I’m beginning to love the following MO:
– Leave the office a bit after lunch.
– Stop on Jamestown, quick run, and a quick soak in the ocean
– Head to the airport with hair somewhat salty. Strangely, swimming in the ocean up here is pretty odor-nullifying, as the water’s clean and cold. I do hit the anti-perspirant stick after I dry off.
14 days down. I will confess that I walked the first K today, but it was a flat K – I ran most of the hills.
And I feel GREAT tonite.
So, I eaked out another one. Tough, tough today.
But the streak is intact.
Need to sleep tonite.
So, the house is painted (At long last), and I managed to squeeze in two runs this weekend. Nothing special about either one, other than they got done.
Saturday’s was pre-supper, post painting. I headed down to River Road, got to 1.5 out and was feeling pretty good, so decided to leg it out to the 4 mile turn around. Mistake. Heading back up the hill from the river didn’t hurt so much as just suck the life out of me. So, I walked it, and finished up with 3.3 miles of running on the day.
Today, I waited until after the boys were down for the evening, and did the Flanders road loop. Three+ miles, and it felt pretty good. I walked one really steep downhill section, ’cause I didn’t want to pound the joints, and the last mile ended up being about 8:15, which rocks.
Next week is going to be tough – one week before an in-water install, and I’m traveling for part of it. But, I think I can get it done. According to Ali, it’s only 21 days to establish a habit.
The other folks still in the Nike+ challenge are tearing stuff up – both are about 10 miles ahead of me for the month, which completely rocks, and shows me what I could be doing if I were really dedicated and 15 lbs lighter.
Good eating starts next week (HA!)
So, I almost decided to punt Augustathon today. Busy, busy at work, gnasty weather, and general malaise and I almost punted.
But, Missy convinced me to head out tonight. Man, it was way too cold for an August evening. Chilly and wet. So, it turns out that my nike+ set is about 10% short, which is what I’ve been guessing for a while.
But, the run got done.
In other news, there’s a phenomenal parody on the period between the end of the new Harry Potter book and its epilogue. Good stuff.
Eight days of Augustathon down, a few more to go.
I’ll be honest – I was about to give up on Augustathon after Saturday’s run. Man, was that miserable. It was hot, it was wet, it hurt, and I was slow. I was cranky, and really, really wanted to throw in the towel.
Since Sunday, though, running’s been the bee’s knees (pronounced with a hard ‘k’ – “the buh-eez kuh-neez”). Sunday’s run was great.
Monday’s run was great – we headed down to check out a destroyer that had just pulled into the pier. Always nice to see a fighting ship of the line and happy sailors coming down the gangway for a little bit of liberty. Great run – really, really sticky but not too hot.
Tuesday’s run was cut slightly short (Still got my 3 miles!) on account of the discovery of a previously unidentified patch of blackberries next to the sidewalk. We spotted them on the way out. Amazingly, I managed to fight off the urge to stop and gorge myself until we were passing them on the way back. Klink kept going – said he would have been dead in the water if he’d stopped. I ate them until my fingertips turned purple. The last 1/4 mile I had to do wasn’t fun – I could taste berries and coffee trying to come back up as I pushed up the hill. But it was worth it.
Yesterday – same old, same old. HA! On Monday, we took Missy’s ma to a lobster shack in Noank. In passing, Missy mentioned how she sometimes forgets how nice it is to have the water as close to the house as it is. Me – not a chance for taking it for granted. Probably has something to do with spending a decent portion of my early 20’s locked in a steel tube staring at the sea and sun but not being able to feel anything but the skins of poor naughas and nuclear-powered air conditioning. No, Wednesday was another of what’s probably my favorite run – a loop from Ft. Weatherill on Jamestown. The wx was miserable – hot, wet, and still. But the roads are enjoyable, there’s enough of a hill to make it challenging, and a dip in the cove at the end of a hot run makes everything worthwhile.
Oh, and last night I got on the bike after the kids were in bed. Yep, got on the singlespeed and rode downtown to the pub for a couple of barley pops and Trivia night. On the way back home, I made it up Cow Hill without going into distress, which puts my fitness at somewhere better than it’s been in a while. Pleasant way to spend the evening.
Thoughts on a week+ of continuous running:
Melissa still thinks I’m crazy, which, of course, I am. But she’s specifically referring to running without rest days for a month. She may be correct, but I think that in some ways the low-level, low-stress training I’m doing is sustainable on a daily basis. I’m hesitant to push my mileage above three per day until I’ve got no soreness at all day-to-day. But, there’s the New Haven 20K 3 days after the end of Augustathon, so at some point I’ve got to add some miles.
Wow – New Haven. I’m pretty confident that I can finish New Haven, and finish it pretty well based on the results of the Narragansett 10 miler. But, I’d like to have an 8 miler+ either the weekend of the 18th or the weekend of the 25th. We’ll have to see how the legs hold out.
Don’t forget the SPF 15!
So, here’s the deal – whenever there’s a documentary about a given generation, there’s a theme song that’s playing. Boomers get Glen Miller. Boomers get something hippie-ish. Jazz age types get Scott Joplin, etc, so on, and so forth.
I’m in Gen X. Irony has no sound.
But, today, ah, today mes amis – I had an epiphany. Gen X does, indeed, have a theme song. A song so perfect, a song so ironic, so cliched, and so powerful that it embodies all we’ve done, all we’ve become, and all we can hope to be.
That song, my friends, is R.E.M.’s iconic classic from the 1988 Green album – Inside-Out. My epiphany came the first time the chorus rolled around during today’s Augustathon 5K –
I can turn you
Inside out
With what I choose
Not to do
That’s pretty much it right there – aggressive work by Buck, Berry, and Mills with the trademark pounding drums and innovative bassline, and the ultimate in passive-aggressive lyrics from Stipe, who, during concerts, would use a megaphone between him and the mic, saving the necessity of actually shouting for emphasis.
Today’s run was brilliant. Despite Jon’s whining, a pleasant gift has, indeed, arrived, from Our Neighbors To The North in the form of dry air (It’s cool, boy, cooooolll). I was able to run the entire 3 miles, with splits of 8:21/8:25/8:15! Life is, indeed good.
So, we’re looking at 5 days down, and I’m starting to feel good about this.
One downside? I am really, really needing sleep more. Like much more than my “Plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead” philosophy wants to acknowledge.
Anyway, that’s about it. My major geek project is my annual revisit of Linux as a main OS. This year I’m easing into it a bit more, using Ubuntu running on a BootCamp partition. The genius of this year’s experiment is that it turns out that you can use the Boot Camp installation as a Virtual Machine in Parallels (link is a how-to), so I can instantly fall back to OSX for crucial stuff like syncing my Nike+ with the Nike+ site. Any of you hackers out there know how to grab the data off of my Nano and send it to Nikeplus, let me know, and this time I may have to sever the strings completely.
And 4 solid days with Augustathon.
Today’s run was tough. Ran in the afternoon, and it was warm. I’ll be honest – I’ve been walking part of the last two runs. Part is ’cause it’s tough – I haven’t been running back-to-back days in a while. The other part is to keep from injury.
One kind of interesting side effect is that I’m loving music again.
Despite traveling, I nailed the first two days of Augustathon. Three miles on the first at Jamestown, on the way to TF Green to catch the plane. Flew to Columbus with the faint scent of seaweed on me. Then this morning, I dragged out of bed at Oh-Dark-Thirty and did my 3 miles in the industrial park by the hotel. Believe it or not, running in the early morning midwest summer haze brought memories of my elementary days in Battle Creek, Michigan that hadn’t stirred in decades. This flyover country’s good stuff.
Here’s a rough list of folks who’ve signed up for Augustathon:
.
There’s 10 folks signed up at Nikeplus, with getnthinr off to a smokin’ start.
This is fun – thanks to y’all; it helped getting me out of the rack this morning.
I’m back in the blissful habit of doing my daily mileage from Ft. Weatherill in Jamestown – run however far I want to go, and finish with a quick dip in the chilly waters of the North Atlantic.
Augustathon is upon us – my first run there will be at lunch today. Alternate plan is Jamestown on my way to the Airport. Amazingly to me, Getnthinr has already ran and logged for the day as I type this at 0630ish EDT. See below:
Did a quick 3+ yesterday on the way home. Scratch that – I did a pretty slow 3+ on the way home yesterday – 28+ minutes to do 3-ish miles, though I think I got bitten by Nike+ for about a quarter mile. The sky, especially over the ocean, was a grey associated only with hot, steamy days on the bay. No chance of rain, but so much humidity in the air it’s almost foggy. But not quite.
The run was a study in silhouette, warm to the point of being hot, but not quite uncomfortable, knowing there was a 70 degree ocean into which to plunge at the end.
I had the distinct pleasure of meeting up in Narragansett with David, April Anne, and Michelle for the Blessing of the Fleet 10 mile road race. Nothing better at all than getting together with other RBF folks and cranking out a few miles on a Friday Afternoon. Melissa’s new running buddy, Chelsea was there in theory, but I didn’t spot her at the start in the thronging masses.
The scene reminded me of the words of the poet:
Here are ones who like to run
They run for fun in the hot, hot sun
Oh me, oh my, oh me, oh my
Oh what a lot of funny things run by
April and David were fit and ready – both have fall marathon plans. Michelle and I were there and willing. Michelle’d brought a bunch of other CT running chicks, a veritable Bondi posse, and caught David, April, and me about a quarter mile past the start, just after a guy in his yard promised beer when we passed on the way to the finish.
The race was great. Huge crowd for a road race in the middle of nowhere Rhode Island, especially for a Friday Evening. There’s something just phenomenal about a couple thousand people all planning to run 10 miles after work – maybe we won’t turn into a nation of lard-butts afterall. Hitting dips or rises was outstanding – look forwards or backwards and the small roads were shoulder to shoulder covered with runners shoulder to shoulder (read it again, I’m not repeating myself).
About mile 3, we were passing a spectacular beach that I’d never realized was a couple of miles off of my commute, and I started feeling pretty good. April and I had dropped (not in the harsh way, but in the “Hey, go run your race” way) David and Michelle and entourage a couple of minutes back, and I was feeling pretty good – no ill effects from Thursday’s tough lunchtime run. The breeze blew, the birds sung, and the sun beat down on my ears. I was hanging with AA, we were passing people, having started way at the back of the pack, and life was great.
Then, mile 4 – straight into the not-quite setting sun. Uphill (very slight, but still there). Out of the breeze.
In short, it sucked.
AA ditched me. HA. No, more like she zigged, I zagged and got caught behind someone, and then I decided I didn’t have the pop to keep up if I were going to do another 6 of these things.
I soldiered on until I hit mile 5, and took intermittent walk-breaks until mile 6. This stretch was on RI 108, pretty much completely exposed to the sun, slight uphill, and with the breeze – meaning plenty of heat and stagnant air.
Just after mile 6, the race headed into a blissfully wooded section – shade, breeze, and, as is my weakness, a wonderfully fit runner running about the pace I wanted to go who I could follow. So, I drafted off of her for most of the next four miles. There was one downhill section that threw me for a loop – dunno why, but I HATE running downhill.
So, turns out I can still run double digit miles. Not sure when the last time I did it was (Hey, looks like last year’s New Haven Road Race!)
Nike+ gypped me out of 0.15 miles, but overall I’m pretty pleased with the effort. I didn’t make my goal of 90 minutes, but it’s close enough, given the weather.
April found me before I’d caught my breath, and David was there soon after. We waited for Michele and company for a while. As we caught our breath, we figured she’d be where we should be – namely, at the “beverage” tent. She wasn’t, but beverages were.
Surprisingly, I wasn’t hungry. Dunno if was the heat and exertion killing my appetite, or if my body’s deciding to set a new weight threshold and I’m about to drop some weight, but I wasn’t nearly so tempted by the various foods-on-a-stick(and/or deep fried) on offer at the fair. Haven’t been overly hungry today, either.
We hung around and talked (Michele’s husband may be my new hero), and failed to dry off at all. My shorts were still literally dripping when I got to the car. Gnasty.
All in all, another great RBF outing.