more off-season crap
Welcome to the off-season! Please leave your bicycle outside.
I've made a lot of training decisions in the past few days. After hearing from a few people that they were doing thirty runs of thirty minutes (or longer) in thirty days, I've decided to join them AND make my own rules. So here they are. I will run thirty different times this month. A run/walk counts if I do even a few minutes of running as long as I am moving for thirty minutes. I will take days off whenever I need them (cough yesterday cough). I will double up a few times to make up for the days off (cough today cough). If a run is longer than thirty minutes, I will count the time towards the grand total of thirty minutes multiplied by thirty times at the end of the month (i.e. leave myself a giant loophole for all the days I skip). I will not wear a watch, a heart rate monitor or any other electronics while doing these runs. I will run with friends at their pace as often as possible. I will NOT let this be something that stresses me out and if I give up on it halfway through the month, well, that will be just fine because no one cares but me anyway.
That said, so far I've run five of the six days this month (every day except yesterday) and every run has been at least thirty minutes long. I'm not wearing a watch so I am mostly guessing at the time, but I have a 3.2 mile loop from my house that I am sure I'm not running in under thirty minutes and I've done that for five of my six runs so far. I'll do that sucker until next TUESDAY (write it down, everyone that keeps asking) when I pack up all my shit and drive for three days to my new home which has actually turned out to be a lot further away than I recall from fourth grade geography class.. And then I'm going to spend thirty minutes a day for the rest of the month stamping my little foot and being really crabby about how inadequate my red blood cells are.
My eating habits have slowly been returning to normal (i.e. healthy food about 90% of the time, maybe with a little more booze than what is normal). I had more than five servings of fruits and vegetables yesterday, and two of those servings were spinach so I can go back to feeling pretentious about my diet for a little while. At some point, I'm going to actually get up when my alarm goes off and go to the pool instead of hitting snooze and reading blogs until it's time to go to work, but I'm also not worrying about it.
I was sort of planning on jumping into either a half marathon or a full marathon (I KNOW) this weekend, but I've decided not to. The biggest reason is so that I can spend some time with my husband instead of tromping all over the state for two days. I was planning on running without a watch and just for fun, but now that I'm staying put I might jump in something else, or I might stop stressing myself out with unnecessary races and just clean my house over and over so someone will want to buy it. And I learned recently that a cross-country move is supposed to involve packing (rude) so I should probably start doing that before 6am Tuesday morning.
A totally unrelated short story that no one cares about but me. I have never voted, except for in the fake election when I was in seventh grade, and I'm pretty sure I voted for the middle school winner, Ross Perot. I'm actually a little bit embarrassed that I haven't been since then, but I'm going today. When my husband abused me for being a woman and setting feminism back ninety years by not voting ever, I explained to him that it is more important to me that women have the CHOICE to vote than they exercise that choice and go voting. He was still pretty skeptical about it, and he lets me train him for marathons so I am making the enormous effort to walk less than a half-mile down the street this afternoon (I tried to go this AM before work but the line was too long, so I did my first thirty-ish minute run of the day instead) (And yes this is a bizarre reason to vote but I don't look inside your marriage and call it weird so just calm down). I don't really feel strongly about politics, but I do have an opinion so I am going to go vote. And that's all I have to say that.
(This is a picture of my red blood cells being inadequate, in case you didn't know).
