Layer up!

Last night's 4miler was pretty good, all things considered. I wasn't in the mood to run, but I knew I really needed to get out there anyway, so for the first half mile or so I had really heavy legs. But eventually, my mind sort of gave up fighting it and things got easier. The leaves are turning in town now, and every run along the creek is beautiful with orange leaves. Last night was no exception.

At one point, I ran up behind an old couple taking a walk along the creekside path, holding hands. They were probably in their 70's at least. I wondered "Will Miah and I take walks like this when we're that age?" It was a very sweet moment. Which I immediately ruined by thinking "Well, if we do, I hope I don't have blue helmet hair like that lady does..."

It is freezing and raining/snowing today in Denver, but I brought along my huge bag of warm running clothes and my shoes. I'm trying to decide if I'm tough enough to get out there in the drizzly, freezing cold this afternoon for a teensy little 3miler. I'm not sure yet. There's always the dreadmill downstairs...

Enough with the 90+ degree days, ok?

First of all... can I just say that Miah is officially the husband of the year? For about a month, I've been asking him to go camping on Labor Day weekend. He's kept saying no, it'll be too crowded or whatever. Recently, we learned that his dad might be coming down to visit on Labor Day weekend, and when I talked to my father-in-law, I told him we had no plans (aside from SoxFan's gruelling 36 mile - 6000 feet of climbing - mountain bike ride). Well, yesterday in the car, he explained to me that actually, he'd made plans for us to spend the night of 9/6 at the B&B where we got married. Why? Because it was our 3 month anniversary, but also because it's one year since the day we got engaged (9/7). He started making these plans about a month ago, apparently, and he'd reserved our honeymoon suite. Isn't he just the most adorable man you've ever heard of? I do think I love him.

OK, newlywed sappiness out of the way, on to the running stuff...

I'm happy to report that the Frankenstein boot is long gone, folks. I kicked that sucker off on Wednesday of last week and I haven't looked back since. I missed only one run last week (Tuesday's run) so I managed to get in 2 weekday runs and my long run on Saturday. Here's a quick recap...

Wednesday's 2 miler was done up in Indian Hills. It's no coincidence that it's called Indian HILLS either. It was a fairly painless 2 miler, though I did have to wrap up the last 7 tenths by running laps around a park (not so much fun).

Thursday's 3.5 miler was done down in town, from my office. Stupidly, I slept in on Thursday morning, which meant I had to run in the afternoon heat. ARGH. I know better than this, yet I still do it. I had to walk a bit on the hills, but otherwise I was pretty pleased with how it went. Maybe it's purely psychological, but it seems like the running gets noticeably easier when you're in the shade? There is one long stretch on my 3.5m route from the office that is completely shade-free and every time I'm running down that stretch, I start to feel like I'm carrying a toddler (or a 27 year old man) on my shoulders.

With those two runs behind me pain free, I was feeling pretty good about Saturday's long run. Not so good, of course, that I could manage to drag my butt out of bed as early as I should have to get the run done before it got hot out, but you know... The trail was really crowded at 8AM, and it wasn't a great run, but it wasn't terrible, either. It was another 5 miler that I did on the highline canal trail, running from Goodson rec center. I notice, especially while running on the highline (which, by the way, is one of my very favorite places to run in Denver) that all the other slow people on the trail always nod and smile at me as we pass. It's as if they're saying "Dude, it's so awesome that we're out here together, struggling and sweating like pigs, getting passed by folks all the time... I know what you're going through." This reminds me of this really hilarious Nike commercial that I must share, even if it is terribly old news...

I missed cross-training (for only the second time and the first time was due to injury!) on Friday because Miah and I were out looking at potential houses with our spankin' new realtor. It was the first time we've been out looking at houses and it was exhausting and somewhat depressing. We saw 12 houses, it took all day long, and in the end there were really only a couple that we were interested in. One, of course, was drastically out of our price range and the other was a fixer-upper, which immediately sent me into a frenzy, worrying about what color to paint the kitchen walls and what kind of carpet we should pick out. (Worrying is sort of a hobby for me, see? If it were an Olympic sport, I'd be an 8-time gold medalist.) Needless to say, I missed out on mountain biking and had dreams about houses on Friday night.

Whew... now that all that updating is done I can move onto something that I was thinking about today...

I was talking to my friend (Alicia) at work. Alicia is a super-athlete. She's run several marathons (including Boston), too many half-marathons to count, she plays soccer and all sorts of other sports... She's generally just really fit and badass. Today, she was talking about how she wants to do a Half-Ironman. She's fit enough that she could probably go out tomorrow and do a Half-Ironman without any additional training whatsoever. Alicia would really excel at triathlons, in general (she excels at everything else!), so I encouraged her to do it. And she mentioned that, out here in Denver, it seems like you're never doing enough. You could be training for a marathon and still feel like a giant wuss because the other folks in your running group are training for an ultra-marathon. Luckily, I realized this early and have steered clear of running groups entirely for this reason.

Still, she's right. Running a half-marathon doesn't feel like much because so many of the people I know have done it or could do it without much training. There are even people who (and these folks really just kill me) don't seem to do a lot of physical activity of any sort, but when you talk them into running a fun-run 5K with you, they smoke your ass.

I mentioned to Miah that I wished I knew more people like me (in person). People who are sort of just getting started with the whole running thing, who have to try really hard to stay in shape, who are always going to finish near the back of the pack. He pointed out that there aren't that many people like that, though. That most of the people we know who are runners have been runners for a while. The other (more couch potato-ish) people we know don't have any interest in running or they would have done so already. It's just not that common for a largely un-fit, sedentary person to decide they want to change into an active, fit person. He said that the best person I have to compare myself to is the me from about 3 years ago. He's right. I know that is definitely the best comparison I can make to see how far I've come. It's just really hard to get the me from 3 years ago to go out for a 5 miler so that we can race... she's a bit of a lazy ass.

Oh! I went to the chiropractor on Monday and it turns out I'm twisted up like a pretzel but the doc says she can put me straight again (I sound like Forrest Gump a bit, no?). We managed to get all the way through the visit without her making some new-age reference to cleansing my chakras or whatever by snapping my little elbow joint and I was tickled to find that she was very careful every time she approached my neck (probably due to the fact that I told her how terrified I was that she was going to snap my neck). I had to get some x-rays of my lower back (which didn't hurt at all on today's 4 miler) and I have another visit on Thursday afternoon. I'm going to try to better understand what all is wrong with me on this visit, I promise. I'm sure there's got to be a better explanation than the one I've currently got: my neck/back/ankles/knees/hips are all janked.

Good times bad times...

Question: If you're set to do a 6 mile run, but instead of running straight 6, you run 2m, then take a 30 minute break, then run 4.5m, does that count as a 6 mile run?

My vote is YES.

During the course of Sunday's long run (6 miles, you guessed it), SoxFan and I had a little conversation after the first 2 miles. The first 2 miles had gone pretty well, and I feel confident that I could have run 6 miles pretty well. But, our conversation ended up taking about 30 minutes, making me feel needlessly (?) guilty and slacker-like. We ended up doing the last 4.5 miles after the sun was WAY too high in the sky, so rather than being a delightful early morning jaunt down the Silence of the Lambs trail, the run turned into the oven-temperature death slog through the holy-hills batman and did you see the size of that bee?

I was tempted to go through another tedious self-loathing session afterward, but I was exhausted, dude, so I just threw in the towel. I mean, I got the run done, right? I even did an extra half mile as penance for my resting ways. And I did extra stretching when I got home. I'm hoping it all evens out in the end.

Monday called for "Stretch and Strengthen", and that's just what I did. We bought an exercise ball and a few free weights and even some resistance bands over the weekend, so I made great use of those last night. I did ball crunches (oh, that sounds funny).... and pelvic thrusts (hahaha)... and I did some seated row with the resistance bands and a few push-ups and even some curls. Oh yeah.... I'm going to have some huge ripped guns after about 8 billion reps with my 8lb weights. To cover the "Stretch" part of Monday's routine, I rolled a few times on the foam roller, basically until my IT bands started audibly threatening my life, at which point I retreated to the sofa.

And then there was today.

As I started today's run, I was thinking about the Facebook. (I was also thinking about how frigid it was outside, but mostly I was thinking about the Facebook.) It's truly the best and the worst of everything, isn't it? It's how you keep in touch with old friends, and it's how you stay in "the know" about your friends' (and your frienemies') love lives, and it's how you win at Scrabble (hey, I won't tell anyone you use that website to cheat, dude!). But sometimes, you end up running into ghosts there. And that's just what's happened to me recently. Innocently enough, I sign on... I need to check who's dating who... and who's changed their profile picture, etc.... And then, there's a blast from the past staring me in the face. This time, it was an especially friendly ghost (or so I hope, at least), and I took a chance and started a conversation.

This was all on my mind as I began tonight's run. So maybe that is why tonight's run came off without a hitch. I was really thinking hard about my old friend, and how and why we'd grown apart. I was trying to figure out how I felt about initiating a conversation and perhaps even a renewed friendship.

So when my Garmin beeped and beckoned me out of my introspection, and I noticed the little pace notice flashing at me, you can imagine my surprise to find that I was running the fastest splits I'd ever run on the Silence of the Lambs trail. Even on the uphill stretch, even on the last mile of the 4 mile run, I was getting faster! Don't believe me? Here are the official splits.

I know that seems glacial to most of you... but for me, it's pretty flipping fantastic. It was a great run. And it came at just the right time, too. After Sunday's debacle, I desperately needed a running pick-me-up.