Patience; the new endurance sport.

They closed off about .5 of the trail right outside of my house. I went out and there was a 'Road Closed' sign.  There was also a sign about improvements to the trail, including a bridge off Lakeshore Drive.  Improvements? As long as you consider more traffic in the neighborhood and on the trail, an underpass that freezes and floods like all the rest, a bathroom so drug addicts, and gay people can find each other late at night.  Yes, most excellent "improvments".   I can not even tell you how inconvenient this whole winter training thing has been, and now they've shut down my trail--MY trail.  So now I'll have to run in and out of the neighborhood--in front of the neighbors. 

9:43/9:27/8:39/8:46/8:23/9:07/9:25/9:45  I wanted to pretend I could do a Tempo run.  So the idea for today was to run 3 miles at race pace in the middle.  I thought 8:23 would kill me.  Good think I was by myself breathing like a polar bear and rolling my eyes as I forced the pace. The AP for the whole run was 9:08.  I'll take it, it sure beats the 9:40's I'm cranking out lately.  Still I need to do some more interval running to improve that average pace and make the race pace get easier.  I wonder if this will get easier when it's warmer, or if I'm just doomed to train with tight everything and iron lung/frozen face.  I'm just hoping for no injuries--really that should be my goal right now.  My knees are a little stiff with all the skiing lately--but it stregthens the quads, which is good for the knees.  Regardless, I can feel that I'm totally gonna need new ones in a few years.  I know how to stretch/strenthen everything else--but I just don't think there is anyway around wearing down your knees after a while.

When I reread my blog entries it's embarrassing the number of misspellings, type-O's, and errors I commit like: your vs. you're.  I am the luckiest sloppy person alive.  How I have been able to accomplish this much in my life, graduate college, get married, have children, and hold a job when I can't even keep “there” and “their” straight is a testament to the kindness of mankind.  I don't even bother editing my FRB entries. Someday,  I'll look back and begin to track when I started totally losing my mind via the crescendo of mental deterioration made visible by the number of grammatical and syntactical errors here.  Maybe it's the whole internet age/ blogging/email informality that has replaced my training in written and spoken communication.  I’m afraid it’s indicative of my overall mental strength.  The stress I felt over crying babies/small children literally changed and retrained my listening skills to the point that 10 years later people can talk to my face and I still can’t ‘hear’ what they are saying and have to ask them to repeat themselves.  And then I quickly forget what they said—particularly if there were relaying instructions of any kind.  The frantic pace at which we all need and have instant (hasty) information shared via texts/email/wikepedia/google has created in me a frantic sloppiness that has completely replaced my BA in English.  9:30/9:27/9:08/8:54/9:19/9:23

9:35 av -- I was so not feeling it this morning. I gave myself permission to run at lunch time up the canyon.  I brought my gear to work and took off from my office.  It was bleak & sunny when I left wearing a base layer tank& sweats, w/one of my long sleeved marathon shirts (w/light gloves & hat).  A mile later, I'd peeled off my long sleeve shirt and ran in just my tank top, gloves & hat.  It was the most comfortable run I've had in a long time. Got my Vitamin D for the day for sure! Too bad the run was only so-so. I ran up past my favorite water fountain where the water runs so sweet and cold at the mouth of the canyon.  I didn't have a lot of energy to push it up or down the hill, but it was life-changing to be outside with bare arms in the sun.

I am so low enegry right now. I'm just barely hanging in there this morning.  Ran 4 miles and am blogging about it in spite of being in a hurry to get out the door for this weekend after I laid awake most of the night worried we were all dying of botchulism...you heard me, botchulism.  I let my 13 year old make dinner.  After we'd eaten, I congratulated her good work, and asked what she put in the spaghetti sauce (it tasted a little funny).  She replied "I don't know but the can was shaped weird and it sort of hissed for a while as I opened it.  It tasted funny.'  So I'm sitting at the table, all of us having fully ingested anaerobic microbial bacteria from canned tomatoes.  Fabulous.  Guess what the best part is?  Go ahead, guess.....neurological symptoms take 3-10 days to manifest.  And they are incurable.  I love having botchulism, it's so much more exciting that regular old salmonilla or listeria.  I get to talk to poision control every day for the next week.  It reminds me of when my daughter put a castor bean in her mouth she plucked from the sumac plants that grow behind our house in San Diego.  They look just like pinto bean once you peel them out of that prickley red ball. Why do we always have to get ricin and botchulism? So if I start seeing double, or if my son's eyelids droop, or my daughter has trouble speaking and we all end up in ICU, you'll know why I stopped blogging :)