Go, you chicken fat, go away!

It felt nice today.  Just a nice recovery run.

Happy Independance Day.  I ran with Herbie today.  He did all right for the most part.  I had to tug on the leash a couple of times.  I finally let him have a break when we reached the Canal.  Surprisingly, he went chest deep into the Canal.  He won't even get in the swimming pool.    Speaking of swimming pool, I then spent an hour cleaning it so that it would be ready for the day.    I took most of the day off from work and spent a lot of time splashing around with my family.

I got up a few minutes after 5am this morning.  I was anxious to get a few miles in while it was still relatively cool.  But then I had a thought.  What if nobody cleaned up that mess we made in the cul de sac last night with all the fireworks?  Sure enough it was a mess.  At least the big stuff was picked up, but there was little papers all over the place.  I fed the animals, grabbed a broom and dust pan, and got to work.  I finally was able to run at 6:30am and I had already worked up a pretty good sweat.  But that's ok.  I need to since I took another cheat day yesterday.  I felt pretty good.  Maybe from all the carbs I had that I'm not used to consuming for the last few months.  Nothing too exciting happened other than seeing a couple of sketchy looking dudes by the Floodway.

It was just straight up hot this morning.  I left about 6am.  My legs are sore.  Should they be this sore?  Nope.  Unless it was all that street sweeping I did yesterday.  Anyway I got to almost Brown Road and I saw a zanjero truck driving down the Canal.  As I turned the corner I saw half of a watermelon that had been halfway eaten.  I was really admiring it when I heard a woman's voice call out.  I looked around expecting to see someone by the Canal.  But then I heard the voice again, and she was calling my name, and she was behind me.  It was my wife on her walk!  I was not expecting to see her there.  So we smooched.

Another early morning with Mike out at Usery Pass.  It was 94º already at 4:30am.  Despite my best efforts yesterday to baby and stretch my left calf muscle, it was still quite sore this morning and I questioned my ability to do this run.  I figured I'd just have to give it a try.  As soon as I started it immediately began to hurt.  But I just changed my stride slightly, and I was able to go, albeit slower than last week.  I could tell because Mike was putting some serious distance between us, whereas last week I managed to stay in sight of him for quite some time.  Anyway, it was hot, too, so that was another reason for me being slower.  I always have to talk myself into not turning around before I get to the top.  It was so hot that there weren't very many bikers out.  I didn't see the first two until 2.7 miles in to my run.  I counted a total of 7.  On the way down I saw one of them coming uphill towards me, but then I noticed he wasn't pedaling.  He had an electric bike.  So he doesn't count.  6.  The last half mile always seems to be the hardest because I'm tired, thirsty, and the slope starts to level out.  I was glad to be done.  The sun broke the horizon at 5:37am.
 

Less than 20 miles to go before I can retire my shoes.  They're long overdue.  Anyway, I usually use RunKeeper to track my run, but today I decided, for no particular reason, to use Strava.  But as I was running, I realized more people see my Strava workouts, and I didn't want everyone to see how slow I am, so I tried to go faster.  That lasted for about a mile.  Today is a weigh in day, so I did 3 loops.  The Floodway and Canal paths run at a diagonal and they intersect with the intersection of Main St. and Higley.  As I was approaching the intersection, I saw a guy riding his bike down the sidewalk.  He had a Gatorade in his hand and a duffel bag on the back of his bike.  The duffel bag fell off and he cruised to a stop.  I decided to be a good Samaritan and pick it up for him.  Holy heavy!  I think it might have been everything he owned.  Also, I may have broken the zipper.  It rained last night while I was sleeping, so today was very humid.  I was very sweaty when it was all said and done.

Got up at 3:30am again for another Usery Pass run with Mike.  It was humid again.  I was ready early and went outside to wait for him.  I was sweating just sitting there.  As we were heading north towards our destination we saw some lightning bolts.  They never got too close.  I left a few seconds before Mike.  He caught me just before the intersection.  I was feeling pretty good this morning.  After the first half mile, the road curves.  Then it stays straight for another half mile before curving again.  After that it gets progressively more curvy.  That's why I usually lose track of people I'm running with around 2 miles.  But today I was able to see Mike right up until 2.75 miles.  Then I thought I lost him for good, but I saw him once more at 3.25 miles.  He was coming back when I was about a quarter of a mile from the top.  That means he was only ahead of me by half a mile.  When we do the 9.2 mile loop, he's usually ahead of me by a mile.  He said, "Good job, Burt."  Some good job Burt's mean, "I see you struggling, but I know you can do it!"  And some mean, "Wow!  You're really doing good today."  I could tell that his good job Burt was the latter.  When I turned around there was a nice breeze.  With the cloud cover I never saw the sun break the horizon.  But there was a little sliver of a rainbow.  It made me think my mom had died.  Luckily, she's still alive.
 

I wanted to get another long run in this morning since it's a weigh in day.  Next week is the final weigh in.  As I was heading west towards the Floodway I could see that it was raining hard in the West Valley.  It also appeared to be raining in North Phoenix and Scottsdale.  No sooner had I turned in to the Floodway when I felt some cold drops on my arm.  Even though the cloud cover wasn't very dense, there was a light sprinkle.  I looked in the western sky again and saw another partial rainbow.  Then the light sprinkle became a light rain.  It felt prettygood.  I think it made me feel overly good as I was running faster than usual.  The rain stayed there all the way until half way through my second loop when I turned to head north.  That's when the faster pace caught up with me and I decided three loops would be enough.  I'm down about 33 pounds.

I'm getting a little faster.

I tried running yesterday, but I got about 40 yards down the road when my knee started to hurt.  I said, "Nope.  Not today."  Today I took it nice and easy to baby it.  It felt all right.  It was also very humid again, and I was soaked to the bone in my own sweat.  I saw some of my regulars today.  The old man that looks like he runs real slow, but in reality probably runs the same pace I do.  The lady that throws the stick in the Canal for her dog to fetch. Et cetera.  Et cetera.

My alarm went off at 3:30am this morning, but I somehow knew in my deepest subconscious that Mike was out of town, and we weren't going running today.  I managed to turn it off and went back to sleep.  I woke up again around 5:00am and witnessed a fantastic lightning storm going on outside.  Nope.  No running in that.  I stayed awake and finally went running around 8:00am.  It was still cloudy out and felt nice.  I decided to run to the top of the RWCD Canal, which, as you can see, is a 7.3 mile round trip.  It took me 2 miles to be completely drenched in my own sweat.  Well, 2 miles until my shirt was completely saturated.  And the sweat kept coming.  I saw a few other runners out today, too.  I saw an RWCD zanjero at the 1/2 lateral.  I didn't stop to say hi.  There's a little hill at the turn around point that I ran down, touched the fence, and ran back up.  But when I got to the top, I stopped for a potty break.  I don't usually do that.  As I was heading back south I realized that I was not going to make it home before the sun came out from the clouds.  Right around mile 5 is when it poked its head out.  The warm rays started pushing the cooler air around, and it actually made a nice little breeze for a little bit.  But then it warmed up, and the sweat kept flowing.  I slowed down a lot those last two miles.  I thought about calling my wife to come get me, but I talked myself out of it.  If I can do this, I'll have no problem next Friday doing the Ragnar Chase the Moon.
 

Saturday's run caused me to get a painful blister on the bottom of my left foot.  Probably a combination of the long run and the new shoes.  Anyway, I wanted a long run today because it's the last weigh-in of the weight loss challenge, but 3.73 would have to suffice.  After Saturday's run where I lost quite a bit of weight, I ate too much the rest of the day.  So I'm about 7 lbs heavier than I was Saturday.  Which sucks, but oh well.

Even though Friday's Ragnar event will just be a liesurely 6.7 miles, I'm playing it safe by taking it easy this week.
 

Ragnar #27.  This was a special event run hosted by Ragnar for some charitable cause.  My buddy Mike and I signed up for it.  You know Mike.  The guy I run Usery with every Saturday morning.  Anyway, we thought we were supposed to run at midnight, but I read through the website and it just said to run under the moon and stars.  So we decided to run at 10pm instead.  However, it was still 98º out.  Maybe we should've waited until midnight.  Mike had mapped out a course that would be just under 8 miles.  We were only supposed to do 6.7, but we were feeling ambitious in the extreme heat.  I guess.  We parked in a Walgreen's parking lot on Power and McKellips.  The route was to run 1 mile north to McDowell, 3 miles east to Usery (Ellsworth), 0.8 miles back to McKellips (McDowell curves), then 3 miles back to the parking lot.  We had our reflective vests, head lamps, and blinky red LED butt lamps.  We got to the stop light together and Mike immediately took off.  He wanted to break an hour.  I did not.  After a quarter of a mile I realized I couldn't see Mike anymore.  How could he have gotten so far ahead of me so fast???  Then all of the sudden I see this light behind me and I realize it's Mike.  He stopped to tinkle.  He got ahead of me again, but the nice thing was that since the road is mostly straight, I could see his butt lamp for most of the time.  The first half is al uphill.  Strava says there was a 318 foot elevation gain, so not terrible, but at night in the heat, I took it nice and slow.  I really felt like I had picked the pace up once I turned the corner and started the downhill, and I did, but I was surprised at how slow my pace was.  Oh well.  7.8 miles seems like a lot to me lately, but I felt great.

It was so humid out this morning.