Girl In Motion

Today was supposed to be 5 recovery so I didn’t get out until 8:30, figuring who cares if it’s 80 degrees, I’ll be going slow.  But then I got that weird rebelliousness in me and ran it GA instead.  I was bitching at myself while doing it, so I really don’t get my motives, except to say it must be some weird confirmation thing.  Like when you bite the inside of your mouth and keep doing it to confirm that yes, it really does hurt.  Except in this case, it’s to confirm that yes, I really can run faster than a snail. Don’t know why I can’t just believe it and let it go.

But anyway, I did it like a pyramid because once I got to the middle with an MP mile, I realized I’d better pull back since I have 14 of those on Sunday.  Avg. for today’s run: 8:43.  Yeah, I know, none of the times I post are really speedy at all, but considering the pace the plan asks for, it was naughtily fast.

So tomorrow is my birthday, I’m going to be 47 years old!  How in hell did this happen?!?  The funny thing is my marathon training has overtaken so many parts of my life that I’ve requested no celebration tomorrow night, knowing that it could mess with my MP run on Sunday.

I posted something in my Women’s BQ thread along these lines also, because I have some cute chunky platform flip-flops that I’ve stopped wearing because I’m afraid I’ll slide off and hurt my ankle.  I also imagine myself tripping on the sidewalk or being run into by a bicyclist, laming me and ruining my marathon dream.  And I know my friends are tired of hearing, “no thanks, I’m going to stay in, I have a hard run tomorrow”, but it’s the sad truth, I’d rather have a great run than go out.  Then again, I’m a hermit anyway, so quite a handy excuse.

But enough imaginings from the Pre-Marathon Drama Queen, how about today’s musical pick?

I’m usually a New Music/Alternative freak but I love a great melodic theme no matter what the genre (add a great hook and I’m there).  So don’t be surprised that today’s fave tune has a Southern Rock type feel: Cocaine Cowgirl by Matt Mays.  Extraordinarily cheezy video, but it’s the only way to play you the song.  Anyway, it has this wonderful melancholy opening guitar riff that laces through the whole tune.  And besides, who doesn’t like a good druggy song every now and then?

My workout today was a beautiful thing, didn’t go the Pfitzinger med-long run route, because I was doing my mile long hill which makes the 20% - 10% not really a viable parameter. As for the hill itself, which I’ve been prefacing recently with “stupid” as in Stupid Mile Hill because things that make me suffer scare me and calling them names makes me feel better, today the hill and I came to an agreement; I wouldn’t bitch and moan and it would be nicer to me than it’s ever been.

Long story short, I did 2.5 trips with the uphills paced at 9:25, 9:29 and 9:47 and the downhills at 8:07, 8:17 and 8:17. How wonderful to be able to fully rehearse my Steamtown pacing (which I imagine will be 8:17-8:20 on the downs) and have it feel good. Of course, after a zillion of those strung together I know it’ll be less than happy-making, but I can start to imagine the real deal now.

After I was done with the hill, like magic (or as running god Arthur Lydiard might have predicted) the final miles home were strangely faster than they felt. I seriously felt I was going along at 9:15 or so but thanks to that fast downhill running, I was actually averaging 8:39. Final tally today: 14.5 miles, average pace: 8:59.

The other big news of the run was I have finally found a gel I LIKE! Not “can stand” “can stomach” or “is palatable” but one where I thought the taste was juuuust right: Gu Just Plain. Wow, not at all cloyingly sweet while at the same time without any of the tartness I find in Hammer or Carbboom. Simply a truly light taste that, mixed in a flask, will improve the Vanilla and Apple Carbbooms I just got, or taste great straight. Seriously, it was so strange to finish a gel off without a single grimace.

On to real running news, I cried last night when 38 year-old Constantina Tomescu won the marathon. What an edge of the seat race that was! Of course, so heartbreaking for Deena and Paula but so thrilling to see a 38 year-old conquer that race! And with such a daring break, just shocking. So here’s to Constantina Tomescu and Dara Torres, another amazing athlete at 41 years old. Cheers to these mature athletic powerhouses, you make the world a more hopeful place.

Moving sideways away from running, I had quite a laugh yesterday while grocery shopping with Nick. We were standing in the produce section of ShopRite, a huge grocery store chain, when I realize the Muzak coming over the loudspeakers was “Love To Love You, Baby”, complete with lyrics. I turned to Nick and said, “check out the music”, we had a chuckle and squeezed some peaches. Then a few minutes later, I recognize the next song is “Voulez Vous Coucher Avec Moi”. Granted, both were fab disco hits in their day, but I find it hilarous that the background music for grocery shopping is now Fuck Me songs. How lovely for the little children, lol.

But enough gabbing from me today, go find some fruit to play with and hum a nasty tune to yourself. It’ll either have you wanting to go grocery shopping or make wild crazy love next to some Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

No, I didn’t actually get any new ink, but check out my lower back from Sunday’s 21.

How ironic, I make a design about chafing in places you’ve never heard of and I end up doing just that to my own body.  I mean, who chafes on their lower back?  Is nothing sacred?  Shitty shorts, is what it was.   They were soaking wet the whole time and they have a pocket in the back that I had a couple gels in, which probably didn’t help, but I think the main offender was some poofiness of fabric surrounding the waistband elastic.  Anyway, it’s two days later and the tramp stamp is still there.  I’m a branded runner.

Moving along, last week my total mileage was 55, this week Pfitzinger takes it down a notch mileage-wise with a total of 48. Today was an easy-shmeasy, 6 recovery miles, tomorrow is a mid-long 15, then a couple more 6-mile recovery runs (Saturday’s with strides), then come Sunday…my first Marathon Pace run!  I’m looking forward to it, actually.  It’s also 15 but with 12 MP in the middle.  My MP at this point is 8:23 (for a 3:40 marathon), so we’ll see how it goes.

Today’s most fabulous song for recovery was Wild Sweet Orange’s “Ten Dead Dogs” It makes me really sad, but in that beautiful bittersweet way only a good breakup ballad can do.

Another night of 4.5 hours sleep to get up early enough to beat the heat, or the illusion of beating it - in these temps, taming it is the best you can do. Like every night before a challenging run, I get a little excited of what the morning will bring and today with 11 miles and a 6 mile tempo thrown in the middle, was no exception.

I left the house at a really easy 10:18 which is funny in itself, since last year when I finally got into the 9s, I wouldn’t dare do 10 anything from that point on. Seriously, it wasn’t till this training cycle, when I’m trying to follow the correct way to T, that I’m finally going slower so I can go faster and by golly, the shit’s working!

I would have liked to have to started the tempo at 2 miles in, but because there are few fountains in the park and I didn’t want to interrupt the tempo portion if I could, I started at mile 3 so I could get my last sip at the fountain before the doing the deed. As usual, with these long Pfitz tempos, when I’m finishing that last warmup mile, I ask myself how in hell am I going to be able to do this, it’s almost 2 minutes faster that what I’m doing now and I’m not walking. Waaaahhhh.

Internal tantrums aside, I kicked it! Yuh-huh! My tempo avg was 8:02, splits were 8:05, 8:03, 8:02, 7:57, 8:04, 8:05. On an 80 degree morning with a thimble of sleep…I’ll take it!

One thing that helped is, you know I’d been leaving my music turned off recently? Last night I made a playlist especially for today’s run. I’ve been downloading a lot of fun stuff anyway, so I put 4 of the slower songs at the top, then a transition song, then the good stuff took me through the tempo. Favorite songs from this round are Idlewild’s “You Held The World In Your Arms” (not a great video, but the song is infuckingcredible) and Carolina Liar’s “Show Me What I’m Looking For”
(talk about an anthem! who wouldn’t want to run to those chimes, that choir…ah!).

Other than that, most of you probably know about the drama thread at RW since that’s where the bulk of you guys come from anyway and that thing sent over a ton of people yesterday. Anyway, just an amusing note about it all, a do-gooder poster let me know that he reported the thread yesterday to the admins because he thought the OP was a little unstable. I understood, but wanted the truth to be out, so didn’t really want the thread removed.

As it happens, the only fallout from the admins was a PM for me today, admonishing me for cussing in a thread with one of my oh-so-clever workarounds (in this case “fuc-king”, and if you see it in context, it’s completely justified). Actually I was pretty proud of that one (looks better than schit which I write for shit), but that’s cool. I understand their point. Happily, I have no such rules on this blog, so I want to say this (and I mean it in only the nicest possible way)…have a fucking fabulous Friday, each and every one of you. Later, babies.

What a great day! You’d think I was bi-polar with how good I’m feeling.

Today was my mid-long 12. I did my usual 9 plus 1.5 times what I’ll now refer to as the Mile Hill. The biggest incline is the first half of the hill anyway, so it was a really good workout. But that’s not the event.

The event occurred as I was coming back towards home, I saw this tiny figure in the distance - a woman, oh so familiar…the walker I’ve referred to in the past, here and here. But today, even though she was quite far away, I could tell something was markedly different. Gone was the wide determined side-to-side armswing, I couldn’t believe it, could it be?

She was running! I’m telling you, I’ve passed this woman about 3 times a week since I started running, so this was an event all right. I lifted up my sunglasses and literally did this and gave her the happiest thumbs up I’ve ever given. She downright bubbled back, it was so fucking cool.

Now, I should say that I have nothing at all against walkers, on the contrary, physical activity in any form is fabulous and I would never try and talk anyone into running that didn’t want to. A year of divemastering was enough to know that there are some things people should never be talked into, you either feel it or you don’t and running is one of them. So anyway, I’m making a huge deal out of basically nothing, but it was something to me, like seeing a distant friend finally join my club. Gee, maybe I am bi-polar.

Other than that, Nick had the hardest day on his bike trip yesterday, they did 78 miles and climbed 8000 feet! The poor guy was absolutely beat when he called last night, and today he’s got 60, but he sounded much better this morning. Cheers to my honey! For a guy in his late 50’s (and one that got stents put in last year), he’s turned into quite the physically fit freak. Between the two of us, I’m wondering if there’s something in the water…

Continuing on my faux mania-driven morning, someone on the RW shoe forum posted this most excellent video from Mizuno last night, it’s GREAT! Watch it till the end, so cool.

I think that covers everything I wanted to blab about today. It’ll be another scorcher, so drink heartily and heavily. Have some water, too. Later, kids.

Had a great weekend hanging with my friends and doing activities. We got a little culture in, going to Olana, home of the famous landscape artist Frederic Church where we took a house tour. Admittedly, I’m not much of a history maven, so I was just happy the place was air-conditioned. Afterwards we went to Mama Mia! which Nick and I pretty much despised, though the rest of the group liked it. I think Abba is pretty high on the genius scale as far as pop-songwriting, so the familiar tunes were the only thing that kept me from wanting to poke its movie eyes out.

Got back to Philly yesterday afternoon and I’m happy to say I’ve already completed today’s hot, miserable tempo run - 10 w/5 tempo. You know it’s trouble when it’s 81 degrees out at 5:30 am.  It was 6:15 when I got outside.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to dreading this workout. I mean, tempos are hard on their own, without being couched between 5 extra miles. Ordinarily I’d do all but one of the regular miles up front, then the tempo, leaving a single mile left for cooldown, but it wasn’t going to get cooler and I figured I’d better get the tempo crap done sooner rather that later, so 3 miles, then the 5 tempo, then 2 sluggish miles at the end.

The tempo was good, near the top I passed a guy going the other way and when I turned around, he was ahead but pretty much even with my pace, so I used him as a carrot. Then he walked so I passed him, stopping later at a fountain and when the tempo portion ended, the guy (very nice Brit) caught up and ran next to me, saying he hoped it was ok that he’d been pacing off me. I think he was afraid I’d think he’d been stalking me, but I laughed and said, “sure!”

I gave myself a pass as far as pace because the heat was undeniable. My tempo miles averaged 8:10, and according to Glover or Daniel’s accounting for heat, that’s equal to 16 to 22 seconds faster, so actually pretty darn good! I stopped 4 times at the fountains - once before the tempo, once during and twice after, that last time I pretty much parked myself there for 30 seconds, couldn’t get enough! I admit to stopping my clock today at every fountain stop, better that than feeling rushed and not drinking enough.

I brought music with me but during the first tempo mile felt it was slowing me down so I tucked my ear buds away. I’m turning the music off or leaving it at home more often lately but I think it’s mainly because I need some new stuff. That’s the good thing about car trips…Nick has XM in his car so I write down songs I like and get them at Napster or Itunes when I get home. Got a handful to download from this weekend’s trip so I suppose it’s time to refresh the soundtrack to my running life. Later, kids.

My marathon cycle started this week and I’m absolutely loving having a plan again. Something about scheduling and having a recipe to run with always gets me excited. It was an easy week to start; Wed was a 7-miler w/10×100m strides, Thurs was 9, 4 short recovery miles today and then 12 tomorrow.

Funny how before I got injured and went away I looked at the plan and was all, “4 days a week for the first two weeks? That’s not much running.” Now I’m grateful for the extra days off, they’ll return me to fighting shape in a sensible manner.

On an unrelated note; my posture has always sucked. I’m a constant sloucher from way back so I’ve vowed to work on my core this summer. I’ll be pulling out the Pilates DVD but to supplement it, I just ordered a posture brace called “Shoulders Back” to help train myself into better posture. It was created for equestrians to improve their riding, but it’s for normal people too.

I can’t wait for it to arrive, curious as I am to feel what it’s like to stand correctly for periods of time, not just when I remember for fleeting moments. I’m sure it’ll be annoying, plus it borders on goofy since it’s a vanity item, but if it makes me feel/look better and doesn’t require an injection or incision, what the hell.

The only other thing to report is an outdoor concert we went to the other night: Deathcab For Cutie. One of their songs, I Will Follow You Into The Dark is so beautiful it has made me cry on numerous occasions, and of course, seeing it live left me blubbering all over myself.

Love of mine some day you will die
But I’ll be close behind
I’ll follow you into the dark

No blinding light or tunnels to gates of white
Just our hands clasped so tight
Waiting for the hint of a spark
If heaven and hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the No’s on their vacancy signs

If there’s no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I’ll follow you into the dark

That vacancy sign bit gets me every time. Sigh.

What a lovely Memorial Day it is in my neck of the woods, albeit somewhat toasty for running. A sunny 77 degrees had me sweating like a piglet and hoping for a speedy hot weather acclimation this year. Doesn’t feel as difficult as last year, though.

It’s funny looking back at my logs from last year, my first summer running. The first time I felt really hot, like miserably hot, was on a 75 degree day. The log entry goes, “Yay! Second 7 miler. Averaged 10:56 pace. Not bad. Hot as fuck though and I ordered an Amphipod belt as soon as I got home.”

It’s about a year later and my pace today was 8:50, so what took 1:17 to complete now takes 1:01. And I thought I was just hydrating better, lol.

Healthwise, I’ve been running two days on, one day off in an effort to kick my ankle crap out the door and it’s working fabulously. I haven’t used the ankle brace for the last 3 runs and the last two were 7 milers. 7 or 8 tomorrow, then Wednesday we’re off to Las Vegas and the Wild West for twelve days…mileage to be determined.

I’m taking a laptop, so I hope to be blogging while gone, though I’m sad because I got my hair cut and it looks ugly/stupid so I already hate all my vacation photos, even though I haven’t left yet. Oh well.

Speaking of bad hair, my new favorite song in the whole world is “I’m Not Over” by Carolina Liar. Here’s the video so you can hear the whole thing. Greasy two-toned hair isn’t really my thing, but he looks rather yummy in ponytailed closeup.

No matter, the song has such great hooks that I can’t stop playing it…4 times in a row on my run today surpassing last week’s favorite song in the whole world, “Sewn” by The Feeling. Really bad contrived video for that one, but the song is gorgeous.