Go, you chicken fat, go away!

I ran the regular loop this morning.  I was up earlier than usual because I had to bring my boy to the "alternative" school.  He's not happy.  Anyway, our washing machine is on the fritz, and we can only wash real small loads, so I was down to my last pair of shorts.  (Yep, I can still wear shorts here even at 6 in the morning.)  I didn't bring my "watch" with me to time myself this morning since I planned on taking it nice and easy because it's my first run since the race.  My "watch" is and has been for a while now my cell phone.  I usually start running as soon as it changes from one minute to the next.  Then as soon as I finish I start counting seconds in my head until it changes from one minute to the next.  I figure I could be off by as much as 6 seconds or so depending on how much counting I have to do.  But on a 3 mile run that amounts to only 2 seconds per mile, and that's close enough for me.  I've seen in our internet history that my wife has been doing searches for Garmins.  So I may be getting one of those for my upcoming birthday and/or Christmas.  That'll be nice.  Back to the run:  I think I was going at a pretty good pace regardless of how easy I wanted to take it.  One thing that was slowing me down was my last pair of shorts.  There's no draw string.  So I had to worry about keeping them up all the time.  I didn't worry too much because it was dark out.  I tucked my shirt in hoping that would add a little more friction.  Then I rolled them over once.  I ended up rolling them over three times.  I should've rolled them from the get go.  No one would have seen how dorky I looked in the dark.  All in all the run felt good.  I was glad to see that I didn't put on too much weight with all the holiday feasting I've been doing lately.

Time: 24:36 (8:22 pace)

I thought I was running faster, but I guess not.  It was dark and I passed these two ladies.  I hope I didn't freak them out too much.  No Garmin for the birthday.  Maybe Christmas.

I did the first 5 miles in about 44 minutes. (8:48 pace)  Then I felt a pain in my knee so I immediately stopped.  I walked about 0.15 miles until it didn't hurt anymore, then ran the rest of the way home.