Dorothy, We're Not in Long Beach Anymore!

This week has been a wild week for Long Beach, and most of Southern California for that matter. This week has been a torrential downpour with winds up to 25 miles an hour, thunder and lightning, hail, and even tornados! Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore!

The tornados were a little more worrisome because us Californians don’t have basements. It doesn’t help that work on the 14th floor in downtown LB, so not only do we NOT have basements here, but I am on the HIGHEST FLOOR possible! Haha oh boy. Luckily, we were ok at work aside from the building swaying due to being on rollers (we DO have earthquakes here in CA). My friend’s boat, which is docked in the Huntington Harbor, was hit by the tornado. She was lucky as her boat had minimal damage. The boats around her seemed to be much less fortunate though.  Glenn has some incredible pictures here on his blog of the tornados and waterspouts!

The rain was so severe that we have gotten about 7-8 inches. To put that in perspective, we get an average of 2-5 inches of rain PER YEAR! We just got 8 inches in three days! There has been a ton of flooding near my house. We had to put sandbags in my front yard, and our alley was full of water 3ft deep.
Check out some of these pics that were taken near where I live!

This is down the street from me near Wilson High School:

Here is Wilson High, which is down the street from me and on one of my running routes:

These pictures were taken by Fat Tony who is a brilliant photographer.

Second Street, which is down the street from my house, was flooded pretty badly too.  2nd has all the restuarants, bars, and shops on it, and it's always a fun time and a quick bike ride :)

Here are some pictures taken by Samuel Lippke for the LB Post:

Here is the inside of Jamba Juice where my friend and I stopped that morning for oatmeal on the way to work (they have yummy oatmeal!).  When we were there it wasn't like this yet:

It's pretty wild!  Long Beach is an older city and the drainage system isn't as great as it could be.  Cal State Long Beach closed down for two days because they flooded so badly they were getting sinkholes!

It's been wacky weather for good ole sunny CA.  These back-to-back storms rolling in have not been conducive to my training schedule either!  I've only gotten out to run once this week.  I did make it to the gym one evening too, but it's definitely been hard to get my workouts in.

It's supposed to dry up tomorrow just in time for my 10-miler this weekend!  Since I don't like Gu, I'm going to test out the Clif Shot Bloks (flavor:  Strawberry) to see how I like those on a long run.

Surf City is in 16 days!!!

xoxo