Rain delay.

AS PREDICTED, it rained (is raining) today. It started this morning and it hasn't yet stopped! I was actually kind of excited about the prospect of running two...maybe even THREE...days in a row this week, but the weather has chosen not to cooperate. Therefore here I sit, having not run, and having only the prospect of stomach crunches awaiting me.

A short blog, yes, but there's little to say. I'll (hopefully) be back tomorrow with a running report...but there's rain in the forecast for the next two days. Who even KNOWS what will happen in my day-to-day life anymore?! Each day as it comes... :)

Man Oh Man

Not the best of days. It looks like I'll have even more time to run now since I no longer have a full-time job. As of next week, I'm a part-timer. Thank you, George W. Bush for ruining the economy. You're just the gift that keeps on giving!

So I was tired and down and miserable this afternoon...but I ran anyway, dammit! Because what's the use of being a runner if you don't run on days like today? Three miles in 35:38. I was a little off in my stride but who cares because I did it and I feel a lot better having done so.

By the way, my weekend was good, if not tiring, and I ate a lot of food that needs to be run off. So...more running tomorrow! (As long as it doesn't rain. Which, honestly, it probably will.)

That would be a no.

I will not be running this evening. I've hurt a muscle in my right leg and to run on it tonight would be...well, I was going to say "bad" but then I don't even know if I *could* run on it so I don't know what the appropriate word is.

Also, I'm half-sick. Again.

Also, my co-worker, who has been deathly ill with swine flu CAME INTO WORK TODAY. She said she was past the "24-hours fever-free" period (by all of 3 measly hours!) and didn't think it was half as big a deal as I did that she decided to show up today. Then again, she's all immune now, isn't she, so why the hell should she care? "I didn't sneeze at all while I was sick!" she said, as she sneezed for the four-hundredth time. Of course she sits right next to me.

I've been drowning myself in hand-sanitizer all day.

I have a headache, my leg hurts, and I need to pack. I give up. Chock this one up as being the worst (well, barring H1N1 complications...) running week of the training season.

I'll be back next week! And dammit, let's hope I'm back on track! :)

Another Day, Another Run

Sometimes my body just does not work as well as I'd like it to.

But let me back up.

Not all that long ago (like, last week or something) we, the fine citizens of Memphis, were finally freed from the oppression of 23 consecutive cloudy days, 19 of which were accompanied by rain. It was a happy day when the sun returned.

But TRAGICALLY the sun left us again 3 days ago and has refused to come back. And I really don't understand what the deal is. WHAT DID WE EVER DO TO YOU, SUN?

I'm hoping it's back before Thursday at least because that's the day I jet off to Austin, Texas for four days. A long weekend away from home means I'm going to miss my long run on Saturday. I'm actually a little worried about this, even though I know *logically* that I'll be fine, and if I run again tomorrow I'll be more than fine. But it's a mental thing. And it's not helped by the fact that last weekend was a "step-down" run.

With the weather being so crappy, I probably would have skipped today if I hadn't been so concerned about missing this weekend. So I went and...okay...WHAT THE HELL. It was one of those runs where I couldn't get a stride going and my limbs were flopping all over the place like I had no control over my motor functions and my time? 35:16. For 3 miles. Where did that even come from? And I was, like, *dying* by the end of it. And for real, my leg/ankle ache so much I don't even know if I'll run tomorrow. Basically, it's a good thing that the park was sparsely attended today on account of the weather because no one should ever witness another human being hurling their body around as stupidly as I did today.

I'm glad I ran, though. :) I'm also glad for the beer that's waiting for my in my fridge. Oh, I've earned it.

Oh, what a difference a year makes!

LAST YEAR Megan and I ran the Olive Twig 10k in Olive Branch, Mississippi. It's a good thing I have taken (some might say "wasted") the time to write down a sizeable portion of my life on the internet or else I would never have remembered that after that race, we Knocked for Change for Obama. Because we hadn't even had the election yet!! That's how long ago a year is!

My blog entry from last year is full of interesting tidbits...for instance...
a) It's rather terribly written! I got bored halfway through reading it last night so, er, a belated thank you to anyone who ever read the whole thing.
b) We were terrible runners! (And the race was 2 weeks LATER in October last year, so theoretically we should have been even further along in our half-marathon training.) We only ran 40 minutes before we stopped to walk.
c) I made a big deal about getting up at 5 am! Which now seems ridiculous because my alarm has been going off at 4:50 every Saturday morning for the past two months.
d) We didn't know what time the race started! So we showed up super-early and then shivered in my car in our shorts in the empty parking lot.
e) We both won medals! Because it was a sparsely-attended affair.

Back to the present...we've been upping our mileage every Saturday in my half-marathon group, but this week we were stepping it down. Apparently that's what you do...you go up and up and up and then you back down so you can recover. This week was a back-down week and we were scheduled to run 6.5 miles.

So Thursday night, I made the impromptu decision to see what was up with the Olive Branch race this year and lo and behold, only 15 people had signed up for the 10k (!). 'Hot damn!' I thought. 'I should sign up and see if I can bag another medal!'

And so instead of going to my training group this morning, I became runner #16. (Though about 50 had signed up for the 5k...typically the races I run have several hundred to a couple thousand participants. For this particular 10k, we simply ran the 5k course twice, and a 10k is 6.2 miles and thus not that different from what I would have run this morning anyway.)

But there were several people who did "day of" registering and signed up this morning. So I would say there were, oh, maybe 25 runners in all for the 10k.

And guess what? 24 of those people got medals. And who would be the person who did not get a medal?

Yeah.

I did fairly well. I ran it in 1:09:39, which was pretty good considering last year (when I came in second place), I ran it in 1:16:46. I ran the first half in 36:07 and I was a little confused by that since that would put me running slower than I do during the week after work. And that didn't seem right. But oh, look at that. The first time around the course, I was simply following the people in front of me. The second time around, when there were far fewer people, I was looking at the ground and saw the arrows that told me to turn around. Which were way before the point at which all of us had turned around the first time. Which meant I probably ran at least a tenth of a mile too far on my first lap.

So yeah, I crossed the finish line and most of the food was already gone and I had one of those great "character building" moments, standing in a small crowd of people and being the only person without a medal around her neck.

Also, last year they had fabulous door prizes. This year, there was nothing.

But oh well! I live and learn. Today's lesson: it's probably not worth driving across the state line to run a race by yourself on a Saturday morning if you're only in it for a medal. At least the race pack was good. :)

It's like night. Already.

I'm always tired after my lunch break. Way more tired than I am when I show up to work in the morning. On running days, while driving back from my apartment after lunch, I always think, 'HOW will I run today? How will I be able to do it when I'm SO TIRED?'

And then next thing I know, an hour has gone by and I'm no long tired.

Except today I didn't wake up as much as I had hoped. I was up late last night and my right leg is giving me some problems and all in all, it seemed like I might be looking at a bad run. But WAS IT?!

No! I took it slower than I usually do for a short run and I did just fine. Even my leg was alright, though I foresee a long night ahead of me bonding with an ice pack. Three miles in 34:27. I was pretty deep into The White Album, so I couldn't tell you what my splits were. I'm finding that regardless of how the first mile goes, it's always better than the second mile. And halfway through the second mile, I'm tired of running. But if I can push past the mile marker to start the third, I can make it to the end with no problems.

At any rate, I'm going to have to work on making sure I leave early enough to make it through my run before the sun goes down, on account of the shortening days. Ugh, I am so not looking forward to the time change...

Is it time to run again already?

So remember last Monday when I was all, "Ugh, I suck and I'll never again run on a Monday after a long run on Saturday!" Well, that didn't so much work out. How was I to know that an exciting Beatles lecture would be coming to town this Tuesday (tomorrow!) and that I'd have to go to that (obviously!) instead of run after work? So I had to go today. And go I did. For three jaunty miles I loped along. Alright, I only loped through two of them. I sort of plodded through the last one. 33:33 (11:08/11:13/11:12) which, hey, check out that consistency, but again with me going out too fast on the first mile! I always seem to do that the first short run after a long run. Eventually I'll get the hang of it. Now I have to go so I can shower before Part 2 of Ken Burns' National Parks documentary comes on. Such are my priorities. (These entries seem to be getting shorter, don't they? Strange how difficult it is to make the same monotonous routine seem interesting day in and day out... And still 10 weeks to go until the half! The mind boggles at how Susie and I wrote about Jake for all those months.)

This week in long runs...

Now you tell me what's up with that. Because last week I was DYING and this week I was going along like nobody's business. And it wasn't just me...last week the entire group looked near death half-way through our run and this week we were all, like, whatever. This running is strange business! It must have been more than just the humidity last week...

At any rate, 8.5 miles today! One hour, thirty-seven minutes, and fifty-one seconds. I am in minimal pain considering.

It was a very even run, in that at no point did I feel awful, nor at any point did I feel like I could go forever. It was one foot in front of the other the whole way.

Uhhh...I really have no other details to share. Except that there was a HUGE dead cockroach in my living room at 5 am this morning and I haven't seen a HUGE dead cockroach in my apartment in close to a year. But that has nothing to do with anything.

So I'm going to go start my laundry.

Back in the saddle.

Two days with no running. Two!! I realize I go two days without running every week, but I never go the two days that I went without this week, and especially not when going only one day without after Saturday's long run (if you can follow that sentence). It's wreaking havoc on me! I feel like I haven't run in ages and ages, even though "ages" is really only 48 hours. Or is it 72? It's too hard to do complicated math, like "counting days," after a run...

Not much to report about today's run, either. Except that I was AWESOME. Three miles in 33:55 (11:24/11:16/11:15). So is the slump over?! Er, considering this Saturday's run is going to be 8 miles (!!), I'm not counting my chickens just yet.

And since today marks one month since I started this blog, I will officially record my Month 1 total miles run as 47.5. I would like to think that next month's total will be a bit higher, but maybe not because I have a vacation and a reunion coming up in October and the running might take a hit there for a while. But who knows? We'll see!

Er, no running tonight.

The half-marathon schedule(s) finally came via electronic mail and it seems to me that the rousing speech we got last Saturday about increasing our training must have been geared towards the full marathoners. For I, myself, did not see anything on the schedule(s) that indicated that I was anything except ahead of schedule re my mileage. Ergo, no running tonight.

But I'll be back at it tomorrow. And I did cross-train this evening. I was quite proud of myself for doing so, too, because I forgot earlier and I thought, 'hmmm...maybe I'm too tired?' But I knew I wasn't really. So go me.

This weekend I started a mile-counter on the sidebar so that I when I need a motivational-boost, I can simply look over there and congratulate myself on the many, many miles I've run. But I wasn't sure how accurate the count was. So far, my pedometer has always been well over the distance calculated by Google on our long runs on Saturday. On Monday, in an attempt to figure out if it was calibrated correctly, I wore my pedometer on my two mile run, knowing the distance was exact around the track. What did my pedometer read at the end?

1.88 miles.

Huh. Granted, I was running quicker than usual and thus my stride was a tad longer, but there is a very real possibility that my calculations have been a tenth of a mile off for every two miles I've run on Saturdays.

In which case my tally could be as much as a mile short (!).

WHO KNOWS, my friends?! All I know is that I enjoyed the night off and that right now, I'm going to bed. Until tomorrow...