”

“Your child? I’m not yours at all! How could I be? When I was a kid, I thought it didn’t matter, as long as we loved each other. Hell, you act like it’s no big deal, but that’s not how the galaxy works, is it?!”

She had never armed such a tone against him in her life.

“Jane-”

“NO! I’m not stupid! Ever since I was little, I thought I could be just like you. I thought maybe if I worked hard enough and showed I was good enough I could go to the Military Academy on Palaven and fix everything. I could take back your honor, or win a great battle in your name, or found a colony for you or something crazy like that, and the whole war would be forgiven and we’d be family for real.”

His heart stopped. She had always shown an interest in turian language, tactics, martial forms, whatever he taught her. Still, he had never once allowed himself to slip into the sentimental dream that Jane might want an official position in his family. The realization that she did left him so raw that his response was far more brutalizing than it had any right to be.

“Impossible. You would have no place.”

“I know! I’m not a stupid kid anymore. I’m just some human orphan, I can never be your heir, or your real mahir - or - whatever. I can’t even wear your familia notas.”

“Listen to me, that is not -”

“SHUT UP! I can’t stand it anymore! I know I’ll never be good enough! I don’t know why you even waste your time with a stupid human freak like me!”

She balled her hands against the sides of her head and squeezed her eyes shut as if willing him to vanish into a black hole. He lacked the fortitude to be angry; her self-rejection left him too wounded, shamed him to the core.

“So… if I couldn’t be a turian, then I thought maybe I should join the Alliance, and be a some tough-ass Marine like Mom was. Steve is the only other person on this worthless colony who wants to join up, and for a while it seemed like it might be an okay plan, as long as we stuck together. But what if they take him and not me? What if I don’t act human enough - or they say I’m the kid of a traitor?”

The stream of self-annihilation droned on with increasingly meaningless angst.

“It’s like I don’t have any parents at all - Everyone here hates me - I don’t belong anywhere - What good am I - Why was I even born?”

Her arms fell from the sides of her head and fisted in the hem of her skirt. The material there had started to fray, and she picked stubbornly at the threads.

“So… then… I figured Ripper has a cousin in the Blue Suns, and he acted like it was cool that I knew all this turian warrior stuff. The mercs don’t care - they’ll take anybody. He said if I was a merc, it wouldn’t matter if I thought I was a turian, or a batarian, or even a wild varren, as long as I could kick ass and blow things up. Nobody would care that I was a worthless bastard, or that my mom was just some alien-loving whore-”

“JANE!”

His voice ripped through the storeroom like a concussive grenade, the anger and shock of it was so explosive that he was sure there would be shrapnel embedded in the walls come morning. Jane stiffened for a brief moment, and then she quailed in deep crimson shame.

He barked: “Never repeat such hideous filth about your mother. Or yourself. Ever. Do you honestly believe a single word of that to be true?”

Too stricken to make a sound, she just sank further into the crate and shook her head. After a long fight with herself, her shoulders heaved and she pathetically began to cry.

In the face of her infantile trembling, he relaxed by degrees, then finally gathered up his wits and went to comfort her. He tossed aside her garbage-pile shoe and pulled up another crate (twelve dozen boxes of expired thermal clips ready for recycling.)

Gently mustering the last exhausted, patronizing supply of fatherliness he had, he surrounded one of her small shaking hands with both of his own.

“Jane, enough of this. Master yourself. Never allow jealous, bloodthirsty vermin to make you feel ashamed to be Hannah Shepard’s daughter. Or mine.”

In a tiny voice, she mumbled: “I never should have listened to Ripper anyway. He’s not even that good of a shot.”

He laughed bitterly, without mercy.

“As for him, if you honestly believe you can run off to join the Blue Suns without my catching up with you, then by all means, get on the next shuttle to Omega.

“Just remember: if you ever discharge a weapon without carefully considering the honor behind each bullet, I will personally break every one of your fingers and make sure you can never hold a gun again.”

He raised her hand to his mouth and gave it a human-like kiss, emulating the ridiculous princes in the vids she had watched over and over again as a child. A prince who wouldn’t hesitate to break every bone in her body if she chose to behave like a thug.

“I hate the gangs,” she spat drunkenly, voice full of simple rage, her earlier rebellion instantly forgotten.

Jane had always been transparently pure-hearted. No simple boy with a merc cousin was ever going to change that.

“Mercs are sloppy idiots with no ideals, and you are not that.”

She nodded and swallowed thickly with guilt. Thank the spirits, he finally had his girl back.

“If you keep your head down until your birthday and convince me that you’re ready to start being responsible again, we’ll commence advanced bellixiatum. I can teach you anything you want to know about being a fearsome and honorable combatant, but only if you forget about these predatory wannabes and start acting like my mahir again.”

“Pari…” She was whispering so quietly that he almost didn’t hear. “I’m sorry for bringing up the turian stuff. I know I have no right.”

He sighed and squeezed her small, pink hand.

He found himself wondering, and hardly for the first time, just how the two of them had gotten to this place. The last heir of Regidonis, living a life of lonely obscurity on a human farming colony and raising a stubbornly ferocious child so alien that she couldn’t even share his meals.

His life was so perpendicular to the one he had been groomed for since birth that he occasionally felt impaled by the hard, spare destitution of their daily reality. If he dwelled on the things he had lost - the Tenefalx, the Blackwatch, even a future flirtation with Primacy - it could nearly get the better of him. Most haunting of all was the constant, enduring nightmare: finding Hannah alone on the floor, cold and unprotected. Losing her forever, before ever getting the chance to tell her…

Then he would remind himself that despite everything, he was hardly alone. For all that he had dearly paid, he had won something remarkable. He had his diume.

He would remember how it felt to hold a sleeping child in his arms for the first time. Back when she was still a terrified wreck, as they clung together through those early, tragic nights. Humming broken old melodies against her forehead until her nightmares dissolved. When he had first begun to consider her his own.

How could he hate this life, when he thought about the way his daughter’s lopsided smile never quite stretched across her face the same way twice?

“Fool child,” he said, pronouncing the words more meaningfully than usual. “Have I ever told you what diume means?”

Her head shook a silent no.

“Look at me.”

She didn’t budge. He pulled her hand to the dark red marks on his face, encouraging her fingers to follow the ancient familia notas of the Regidonis clan, a once proud symbol that that no longer meant anything at all.

“My joy.”

She finally met his gaze, and the dark wet smear of her eye makeup started to stream down her cheeks.

“Diume, exempting these few weeks of temporary insanity, you have made me proud with your every breath. If I could rearrange the stars and allow you to become a true Regidonis Gloranumis, I would.

“But this…” he jostled her hand as it traced his notas, “Is no longer mine to give. You and I must find something else, something all our own.”

He wiped the tears and filth from her face, then slowly touched his crest against her forehead.

“Never doubt that I love you. I love you as surely and completely as if you were my natural child. I may not be able to give you my place in the Hierarchy, but we can make our own way, somehow.”

“I love you too, Pari.” Her voice was ragged with a dozen unvoiced emotions, and he curled both hands around the back of her head and held onto her like something precious.

Then she burped quietly, the alcohol rancid on her breath.

“You’re confined to quarters for a month.”

“I know…”

#mass effect #red streak #femshep #turian oc #drabble #Fred writes

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medproish · 6 years

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Firefighters work to extinguish the fire in a 24-storey building used by squatters that later collapsed in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the largest city in Latin America

A 24-storey building used by squatters in the center of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, collapsed early Tuesday after a blaze that tore through the structure, leaving at least three missing.

Survivors described waking in the night to find themselves surrounded by flames and escaping with their children before the tower turned to rubble.

Scores of homeless families were occupying the building, according to officials. However, despite the ferocity of the blaze, only one person was listed as almost certainly dead.

“There are some missing, approximately three, with one very likely a fatality,” Ricardo Peixoto, a firefighters’ commander, told AFP. “We don’t know how many people were in the building so we don’t know whether we’ll find more victims in the ruins.”

So far, 250 people who’d been living in the building have been registered after the blaze, city security official Jose Roberto said.

The fire began overnight and spread rapidly, turning the building into an inferno before it fell down.

Dramatic pictures tweeted by the fire service showed flames shooting up the sides of the whole tower, moments before it was reduced to a heap of smoking ruins. An adjacent church was also damaged.

“We got the call at around 1:30 am (0230 GMT) and we came at once, a few minutes later, and about five floors of the building were on fire,” Peixoto said. “Fifteen or 20 minutes later the building fell.”

Fifty-seven vehicles and 160 firefighters were deployed to the scene, the department said.

– Frantic escape –

Sao Paulo is Brazil’s financial capital and the most populous city in Latin America, but suffers huge economic inequality.

Poor families often squat in disused buildings or set up tents and shacks on vacant land, sometimes next to wealthy areas.

President Michel Temer, who is Brazil’s most unpopular leader on record, with single-digit approval ratings, got a hostile reception when he briefly visited the scene.

“We want housing!” a crowd chanted.

One survivor, 26-year-old Henrique, said he managed to get out from the third floor with his girlfriend and their dog.

“We woke and the building was already on fire,” he said. “We struggle so much and now we’ve lost everything.”

Another man, Jose Antonio, described the frantic escape from the sixth floor, where he lived with his wife, three children and sister-in-law.

“I was unsure if my son had taken my youngest daughter,” Antonio, 48, told AFP. “There was still time to go back so I returned, I looked around, I patted the mattresses. There wasn’t time to take anything. I patted the mattresses, saw no one was at home anymore, then I went down behind them shouting their names to see if they had gone down.”

Sao Paulo state Governor Marcio Franca said “it was a tragedy waiting to happen…. This building didn’t have even the minimum conditions for habitation. The state should not have allowed it to be occupied.”

From a safety point of view, the building was a ticking bomb, Peixoto said.

“There was no security, there were not adequate electrical installations, there were no safe staircases, there were piles of rubbish — there was everything you need to start a major fire,” he said.

Firefighters work to extinguish the fire in a 24-storey building used by squatters that later collapsed in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the largest city in Latin America

Sao Paulo suffers from huge inequality, and poor families often squat in disused buildings such as this one which caught fire and collapsed, likely leaving one person dead

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