you always knew to wear it well
I'm coming out of my "omg thesis" mode a little - I did laundry and cleaned the bathroom today as well as organizing a handful of notes and grading the rest of my students' papers. I'm sure I'll fully relax back into general productivity right about the time I get this draft back from my committee and start revising. I'm trying to milk this brief break for all it's worth, basically.
The days that it's warm and/or sunny (I can put up with slightly lower temperatures if there's sun pouring down on me), I've been running, and it's been going really well. I say this next bit with the caveat that I'm not really in shape and haven't been for years and even when I was competitive I wasn't a distance runner; I was a sprinter. I have a three mile path through my neighborhood marked off that I run, and my average time is currently about three minutes better than it was last semester. Personal best (don't laugh at me) is 3 miles in 31 minutes. And I know a ten minute mile is nothing to brag about x.x More than the speed, though, is the simple issue of pace. Again, I was a competitive sprinter; making the transition from 200 yard dash to 3 mile run is ... difficult. It's something I've been working on for the last six years, so really I should be better at it, but it's been very difficult for me to accommodate running with the regularity that I want in my schedule. Still, I love it.
*examines how far off-track this paragraph has gotten*
I was aiming at a totally different statement here. In the past month-ish, I've finally hit a point of *feeling* the pace I need to be maintaining, which is, I think, contributing considerably to my improving times. There's a difference (for me at least) in knowing a pace in terms of "2 blocks should take a minute and fifteen seconds" and feeling in my muscles how hard I need to be pushing to achieve that time. I'm not entirely sure what finally clicked into place, but I thought of it about a month ago as a "wolf pace" - as in, wolves have this ground-devouring gait that doesn't exhaust them and that they can maintain for ridiculous amounts of time. It's clearly running, not walking, but it's gentle in a way. Something about the image of wolves in the snow somehow translated directly into muscle effort, and it all came together for me. And it's stuck nearly perfectly since then - I now think of it as "wolf pace" and "cat pace", the steady endurance lope and the stretching-my-legs, chasing-the-wind speed I let myself use three or four times while I'm out. Sprints still make me happier; throwing myself forward without regard for conserving my strength or breath is just ... it fills me with joy. I find myself grinning fiercely at nothing while I run. But the ease that I'm now developing with the longer run/slower pace is a different kind of comfort, where I can feel tiredness that isn't exhaustion ebb and flow at the edges of my energy.
In other trivial-things-no-one-cares-about news, I ran out of shampoo yesterday and washed my hair with my Bath and Body Works sandalwood rose body wash, which I was really nervous about because my hair gets stupidly oily if I don't clean it adequately. But my hair has been super soft and silky and glorious today, so I'm tempted to just switch over entirely :P At least I know if I unexpectedly run out, I have a backup stash of suitable soap - B&BW doesn't carry this fragrance in stores anymore, so Mom ordered me three bottles of it from their online store for my birthday. I've still got like one and a half left.
Mardi Gras was a lot of fun with Rachel - we went to parades and caught tons of things. I sent her home with a blinky light guy on a necklace from Endymion; the rubber figurine is, like, the size of my hand, and there's LEDs in him and also in the necklace itself. It was obnoxious as hell, lol. I got a tiny patch of sunburn on the back of one shoulder, which is now peeling and annoying me because I can't reach it. In true New Orleans fashion, the first parade we went to was freezing ass cold and raining, and the last one was brilliantly sunny and hot. They were four days apart ^^;
The days that it's warm and/or sunny (I can put up with slightly lower temperatures if there's sun pouring down on me), I've been running, and it's been going really well. I say this next bit with the caveat that I'm not really in shape and haven't been for years and even when I was competitive I wasn't a distance runner; I was a sprinter. I have a three mile path through my neighborhood marked off that I run, and my average time is currently about three minutes better than it was last semester. Personal best (don't laugh at me) is 3 miles in 31 minutes. And I know a ten minute mile is nothing to brag about x.x More than the speed, though, is the simple issue of pace. Again, I was a competitive sprinter; making the transition from 200 yard dash to 3 mile run is ... difficult. It's something I've been working on for the last six years, so really I should be better at it, but it's been very difficult for me to accommodate running with the regularity that I want in my schedule. Still, I love it.
*examines how far off-track this paragraph has gotten*
I was aiming at a totally different statement here. In the past month-ish, I've finally hit a point of *feeling* the pace I need to be maintaining, which is, I think, contributing considerably to my improving times. There's a difference (for me at least) in knowing a pace in terms of "2 blocks should take a minute and fifteen seconds" and feeling in my muscles how hard I need to be pushing to achieve that time. I'm not entirely sure what finally clicked into place, but I thought of it about a month ago as a "wolf pace" - as in, wolves have this ground-devouring gait that doesn't exhaust them and that they can maintain for ridiculous amounts of time. It's clearly running, not walking, but it's gentle in a way. Something about the image of wolves in the snow somehow translated directly into muscle effort, and it all came together for me. And it's stuck nearly perfectly since then - I now think of it as "wolf pace" and "cat pace", the steady endurance lope and the stretching-my-legs, chasing-the-wind speed I let myself use three or four times while I'm out. Sprints still make me happier; throwing myself forward without regard for conserving my strength or breath is just ... it fills me with joy. I find myself grinning fiercely at nothing while I run. But the ease that I'm now developing with the longer run/slower pace is a different kind of comfort, where I can feel tiredness that isn't exhaustion ebb and flow at the edges of my energy.
In other trivial-things-no-one-cares-about news, I ran out of shampoo yesterday and washed my hair with my Bath and Body Works sandalwood rose body wash, which I was really nervous about because my hair gets stupidly oily if I don't clean it adequately. But my hair has been super soft and silky and glorious today, so I'm tempted to just switch over entirely :P At least I know if I unexpectedly run out, I have a backup stash of suitable soap - B&BW doesn't carry this fragrance in stores anymore, so Mom ordered me three bottles of it from their online store for my birthday. I've still got like one and a half left.
Mardi Gras was a lot of fun with Rachel - we went to parades and caught tons of things. I sent her home with a blinky light guy on a necklace from Endymion; the rubber figurine is, like, the size of my hand, and there's LEDs in him and also in the necklace itself. It was obnoxious as hell, lol. I got a tiny patch of sunburn on the back of one shoulder, which is now peeling and annoying me because I can't reach it. In true New Orleans fashion, the first parade we went to was freezing ass cold and raining, and the last one was brilliantly sunny and hot. They were four days apart ^^;