more wins than losses/twilight 5k

On Saturday I ran the Twilight 5k. I ran it last year in 25:05 and mentioned earlier in the week that I wasn’t too jazzed about my chances for besting that time this week since I have pretty much just been running since my last marathon and not thinking about speed. I fell asleep late Friday night and slept pretty badly, so the 6AM wake up came early. My legs were hurting, maybe because I ran late on Friday. It stormed during the night and the weather forecast was calling for storms all morning. I parked on campus, left my bike jammed in my trunk, walked to the start and picked up my card for the Gambler, then back to my car to take off my rain jacket. It was pretty cold, so I left a tshirt on over my tank top that I’d planned on running in, but it wasn’t really raining anymore…yet (foreshadowing, hint hint).

The rain returned right before the run started. It poured and I stood under a tree, which didn’t do a ton to keep me dry. It was at this opportune moment, while my Garmin was beeping and flashing between screens, that someone asked me how I liked my 405. I unleashed a little about its inability to deal with sweat/water. The race started and it was a quick start. The top ten (or fifteen?) men and women run later in the day in the thousand dollar mile, which brings out some very quick runners for the 5k. It’s a more or less flat race, especially the first mile. I was kind of waffling between whether I would try and run faster or not since I felt crappy and tired. I tried to start off a little slow and then pick it up, which I think I did; the first time I checked my Garmin was at 0.65 and I don’t remember being passed by anyone after that point while I was able to pass a decent number of people. It switched between raining and pouring for the next 20 minutes or so. The only uphill is during the last half mile or so when you return downtown and run up Hancock. My feet felt so heavy and waterlogged by this point. I also thought about wetting my pants since no one would notice in the rain, but I realized that during 90% of races I will weigh the pros and cons of wetting my pants. No, I have never actually done it.

I chugged up Hancock, made the turn onto Jackson, and almost fell flat on my face when I heard someone yell “Bootsy!” It was one of my derby buddies who was being a good sport by course marshaling in the pouring rain. I turned onto Washington and saw 24 still on the clock. I’m not sure what my official time was besides 24:xx; my Garmin said 24:53. It’s not a gigantic improvement, but I’ll take it. It feels good to move into a lower digit! Next stop, 23. Win.

It was a little before 9AM when I finished. I was signed up for the 50k bike that started at 10AM. I wandered around looking for some people I knew doing run/bike, but did not see any of them. At this point, I was totally bummed because I was sopping wet with no change of clothes. For some reason, I just didn’t take the weather that seriously so I didn’t have a change of shorts. I was already wearing my change of shirt, so the only thing I could do would be to put my rain jacket on over my wet clothes. I hemmed and hawed and decided I didn’t want to spend the next two hours alone, cold, and wet riding my bike. It felt like a guilty decision, but also the right decision. The ride was something I signed up to do for fun (and I didn’t sign up until I knew someone else was going), so if it was going to be miserable and lonely, no point in going. Loss.

I went home and ate pancakes with Brian. Guilty, delicious pancakes. Later on, my friend Will was looking for someone to be his partner in a homemade bike race called the Old Mil 5. He said it involved costumes, interpretive dance, and beer. That sounded fairly up my alley, so I decided to attempt to salvage my day since I was feeling like a loser for bailing on my original plans. Will is Canadian and dressed up as Captain Canada. I put on every red, white, and blue article of clothing that I own and he supplemented my costume with a blue afro wig and an American flag cape. We had to do some silly tasks (catching water balloons, coordinated dancing) before racing each lap around the block. It culminated in having to drink a 16 ounce Milwaukee’s Best before the last lap. It was gross. We came in third out of six teams, but there were no losers at the Old Mil 5 and we won best costumes, even though the people who legitimately had the best costumes (Mario and Luigi) won the loser award for coming in last. Another win.

I’m not sure exactly what everyone’s themes were, but from top to bottom you have a team in some kickin’ 90s cycling caps and gym teacher outfits, some misguided Twilight cyclists (who won, in their cycling gear and fancy bikes), conjunction junction engineer and hero zero (who trailed three wagons’ worth of “and or but” and nearly did some damage to vehicles in the road), Will and me, Back to the Future (second place), and Mario and Luigi.

I should mention that it continued to rain all day, so I found myself once again soaked. This time I had packed extra clothes and shoes before leaving home so I would be ready to stay out and watch the pro races at 8PM, but it was storming so much that I decided not to do that either. I went home and ate a lot of food instead. I must have eaten six meals on Saturday. It was out of control. I turned on our heater for a while and warmed up. My friend Kelly lives out near us and I went over to her birthday party, my final win of the day. Their house is always super fun and usually it’s the only time I stay up past 1AM on purpose. I slept most of the day yesterday trying to recover from that.

Ended up with a pretty light week…that’s what happens when you bail on a two hour workout!

4/18 sunday – off
4/19 monday – 5.1 miles, 45:00
4/20 tuesday – 8.08, 68:18
4/21 wednesday – 7.01, 60:00
4/22 thursday – off
4/23 friday – 7.11, 60:00
4/24 saturday – twilight 5k, 3.1 , 24:53

total miles run: 30.4
total run time: 4:18:11
total cardio time: 4:18:11

tgi finally friday

Last night I volunteered to help with some Twilight setup downtown. I love volunteering for things and the often menial tasks you are assigned to do. Alphabetize 600 names, take them back out, shuffle them, and alphabetize them again? Sure! That is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it is oddly satisfying, especially since I work from home and thus don’t have to work with people all day anyway. We pretty much unloaded merch boxes, set up registration tables, got preregistered people’s numbers and waivers together, and then alphabetized until I could alphabetize no more. Hopefully we did a nice job so it will not be stressful for people who are working the packet pickup/registration today, although someone will probably be cussing my handwritten names on the back of bibs. My handwriting has improved a bit, but it drops under pressure. I got to pick up my tshirt and number so I can avoid the rush later today, even though it’s kind of fun to go.

AND AND AND yesterday I continued my lucky streak by winning a pair of my beloved Adrenaline GTS 10s from Brooks. So good! If you use Facebook or Twitter, you should follow them because they do giveaways pretty regularly. I don’t use Twitter, but at least on Facebook the signal-to-noise ratio is good and they aren’t constantly posting things like some pages (*cough* Atlanta Track Club). Check out this link to their “green room” where you can read about their efforts to be more environmentally friendly.

Yesterday, Runner’s World posted this tongue in cheek article on how to be more ecologically friendly as a runner. It’s a joke, but seriously – if you run regularly, I think you’d probably cruise through at least three pairs of shoes per year if you replace them once you rack up enough miles on them. I know I can tell my shoes are too old because my feet will begin hurting after 400-500 miles on a pair. That’s a lot of shoes and shoe boxes, not to mention all the other junk that you have the ability to use up while running and especially doing races; gel packs, water cups, synthetic clothing, iPods, my beloved treadmill, plastic bags full of pamphlets you might look at once, crappy tshirts that are produced and shipped and you never wear, driving to races. The plastic bags at races kill me, especially in cases like ING Georgia. Both this year and last year, they had a major sponsor, Publix, giving away reusable shopping bags. This was easily the most popular booth at the expo and to be fair, I see that Publix would want to keeping driving people towards their booth. It literally appeared that 98% of the people at the expo had one of the bags from their booth, which also had food samples and coupons and some other do-dads (point being, I would have gone there anyway). They could have made the recyclable bags the packet pickup bags and eliminated 18,000 or so plastic bags and still gotten a huge amount of advertising. I can’t remember if it was a merch bag or a packet pickup bag, but I know I got a biodegradable plastic bag from Brooks at the Marine Corps Marathon, which is cool. It might take a zillion years to degrade, I don’t know, but maybe that’s better than a reusable shopping bag that doesn’t actually get used and eventually ends up in a landfill anyway, which is probably what will happen now that every single store sells them for 99 cents. I, like most other people, feel semi-compelled to take something if it’s free, but I try to stay within reason and not take something if I know it’s just going to be junk in my house and I won’t use it.

Well, that got long. Time to get back to my regular schedule of puppy cuddling and working on my final proposal draft. I’ve got to drag my bike out of the garage and make sure it’s in shape for tomorrow. It just occurred to me that I’m not even sure where my lock is since I only ever ride my bike from home and Oglethorpe County is not what one would consider rich in destinations worth visiting; I have one of those u locks from 2000-ish that ended up being able to be picked with a Bic pen, but it was in the back of my truck which is at the shop. Maybe I can convince someone to let me buddy lock it with their bike.

wish wash

I am still here, still being schooled by pollen. It is crazy. I’ve even had old-lady smoker voice. Happily, pretty much everything except the throat has gotten better and despite feeling like crap since last Wednesday, I have had some decent runs brought to me by pseudo ephedrine (do allergy meds count as doping?). Most days I have felt like I would probably quit and ended up a) not quitting and b) running farther than I planned, so I felt pretty good about getting it done. Being dehydrated and having cotton mouth is getting old. I have been taking this other generic cold/allergy medicine that looks like it came from 1985 and it is the bomb.

Twilight is Saturday, which reminded me today that I probably would not recognize 5k pace if it ran up and kicked me in the behind. I ran it in 25:05 last year, which is an admittedly modest 5k time, but I do not foresee bettering my time unless I start out fast and somehow manage to hold on. It’s a flat course, but still, the only time I have been running fast is the last couple of miles of progression runs where I’ve already run four or five miles at an easier pace and lie to myself that I’m almost done anyway. Thanks to this week, I’m pretty familiar with the “run til ya puke” feeling. Maybe I can leverage that this weekend.

I’ve been hemming and hawing on a fall marathon. I want to run the Houston Marathon next January; my brother and his family live in Houston, I want to do another big marathon, and it’s supposed to be a nice course. They announced last month that the 2012 Olympic Marathon Time Trials will be held there, so that is cool but not really why I am interested in running it – I am just a convenience kind of person and don’t want to make a huge trip unless there is some other reason besides a race. Registration isn’t until late July. I was thinking about doing another October-December set, but might bump that up a little bit and do one in September. I’ll be defending my thesis, finishing graduate school, and applying to dietetic internships in the fall (and g-d willing, getting accepted to one for January), so I don’t want to pressure myself to spend a lot of time getting ready for a marathon since that is clearly the bottom priority. And yet here I am thinking about it. Maybe I need to set up some reward system for myself. Analyze data+write+defend+finish DI applications = one fall/winter marathon registration.

Here’s what I did last week. Yet another cycling fail…didn’t realize there was no late Saturday afternoon class this month so when I finally decided to go, no dice…I am needing to diversify because I’m bored of just running, but that’s what the 31 miles of cycling Saturday is for, I guess.

4/11 sunday – off
4/12 monday – 7.18, 66:46 avg 9:17
4/13 tuesday – 7.0, 62:44 avg 8:57
4/14 wednesday – 3.05, 30:30 avg 10:00
4/15 thursday – 7.47, 69:14 avg 9:20
4/16 friday – 8.05, 72:05 avg 8:57
4/17 saturday – 8.38, 76:14 avg 9:05

total miles run: 41.13
total time run: 6:16:53
total cardio time: 6:16:53

why, pollen, why?

Allergies have been beating down whatever shred of mojo I can muster for the past couple of days. I have tried everything I can think of – Claritin, generic Zyrtec, Benedryl. Last week, it was itchy eyes and headaches. This week, it’s headaches, sore throat, and sour stomach from whatever is in my throat. My tonsils and lymph nodes in my neck are huge. It’s bad enough that I skipped coffee this morning, which is usually reserved for the crappiest of crap feelings. I guess if this is my biggest problem, I am doing alright.

I’m crossing my fingers that I pull it together enough for an evening run or maybe spin class since I still have been too busy to go this week. My professor gave us our statistics exams back and I got an A, though not quite as high as my first one. But I’ll take it. I defended my thesis proposal on Wednesday. The prospect of a roomful of people from my department staring blankly at me is no longer an immediate concern. I don’t love speaking in front of people, but I don’t especially mind it. One problem I have is not explaining things that I think are clear because I’ve thought about them for months on end. Doing transcription has made me more conscious of saying uh, ah, like, et cetera – but I still do it and managed to say “you guys” in the first minute. I am a little nervous to get my evals back. I’ve never had one say anything groundbreakingly bad or embarrassing, but the potential is there.

This weekend my major task is to work on cleaning up my analysis tool so it can be submitted to IRBs. It will be nice to have a slow weekend. Next weekend is Athens Twilight Criterium, which ranks high up there on the list of best things that happen in Athens. I’m volunteering on Thursday night and doing the 5k run/50k ride on Saturday morning. The men’s and women’s races are Saturday night…might need a nap to make it through.