Hello,
I wanted to include some of Chris's journal that he kept while in China. I have atached some of his writings, hope you enjoy it.
August 6th 2008
Mary caught the shuttle over from the Olympic Village and we met on the track at BNU at 9:30am. It was great to finally see each other on the opposite side of the world. The workout was 4 x 150’s (yesterday she ran 5 x 100 on 1 min rest as a workout just to get her going). The first one she obviously, but smartly held back clocking an 17.9 with an 11.6 flying 100. She warmed up more on the 2nd, 17.3 (11.0) and was rolling on the next 2, both in 17.0 (10.9 flying 100). They were done on about 10 min rest and were very good, in fact she has never run faster. Her right knee and quad were bothering her a little so she got a rub down and iced afterward. The smog and air quality don’t appear to affect her running. You can’t feel it at all during the run, but afterward it is tougher to catch your breath. We then had lunch in the BNU cafeteria (the food is really pretty good and fellow Bearcat alumn David Payne joined us) and then played Mario on the Nintendo DS that Mary bought at a vending machine in San Francisco and then we took a nap. When we woke up we decided to head over to the practice gym to see what was going on. The only thing interesting that we could find was the boxing team practicing. They were working out in sweats with plastic shirts on underneath trying to cut weight. These guys were quick, and little. Rau’shee Warren, also from Cincinnati was training and will box in the 130 pound weight class, so Mary outweighs him by 8 pounds. We even saw a guy training who will box in the 106 pound and under weight class (I still wouldn’t want to box him). I think they told us the heaviest weight class at the Olympics is 201 pounds and under. We took a walk over to the track and saw Tyson Gay working out. We saw him do his last 120m and he ran it in 11.69. Not too bad, so it looks like his hammy that he pulled in the 200 at the Oly Trials is doing okay. We headed back to the dorms for dinner and then Mary caught her shuttle back to the Olympic Village.
August 7th 2008
Mary had a day off (she just did a little jog and stretch out) so I caught the shuttle over to the Olympic Village to check things out. Michael Phelps actually got on and sat across from me. I am guessing whoever is reading this will know who he is considering he won 5 swimming medals in 04 in Greece and is going after 8 golds this year. I got a picture to prove it also. It was pretty amazing that this area, which was probably about the size of UC’s campus, was created just to house the athlete’s for this one sporting event. It was said that the Chinese government had to displace 3 million people out of their homes for the Olympic facilities. So I checked out her dorm room and we ate in the cafeteria which sat well over a couple thousand people from all countries. We actually ran into Dayron Robles from Cuba, the 110 meter hurdles world record holder (12.88 I think) and Mary got a picture with him. They actually know each other from the European meets. After lunch, we caught a taxi over to the “Silk Market”. It was a bunch of congested shops, selling imitation goods for pretty cheap. I didn’t find anything that struck my fancy and neither did Mary. We then caught a taxi back to the Oly village and Mary was dropped off. I went walking up the street just to see what I could see. By the way, the sun isn’t something that I’ve seen yet. There is a fairly dense haze restricting the view, but I think that it has more to do with the weather conditions than the pollution which has been the talk of the media. It is so incredibly humid it almost feels like it is a rain forest type haze rather than smog. Anyway I then caught a taxi back to BNU for the night. Taxis are incredibly cheap. When we went to the silk market it was about a 30-45 minute drive and it cost about 8 bucks. Considering gas is $4/gallon right now in the U.S. how the heck are they making any money. When I got the taxi back to BNU (10-15min) it was less than $3.00. Maybe taxis are a public service, because I can’t figure out how it could be worth anyones time. The exchange rate by the way is $1.00 = 6.7 Yuan. Also the most popular powerade flavor is lemon grapefruit.
August 21st
Mary just wanted to hang out in the Village today and I had already used up my guest passes so I went to meet up with Uncle Scott. We took the Subway to a shopping center and Olympic Store. I have forgotten to mention how helpful the volunteers have been. Everywhere, there are volunteers dressed in blue in white shirts, and they speak decent English. They are on the streets, in the malls, at the sporting venues, in the hotel lobbies. I was so impressed with how helpful and how many of them there are. I figured they had to have an amazing number of volunteers so I asked one the other day. I first asked how much do you get paid to help out? And he said, “ no, no, I am a volunteer.” I then asked, do you know how many of you there are? The answer, one hundred thousand, yes 100,000. To think that we have a hard time getting our alumni to work our track meets and they have 100,000 volunteers for the Olympics, and remember they speak a decent amount of English. To me it spoke to the tremendous amount of pride they have for their country and their desire to help China run a great Olympic Games that the world will be impressed by. It seems so contrary to the things we hear about the suppressive communist government, the censorship, and unfair justice system. We have a hard time just getting people to vote. The people here seem very happy and things are not what I expected. From what I have seen people have freedom in religion, and where they live, and the jobs they work. The skies have been clear for the last week and I feel very safe walking around. They do drive crazy here though! It makes New York look calm compared to this chaos. Anyway, I finally got the word from Mary that she would be leading off the relay on both days for the prelim tomorrow and the final the next day. I made it back to BNU to watch the meet. It was such an up and down day. First the USA swept the men’s 400m dash with Merritt, Wariner, and Neville, but then both the men’s and the women’s 4x100 relay teams dropped the baton in the prelims failing to advance to the final. Next, David Payne, friend and former teammate at UC came up big in the 110m hurdle final. He captured the silver medal winning UC’s first ever Olympic Medal in track and field. Hopefully Mary will be the 2nd.
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