guilty as charged...

Aug 14, 2008 15:26

Yes, I've been avoiding my LJ. Because I had a rough race on July 27 and didn't take it well. For someone who's actually trained so smart and run smart races, I made a bunch of rookie mistakes that just make me crazy.

It started with an unfortunate pizza incident, where I felt the need to walk some of it off after polishing off 1/2 of a large pizza. So I walked a bunch of hills. This probably wouldn't have been so bad on its own, but previously in the day I did an "easy" 10 mile bike ride with Brian. By race time, I had no legs left. After a 10:37 first mile, I struggled through mile 2 (which is normally where my legs tighten up and complain until I pass mile 3, then I'm fine for a while), and walked most of the rest of the race.

The fact that I finished 4 minutes slower than my July 4 race speaks volumes of what I could have done had I actually used my head the night (and day) before. I'm still kicking myself over that race, even though I have learned some valuable lessons.

My next race is 5 on Labor Day, then it's just finishing training for my half marathon Sept. 27. I'm really looking forward to being able to do a long run of 7 or 8 miles, without the pressure of needing to be able to handle 13.

I have also been glued to the Olympic coverage. Watching all the swimming makes me really want to swim competitively again. I wasn't bad at it, I even scored a few 2nd places in the backstroke (my best & favorite stroke). To this day, I only do butterfly under protest. I wasn't very good at it, and it was miserable to practice. I've been watching gymnastics, but that wasn't a sport I was very good at. Well, I did great on a trampoline (I took several years worth of lessons) anyway. I'm too clumsy to be turned loose on a 4 inch beam 4 feet off the ground, forget feeling safe enough to hurtle myself off of a vault or swing off of the bars. I figured that out when I was about 10.

One gripe I have about all the Olympic coverage is the people who have gone just far enough off the deep end to actually eat stuff like silk worms, scorpions, centipedes, and other weird stuff. Just give me a basic stir fry, bowl of noodles with pork, pot stickers, and/or giant bowls of rice and soy sauce. I'll be just fine with those.

I also now have a greater appreciation for all the training that goes into the swimming, track, and other events. I can't swim 100 meters in under a minute, and I really can't swim 800 meters (1/2 mile) in about 4. As a matter of fact, my best 800 meters time is just under 20 minutes.

In other news, I now own 2 mp3 players. One for racing (1 gb), one for training runs (2 gb). My racing mp3 player is 75% full. My training one is now about 1/2 full. It's frightening to think that I have that much music to run to. And in an embarrassing admission of how old I really am, I have 4 Barry Manilow songs from the 1970s. And my favorite is called the Jump Shout Boogie, which, if you catch me at just the right time, I have been known to jump, pretend to shout, and punch the air while running. I've even gone so far as to randomly throw the song into each music folder on my big mp3 player just to keep me going. Somebody really needs to commit me and have my head examined. I think I've lost it.

My best recent find is thanks to beach volleyball...a song with lyrics of "I get knocked down but I get up again" and "don't bring me down". I'm not even attempting to type out the true name of the second song, it's some long crazy name by a group whose name is just as long and clumsy to remember, let alone type correctly.

Okay, it needs to stop storming (or threatening to storm) so I can go out and take my newest round of music out for a test spin. Otherwise it's to the gym I go. (Oh, please oh please, let it stop raining.) Running in the gym is not my favorite activitiy. The only worse thing is running on a treadmill.
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