I got in 37 miles this weekend, I believe my #2 weekend, volume-wise, ever, behind only the weekend I ran the White River 50 miler last year. And I gotta say I’m sort of surprised that I really don’t feel all that destroyed, especially considering I hadn’t really prepped myself with anything close to 37 miles in the preceding weeks. I know injuries don’t typically occur overnight, unless you dart out into the middle of traffic and get hit by a car, in which case you probably shouldn’t have been running in the first place, so maybe pain is on the way. Maybe not. I’m just surprised I feel the same today (Tuesday) as I did one week ago, after only about a 26-27 mile weekend.

Saturday I did 24 miles in Discovery Park with Patrick and Katie, doing Patrick’s custom ~6 mile loop 4 times (though changing direction each time around, so it was more like a 2 x 12 mile loop). I hadn’t been to Discovery since we moved to West Seattle, so that was a nice little reunion, aided by what was more or less perfect weather.

About 24 hours later I did a little over 13 miles around the cold hard streets of West Seattle, this time accompanied by only my shuffle and a water bottle. Fearing how fatigued I’d feel, I actually quickly found that I felt ok and held an 8:00 pace or so quite easily, ending the run more out of caution than any sort of overwhelming need/desire to stop. Iced while spending the next 30 minutes primping for the pre-Oscars preshow. I can’t believe that one guy won.

Tonight I was back on the (beautiful) track, thankful the rain we’d be promised by the dice-rolling weathermen decided to sleep in. Last week I added a mile to my 4×1 mile workout and cut the rest a bit. This week I added another mile, did them in three sets (aka 3×2 mile) and kept the rest rate the same (400m jog, or 2:00, after each set of 2 miles, instead of last week’s 200m jog after each individual mile). Goal was to be between 11:50 and 11:59.

Set 1: 11:54 (5:56/5:58), 2:00 jog rest
Set 2: 11:51 (5:56/5:55), 2:00 jog rest
Set 3: 11:40 (5:57/5:43)
Total: 6 miles, 35:25 (5:54 pace)
Including rest jogs, 6.5 miles in 39:25 (6:04 pace)

The soccer guys were in full effect, the bench players loitering as far out as lane 3, almost daring me to confront them…of course I didn’t. In the middle of my 2nd set their game ended, so while they had an entire soccer field to use while they changed out of their uniforms and discussed their lame lives, lamely, most seemed content to use lanes 1 and 2. Then on the final straightaway of my last lap (the 26th of the evening), some guy almost spit on me, allegedly not hearing me approach him. Are people fucking retarded? I had passed this guy at least three times before, and it’s not like I’m not some lightweight out there, my feet & legs pound like a buffalo’s when I’m on a track, and I’m wheezing like an old man having an asthma attack. How can you not hear me coming?

Good to be done though, and the gf had beef and sweet potatoes ready to eat when I returned, so what the hell am I complaining about.

I fear I will soon take for granted the beautiful track that sits no more than a 1:40 slow jog from my house. I’m estimating I could sprint from my front door to the 8th lane in less than 60 seconds. (did I just remind you of that delightful Jolie/Cage summer romp? I’m sorry. No I’m not.). Soon enough I’ll forget how lucky I am, and will be snapped back to reality when the presently-vacated high school across the street returns to normal use (sometime this summer, I believe), and the track/field is inundated with high school football players and 15 year-old guys awkwardly trying to stuff their hand down their gf’s back pocket (I know I might be dating myself with that line…if in 2010 this doesn’t really happen anymore, or it does, but for kids much younger than 15, then please feel free to take “gf’s back pocket” as meaning, umm…something else).

In the meantime though I can use it for my own gain, during speed workouts I might otherwise half-ass. At times my motivation to do those really hard workouts, when alone, can be close enough to paper-thin. Not cutting short solo track workouts used to be harder than the actual workouts themselves, this fact not made any easier by the then-far greater distance & time required after the workout to get home. Now, it’s barely anything. Sure, it isn’t prudent to take a mere 90 second cooldown after pushing myself as hard as Tuesday evenings typically ask, but almost being able to see our upstairs lights in the distance keeps me honest. I can push a little harder since home is just a stone’s throw away. And by the time the workout is over, I’m so relieved to be done that an actual cooldown doesn’t sound so bad after all.

That the track itself is nearly as ideal a rank amateur such as I can hope to use is almost besides the point. All-weather, it’s runnable rain or shine, with stadium lights on or off (only difference being it’s easier to read the splits in the light). There’s oftentimes a soccer game or something going on inside the track, but the track itself, ever since the rugby squad a month or so ago decided to give up ever getting to use this field, is mostly abandoned, save for the soccer players’ ugly bags which sometimes litter a tiny fraction of lanes 1 & 2. The field turf inside the track, with just enough room outside the soccer field boundaries, is wonderful for barefoot strides/drills. And then there are those occasional evenings when there’s nothing scheduled on the track, and I’m free to use the entire football field for my drills, the entire track for my reps.  It’s as close as I’ll ever be to being Ryan Hall, my own personal track facility in, more or less, my own backyard. But I forgot to pay my latest electricity bill and the city cut out my lights. Still cool.

Two Tuesdays ago I did 4×1 mile, planning on starting around 6:00/mile and cutting ~10 seconds off each one thereafter. 2 minutes of walking rest in between.

Mile 1: 5:52 (IIRC the opening 800 split was 2:52, whoops)
Mile 2: 5:47
Mile 3: 5:38
Mile 4: 5:23

Last night I wanted to add another mile but tighten up the reigns, keep every mile in between 5:50 and 6:00, and this time only 1 minute slow-jog rest (basically, jog 200m to the opposite side). So there would be no stopping at all.

Mile 1: 5:56
Mile 2: 5:54
Mile 3: 5:54
Mile 4: 5:54
Mile 5: 5:43

5 miles in 29:21 – 5:52 pace. All told, including the 1:00 jogs, it was a 6:04 pace (5.5 miles in 33:21).

That’s a lot of laps on a track. 22 all told, consecutively. On the first two reps I dutifully checked my watch every 400m. To keep me focused though, on the 3rd one I only checked after 800m, on the 4th rep I only looked after 1200m, and I didn’t look at all on the 5th. That’s how we keep things crunk in the KC.

You can always count on the rich white guys to best relate to the plights of the middle class/poor/not rich white guys.

One of the sharpest areas of philosophical disagreement between Mr. Obama and the Republicans emerged when Senator John Barrasso, the Wyoming Republican who is also an orthopedic surgeon, contended that Americans would make better, less costly health care choices if they had catastrophic insurance coverage that required them to pay for most services out of pocket.

Mr. Obama asked if he would prefer that members of Congress have only catastrophic coverage; the senator said he would. “That’s right, because members of Congress make $176,000 a year,” Mr. Obama replied, adding that he wondered whether Mr. Barrasso would feel the same way if he earned only $40,000.

[nyt]

On an unrelated note, Barasso is also opposed to gay marriage. He believes in “traditional family values”.

Yet he’s a divorcé. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But…I presume at his wedding he took a vow, right? Which he broke. Therefore I can’t trust this guy any further than I can throw him.

“Well with your bad shin Joe you shouldn’t throw anybody.”

It’s weird…when I listen to cheesy late 90s/early 00s trance, I often get the urge to write. To purge thoughts. Subject doesn’t matter. Just open notepad and start typing as the repetitive 140bpm and painfully saccharine female vocals are fired into my ears. “Well, then please turn off the trance,” I can hear some of my wittier friends requesting in a mostly demanding tone. Ahaha, I get it, good one!

I’m simply guessing it’s nothing more than positive association, in the same way that Journey’s “Raised on Radio“, one of the most “average” albums ever made, takes me back to the halcyon days of youth I can only now make crude attempts to recreate. In my college days, when electronic music like this was actually “new” and you actually had to, you know, go to the store and buy it because it wasn’t popular enough to have much of a presence on Napster, I was a fledgling “coder”. For a wiffleball website. I was terrible but I loved it. College school work, as well as a healthy social life, were typically set aside in favor of privately listening to Radio1 broadcasts and Seb Fontaine CDs (or whichever ones my brother could procure for free from his internship at The Synthesis) while very slowly constructing online temples to immaturity, available for all to see. To relax on a Friday night, my fellow students might head to the frat party and do keg stands. The older professors might sit at home by the fire, nursing old scotch, looking forward to Saturday where they’d give my latest attempt at a film critique essay another C+. That’s what old professors do, right? While wearing a tweed jacket? Younger professors might be heading incognito to the same frat party as their students, pockets full of roofies and vd. I though was perfectly content to sit alone in my room (or Mark’s on the 38% chance my cpu was on the fritz, team up with Dreamweaver, and write really bad code. Take a break, walk down to Tacos De maybe, come back for more. None of us were being productive in any way (aside from maybe the frat partygoer, in the sense of possibly conceiving a mildly drunk child), and we were all happy in our own ways.

Today as a 30 year-old, other than the fact I’m no longer expected to prowl after women and/or drink specials on the weekend, it isn’t much different. And though I’ve given up on “writing code” as anything more than an occasional distraction from the real world, I wouldn’t say I’m any better off. I now “write blog posts” when the BPMs hit 140. Like the code, also written kinda poorly and oftentimes hastily. Also not as often as I’d really prefer. And it’s still nothing I’d call productive or worthwhile, but like the wiffleball website, at least I’ll have something to look back on in 20 years. I imagine being old and retired might get somewhat boring after awhile. in 2050, after I check out the 50 year old plastic baseball website and read some embarrassing blog posts from 40 years ago, I wonder how I’ll pass the time. And how will the late 90s trance have held up?

The past [x] weeks I’ve been doing either 800s or 400s (or some combination) on Tuesday nights at the track near my house. Tonight I decided to take a break from that mess and just see what I could do with a 20 minute tempo run. I figure I should be sitting around 6:00 miles. During non-track tempo runs, that’s usually what I’d be hitting, but I was in better shape back then. Give me a track and track shoes and I figure that’s worth about 10 seconds per mile.

With a coed soccer game going on next to me, I started with a too fast 85 first lap (5:40 pace). I backed off a bit but still crossed the first mile in 5:45. Normally I would be dreading the inevitable collapse, but part of me felt I could hang on for another 14:15. To be safe, I backed off further and hit 5:53 for the 2nd mile (11:38 total) and felt confident I could at the very least maintain that for the final mileish. Especially since I was well over halfway done. I tried to ignore the watch for the 3rd mile and crossed in 17:26 overall (5:48 for mile 3) and then tried to ramp it up for the final two and a half minutes. I figured this would be not quite half a mile, so I decided to just run 3.5 miles to keep it even and stop the watch however much after 20 minutes that took. Upon completing the 14th lap, I stopped. 20:15, giving me a 2:49 for the final half mile, 5:38 mile pace. While I admit I was probably running closer to 100% capacity than a tempo run usually requires (~90% effort?), it’s probably par for the course as far as MY normal tempo effort. And I definitely think I could have fairly easily gone maybe another mile at sub-6:00 pace. So call it better than expected.

The soccer game provided a not-atypical annoyance. First and foremost is watching guys give 110% and dominate somewhat overmatched women. Which I know might make me seem, unintentionally, misogynistic. I understand but I can’t help it. And everytime I see it, I wrestle with the contradiction. Aren’t the guys being fair by giving the women 110%? Sure, the women aren’t scoring and are being shoved around, but why would they want the guys to let up? Who likes being patronized?

Anyway, there are oftentimes soccer games going on, or some other event like maybe a rugby club practice to distract me from my pain. As I said before, tonight it was another soccer game, and as it often the case, at some point in my tempo run, a ball gets kicked out of bounds and rolls somewhat close by me. This time it happened around the 17 minute mark, where I was in a zone of struggle, and the ball got booted somewhat behind me. Yes, if I was quick with my reflexes and stopped my run completely, I might have been able to catch/stop it for them. But uhh…sorry, I’m not stopping. It doesn’t even enter my mind to stop. And those of you who are runners might be thinking “of course not, why stop? Let them get their own ball.” But that’s because you’re a runner. And if you are a runner, you can probably guess that I did indeed hear a couple sarcastic comments of “thanks” coming from the peanut gallery. And of course these comments came from male mouths. Of course. What do you want me to do, fellas? Completely pause my workout, which is going awesome and is 85% done (and really hurts), just because your flabby goalie is too goddamn lazy to jog 100 feet to fetch a ball? I’m working here, you guys play rock-paper-scissors and see who has to burn the 7 calories. And then chew out your female teammate who couldn’t cash in on that breakaway goal.

Later I was at the gym lifting (if you wanna call it that, I do!), getting annoyed this time at the guys who refuse to rack their weights. “Ok, just finished benching 275…goodbye.”

Ok men’s figure skating is over so it’s time for bed.