Israel photo montage: These last two weeks
Bat Yam Festival
[above] A short drive south from Tel Aviv was a festival in Bat Yam that featured a strange traveling act. They hooked half a dozen women to a huge crane and then rotated the crane in circles while the girls threw confetti and fireworks. Beautiful and strange all at once.
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This is how I roll with the Bears in Tel Aviv
I have a border-line unhealthy love affair with the Chicago Bears. I say unhealthy because when the games are at my finger tips, my mood can run hot and cold. I could be excited or I could brush it off knowing that I’ll see them the next week. When I know I’m just a remote control click away from them on any given football season Sunday, I’m calm as a honey bee.
When I can’t see them so easily (like when I’m half way around the world), my desire to watch them becomes so great that I start to feel little explosions of anxiety inside of me at the thought of missing a game.
Last weekend was the Bears’ opening game against Indie. Because of the time difference, it showed here on ESPN live at 3am and replayed again at 9pm the next day. Even though it was a re-run, I opted for the next night rationalizing that everyone would be sleeping back in the states and I could avoid knowing the score. It was nice to watch the opening game although it wasn’t quite the same without it being live.
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Finally! My marathon time is uploaded!
One of the cool things about the Nike marathon are the post-race graphics!
Click on the picture to take you to my official race information. I was so close to meeting my goal of running 10k under 60 minutes. According to the race chip, I did it in 1 hr 3 minutes. Next time I’ll get it under 1 hour!
The personal graph of: ג’יימי גיבס
Don’t forget to click on the video link labeled “Video Yarkon park (finish right)“. I’ll be on the left hand side of the screen wearing a black hat running straight at you with very pasty white legs. 
As you can see, my Chicago flag had fallen off by then.
UPDATE:
Statistics from the Tel Aviv marathon:
- I finished in 4,364th place (out of 9,745 runners).
- 55% of the runners ran slower than me.
- 80% of the runners were male.
- The oldest person was 75 years old.
- 15 different countries were represented in Tel Aviv.
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[Video] Nike Human Race 10k Marathon in Tel Aviv, Israel
Featuring: Jami “boom boom” Gibbs! (Ms. Babble)
Enjoy!
[video]
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Nike Human Race 10k Tel Aviv, Check!
Just a quick note to say I’ve finished the race and it was really fantastic. My goal was to finish in under 60 minutes but (by my watch) I did it in 65 minutes. Not too shabby for an “old” lady like me. I’m still waiting for Nike to upload my official time via a race chip everyone wore in one of their shoes.
Right now it’s midnight Tel Aviv time and I’m beat. More tomorrow….
UPDATE: The day after the race, Monday 9/1/08 3:30 Tel Aviv
I woke up eager to get my official score and see Tel Aviv pictures online. Since most of my documentation of the race is on E’s video recorder, I don’t have any still pictures to post here yet. I thought I could get the race times and local pictures of the Tel Aviv race all at once. Unfortunately, the Israel Nike Human Run website doesn’t appear to have been updated with anything new.
There is a Nike Human Race world wide results website but it’s suspiciously missing Tel Aviv. A quick search of my name reveals nothing.
An article was just published here in Israel explaining the confusion. Apparently, Tel Aviv was a last minute entry and there was a problem with everything being in Hebrew. I’m guessing that maybe they were having issues with the runners names who were all registered in the local language. If you recall, even I had to write my name in Hebrew when I registered for the race. Hebrew is a tricky language for computers to handle because it’s written from right-to-left. There are other languages other than English listed on the world results website, (like the city of Taipai for example) but it’s not a right-to-left language and thus can be displayed without any tricky software downloads.
Long story short, the article said that they’ll list the times from the Tel Aviv marathon on the Nike Israel website (not the world wide one). I’m assuming the name search will be in Hebrew so I’ll post the spelling of my name here for people to cut-and-paste if they’d like to check the site themselves once it’s up and running:
First name: ג’יימי
Last name: גיבס
(Just as I was saying that the Nike Website can’t handle right-to-left language, I see my blog’s publishing platform can’t handle it either, thus all the ???’s above where I wrote my name in Hebrew. I’m trying to fix it now.)
UPDATE: 5:17 PM Tel Aviv
So, I’ve managed to get the Hebrew characters working…. only now there’s all those annoying question marks all over the page. grrrr…..
UPDATE: Tuesday, 9/2/08 at 8:55am Tel Aviv
Since my publishing platform isn’t in a rush to help me fix all those question marks that are now displaying on my old posts, I went ahead and manually removed them from this post. It was difficult to read otherwise and I wanted to add a photo from the race for everyone to see.
Still no race times updated on the Israel marathon site.
Where’s Ms. Babble? Oh! There I am!
And don’t forget to check out the video of the marathon here featuring me!
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Ms. Babble on 
Aunt Susan on 
