I get up early so I have time to take a nap

I woke up this morning to my alarm at 6:30 feeling tired and decidedly unmotivated about getting out of bed. Meeting with my running group is usually incentive enough to get moving, but between a couple of hard days at work and going to bed too late the last several nights, what I wanted to do was shut the alarm off and close my eyes. Trying to convince myself to get my butt moving, I had this conversation with myself:

"Get up. You'll be better off running with the group; it will psych you up for the race tomorrow and you could use the group stretch after."
"Screw that. I'm tired; I need sleep. I'll run later and stretch on my own."
"Liar. You won't stretch on your own."
"If I go now I'll be hanging around for a couple of hours until I can register for Decker and get my race packet. I might as well wait till later."
"You can sleep in the car while you wait. You've done it before."

I went back and forth like this for several minutes, getting nowhere with myself, until I realized there was another whose wisdom I could turn to. So I asked myself, WWCD? Easy. Charlie would say I'm just gonna, you know, go back to sleep now.

Woot!

Or not.

I finally dragged my hiney out of at nine, and at nine-thirty I got a phone call from one of my running friends.

"Where were you this morning? We missed you."

One of the things about running with a training group is that there is always someone who will call you out on missing a work out.

"Slept in."
"We're at breakfast. Are you going to meet us?"
"I'm not even out of my pajamas yet."

I was still in pajamas because despite the extra two-and-a-half hours of sleep, I felt groggy, spacey, and generally out of sorts. Unfortunately Charlie doesn't know (or really care, the cranky cynical bastard) that when I sleep late (and nine is pretty late for me), it has a tendency to throw off my whole day and leave me feeling worse than if I had gotten up early and taken a nap later on. I could not shake the lethargy and brain fog all day.

Oh well. At least I still have both kidneys.

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PSA (That's "public service announcement," not "prostate specific antigen.")

Did you know that when left sitting in a sunny bathroom window sill for over a year, the tea tree oil in a bar of soap will go rancid? Did you know that rancid oil, when applied to anything, leaves a nasty coating that requires a sandblaster to remove? Did you know that said rancidity is not detectable to the human nose until after it is all over your skin?

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Random observation

Discovering after your run that your running tights are worn and have become easy access is not a good thing.

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Notes from an out-of-town Thanksgiving weekend, part 2

How a mother with a PhD in molecular biology speaks to her three-and-a-half year-old child:
"She can't have any pie; she's allergic to some of the things in it."
"Why?"
"Because there's something wrong with her chromosomes, honey."

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Notes from an out-of-town Thanksgiving weekend, part 1

"Your new kitchen cabinet arrangement makes me uncomfortable."
"Why?"
"You've got food mixed in with dishes. It's not right. Food and dishes should be in separate cupboards."
"They're grouped by what is used together - coffee is with the coffee cups, cereal is with the bowls. It's efficient organization. I saw it on HGTV."
"What if you want a bowl for something other than cereal? What if you want to drink milk out of a mug?"
"Then you have to open different cupboards."
"The next time I'm alone in your house, you're going to come back to find your cabinets rearranged."

And your toilet paper hanging the other way.

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What if she gets so used to having bread next to the small plates in the cabinet above the toaster that she forgets it's possible to eat Campbell's Chunky Soup with chopsticks? This is how thinking inside the box starts.

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I know this makes me odd, but...

I can't think of a better way to spend a Saturday morning than getting up at 4:45 am to go run 16 miles.

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While doing drills this morning before dawn on the grass of Auditorium Shores, I thought, Why couldn't I have stepped in dog poop after doing butt kicks?

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EAS 10 Miler Race Report

I came to the starting line yesterday with no real time goal in mind, but hoping to run well. For me, well means not feeling like crap at mile three and pacing myself so that I have something left in the tank the last few miles to kick it in to the finish. Gilbert had this to say about the course: don't go too fast the first couple of downhill miles, slow somewhat through the next four miles of hills, then pick it up the last four mile flat section. Wait. "Flat"? The first and last two and a half miles are an out and back along the same road. The first section is downhill, so that makes the last section... flat? Gilbert is fast enough to create his own jet stream, and apparently his own law of physics, too. Gilbert's advice was my Plan A race strategy: start easy, don't kill myself on the hills, and remember that uphill is just flat on an angle.

I got there early, made a trip to the porta-potty (which was freshly scented with cinnamon, an association I could have done without), found my friends, got the usual lump in my throat as I listened to the Star-Spangled Banner, and then we were off.

The first mile, my legs did not feel good. Uh oh. Crap. I looked at my first mile split, and it was too fast. Second mile split - too fast. Double crap. I'm screwed. It looked like I was going to have to go to Plan B: start out too fast, get my ass kicked by the hills, and shuffle to an ignominious finish. I'm familiar with Plan B.

Around mile four though something peculiar happened: the dead feeling in my legs went away. I have this mantra I say sometimes to myself: Running is easy, my body is strong and healthy. It works. Eventually. Sometimes it takes a couple of days to take effect; one time it took about 6 weeks. Today I got lucky after ten minutes. It's a new paradigm: Better Running Through Magical Thinking.

I held things together through the hills, and I caught up to a friend who had pulled away from me a few miles back. We hit mile 6 together, and I said to her "Let's see what I've got." The next three miles were hard but great; I was pouring it on and passing people one by one, which always gives me a mental boost at the end of a race. The last mile though was HARD. I was still maintaining a faster pace, I was tired and ready for it to be done, and what's this? Uphill? Damn fuzzy physics. I wanted to walk. I REALLY wanted to walk. In defiance, I screamed my mantra over and over in my head. RUNNING IS EASY! RUNNING IS EASY! HA HA HA HAAAAAARRRRRGH! THE EARTH IS FLAT! GALILEO WAS A HERETIC COUCH POTATO!

Strange things go through your mind when your brain is oxygen deprived, I tell you.

I turned a corner, finally able to see the finish line, and cursed the people who put the damn thing so far away from me. A pox on you and your running shoes. I love running, I really do, but sometimes the best thing about running is stopping.

I crossed the finish line thinking I've never been so happy to finish a race, which is not true, it's just selective memory. This is a very handy adaptive mechanism in runners.

So it started out a bit rough, but I was really happy with how I did. My big thing was I didn't want to fade on the back end, and I didn't. I really hate that feeling when it falls apart in the last few miles. My time was a fair bit better than I thought it would be; in fact I think it may even be a PR (personal record, for the non-runners who are reading this). I haven't kept good track of my race times over the years, but in Spring of '06 I ran a course that was much faster and easier than this one, and that time was a minute slower. So I'm calling this a PR.

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On sucky running and races

Tomorrow I'm running a race, the EAS 10 Miler. I hadn't exactly been thrilled about doing this race. You've heard of a runner's high? For the last few weeks I've been on a runner's low. Between food allergy issues and my asthma acting up, running well has been something of a struggle. It's shown me one of the few disadvantages to running in a group, especially one as competitive as mine: it's all the more apparent when your running sucks. You can ignore your watch, but you can't ignore getting dropped.

I haven't done a race in a ridiculously long time. It's been more of a confidence thing than anything else, although when asked why not I've thrown out some vague, BS excuse; I haven't wanted to be honest and just say "I'm chicken shit." But I've been chicken shit. I've been afraid to do a race and not run it well, since I hadn't been able to train with any kind of consistency. And just as you can't ignore sucky running when you're with your training group, you can't ignore it in a race. Not only that, but your suckiness is available for the world to witness for all of eternity, or at least for as long as results are archived online. I didn't need another reminder that I wasn't doing what I wanted to be doing. It was depressing.

But it's time to let that go and get back into the racing groove. The effects of whatever I ingested are fading, my chest hasn't felt like it's encircled by a steel band, and picking up my race packet on Friday I remembered how much fun races can be. Bring it on.

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A poll!

The other morning, I did fartleks with my running group. Now you might be wondering “what the heck is a fartlek?” I’m not telling; instead I’m going to make you guess, via Blogger’s handy dandy poll feature. Guess right and you get a cookie. Not a real cookie - I'm cheap. I will think very very hard about the cookie of your choice (unless it has chocolate chips; I'm allergic to those) and send it into your brain.

No googling the answer. If you know the answer, vote for something else.

Disclaimer: If you don't get the mental cookie-gram, don't blame me; it's not my fault you're not psychic.

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