Somehow I got my ass out of bed at 6:30 AM without having made prior plans with a horde of other runners as motivation. Then I got passed by a chick on my shakeout jog.
Getting up early led to me being exceedingly tired at work all day. But then I realized - it doesn't matter how tired I am at work because it actually requires zero cognitive functioning. If Art asks me a question, I can just say, "I dunno," and after I do that five or six times he stops asking. Then I can just type emails and read mindlessly in zombie mode. Not that this is an especially good thing, but it's possible, anyway.
I forgot my watch in the evening, and based my time off the clock on the wall of the gym (which was closed at 6pm - since when is December 30 a holiday?). I didn't even check how long I'd been going until a bit past 70 minutes, so I wound up getting in a good solid evening run, feeling great.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008 (20 am, 70 pm)
Weekly Summary: 12/22/08 - 12/28/08 (355 minutes, no workouts)
I missed two days that I planned on running, which was disappointing. But other than that things went well. I got in four runs longer than 70 minutes, with a 100 minute long run. I'll be returning to California tomorrow morning, where hopefully I can nail my schedule down more effectively.
The plan for next week is to increase minutage by doing more total runs, and to get in a long tempo.
Sunday, December 28, 2008 (75 minutes)
Cruised my neighborhood for the last time this winter. I ran at night, as I have a several other times this week. I prefer to run during the day, but I'm terrible at adjusting my schedule so that I'm sleeping at the right times. I stayed up all through the night more times that I stayed up all through the day this break.
Saturday, December 27, 2008 (100 minutes)
Surprisingly, I didn't break or rip anything by running this long on the roads. I was feeling sufficiently tired near the end to think it was a good solid long run. I'll be glad to get back on the grass in a couple of days.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008 (30 minutes)
My parents gave me a pair of Nike Free's for my birthday (Dec. 3, and therefore close enough that it's not worth shipping something across the US when I'll be home soon anyway), which I wore running for the first time today. About three miles out, some sort of tendon-like thing on the bottom of my left foot had a few twangs of pain, so I decided not to wear the Free's for real runs for a while, and came back. I hadn't run over 70 minutes for three consecutive days in a while, so an off day isn't go to hurt anything right now.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008 (75 minutes)
Stalked around the streets near my house. I realized now wouldn't be a good time to start running twice a day, since the ground is frozen, and short of some fairly extreme measures my viable option right now is to run all my milage on the roads. I felt fine, though.
Monday, December 22, 2008 (75 minutes)
Kangway may have been slightly startled when I arrested him in his doorway, grasped his shoulders, and screamed, "I can't stop farting!" His advice was to open a window, but I couldn't make the connection with how this would prevent my unwanted gas.
I left for the Gold Line station around 1:10am this morning, not having slept. There should have been two more trains that night, according to the schedule I found online. I spent three quarters an hour standing alone under the halogen lights, feeling the heat radiating from my newly-shaven head and trying to focus on the book hovering in front of my face. I turned the pages less-and-less nimbly as my unprotected fingers solidified. Finally I adopted a nervous pacing, all the time seeing no one but the fantom, unmoving person at the far end of the platform, which turned out, upon inspection, to be a coincidental juxtaposition of a pole and a head-high flesh-colored call box. That is, no one except the guy who started peeing in the bushes by CVS ten meters away when I had paced a bit too far and disappeared temporarily from his field of view. All this time I farted.
The Metro abandoned, I called a cab, and continued my pacing on the sidewalk outside our complex, trying to tease out the precise relationship between my flatulence rate and the vigor of my stride in the fifteen minutes past the set rendezvous time it took the cab to arrive.
Sitting in the airport before the security checkpoint opened, significantly poorer from the cab ride and increasingly exhausted from staying up all night, I resolved not to eat anything for the entire day of traveling, since if there's only a set amount of material in there for my intestines to work with, eventually they'll just have to give up when there's nothing left to gasify.
The plane itself was the worst, since, with farting, you're basically fine as long as you can keep moving (as Ian, I think it was, once pointed out to me). Ironic that I could move around the least while going the fastest.
By the time I arrived home in Baltimore, not having eaten in 15 hours, the farting attack that had lasted at least a day was puffing out its last gasps. Running on fumes.
Fine, but it wasn't running time. It was dinner time - the first time in a year the whole family had assembled. And in my honor, the entree was sauerbraten - my boyhood favorite. After not eating for fifteen hours, my mom is laying before my a pile of the thick, juicy, week-long marinated beef, with a taste and smell (I could smell!) so powerful it threatened to tip from flavor to pure pungency. The side dish, traditional for us, was dumplings fried in butter, along with sourdough bread, salad, peas, and wine. Dessert of cheesecake, ice cream, cookies. This was where I found myself an hour before I intended to run.
"I remember the way you used to be able to eat when you were a teenager," said my mom, when I somehow refused seconds on the huge gobs of beef and dumplings.
But I made it through. The food actually seemed to quell the gastric uprising inside me, and I went out for a solid 75 minutes through that biting, still layer of air between the crunching ground and the intermittent, flickering streetlights. It was pretty nice. Out here you can see the stars.
Sunday, December 21, 2008 (90 minutes)
Long on the south field. I started running from the house, and finished my 90 on the south field so I could go lift afterwards. This left me stuck at the gym, so I had to run an extra mile and a half to get home, which adds up to a pretty good amount of foot travel today. This will be my last barefoot running for a week or so, since the ground in Baltimore is likely frozen, or near it.
My plan for next week is to run doubles, without worrying about speed. I'll throw in some striders when so inclined, but mostly I want to get my body and mind back into believing that they're going to be taking this thing seriously again.