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Sleepy Season

If there’s one thing that somehow takes me by surprise every year around this time, it’s my lack of willpower to exercise once it gets dark out. My plan for this evening was to run a quick 4-miler on the lit portion of the W&OD Trail (or if I was feeling really ambitious, finally go run with Pacers in Old Town Alexandria again) as soon as I got off from work. And until about an hour ago, I was firmly on board with this decision.

But as it’s started to get dim outside, my energy level has been dropping rapidly. With it, my excitement level abot going running. And this is hardly the first time this has happened this month. There’s just something about gearing up to go running after dark that saps my motivation, big time. If it was dark but warm, that’s somehow doable. But dark and cold? Forget it. So plans to knock out 4-to-6 miles tonight are rapidly falling by the wayside. (I would’ve run this morning but schedule-wise, it just wasn’t in the cards for a variety of reasons.) It doesn’t help that my gym has an indoor track instead of a treadmill; as much as I am not a fan of a treadmill, an eighth-of-a-mile track means anything more than five miles or so runs the risk of me getting dizzy and throwing up all over the place. (Not that this has happened yet. And I have knocked out six miles on it just last week. But that doesn’t mean I will like it.)

I’m not going to say it’s some sort of seasonal mood disorder, but I can’t help but note that come spring this little motivation problem will be mostly gone. Of course, by that point three months of eating with minimal exercise may have also taken their toll. *sigh* We’ll see if I can rev up a bit of energy in the next hour or so to get myself moving or not.

(Maybe I’ll just hang pictures of fat that’s been liposuctioned off of people all over my office with a note, “Do you want this all over your belly?” written underneath it. Fear as a motivator is a strong one.)

If I don’t go running tonight, though, I will make myself get up early tomorrow to hit the gym then. Honest.

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Two Things Which Made Me Laugh

While walking through the CVS on 14th Street (just south of Thomas Circle), I heard one woman lecturing her shopping companion in the soap aisle. “Ohhhhh, no,” she scolded, “he needs more than one bar of Dove. We need to get a three-pack of Dial! Maybe more!”

I shudder to think just how bad this guy must smell. I mean, really!

  

And then today, while cleaning out my spam folder, it suddenly hit me that if one was granted a wish and you wanted to go for a selfish kind, I have the perfect one. “I wish that all of the spam e-mail offers that I’m sent are real and truthful.” Because really, this day alone I’d have gotten multiple $500 gift cards to all sorts of stores, some free pizzas, a brand new Toyota (the subject line didn’t specify which model car, alas), and of course, all the genital enlargement products I would ever possibly want and then some.

And that’s just from one day. Imagine the possibilities! (I think I’d pass on the offers for Russian brides, though. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen one of those in a long while. Which is a pity, because those always amused me. I liked to joke that my mother was signing me up for those mailings.)

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One Brief Weather-Related Grumble

For my running program this winter, I was supposed to run five miles today. For anyone who’s in the DC area, you will know that there’s that whole strange phenomenon known as snow covering the area. (Just a couple of inches, nothing to freak out about, even though people are somehow unsurprisingly doing just that.) So running outside seems like a good idea only ifI am desperate to break a leg. And with book club tonight (I’m leading the discussion, no less), I can’t wait until this evening to pick up the distance.

I got up early so I could head to the community center, where I could run around and around and around their indoor track 40 times. And riiiiight before I left, I decided to check Arlington County’s weather closing website. Good thing I did; due to the weather, the facility wasn’t opening until 10am. Argh!

Still, it’s all (mostly) good. I ended up working at home for a few hours (waiting for all rush hour traffic to go away), and then came in. Which means that in an hour or so, I can leave (having worked a full day), go home and change, and go over to the no-doubt-empty community center and get my run in. So, in theory, it’s working out in the end. But I kind of wish I’d gotten to sleep in today. Oh well.

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DCist Exposed 2008

DCist is having their second annual DCist Exposed photography exhibition, and like last year, I’m going to take a stab at trying to get into it. You can only submit three photographs for consideration, so this time I’m going to open it up to you to help me pick the best entries. You can look at the winners from last year here, and the earlier link talks about what they’re looking for in general.

There are some photos here that I’m leaning towards more than others, but I’ll be curious to see what other people think.

So, with all that in mind—which of these photos (if any!) jump out at you? Thoughts?

Continue reading DCist Exposed 2008→

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Should We Talk About the Weather?

Well, we sure aren’t going to talk about the government. (Sorry, iTunes randomly kicked up Pop Song ’89 from R.E.M. a minute ago and its lyrics are jumping through my head.)

Anyway, this has been a nice weekend. It was off to a bad start—really bad stomach cramps kept me up most of Thursday night/Friday morning, which was unpleasant and exhausting. I ended up staying home from work, although I did polish off some revisions to a course for Julie before going back to sleep for a couple of hours. Had a nice night on the town out with a bunch of the guys; saw some old friends I haven’t run into for ages, made some new ones as well. My pretty bad alcohol tolerance (which has been getting worse and worse since mid-2001 when marathon training started and I stopped drinking on Friday nights, and then even moreso after dropping all that weight in 2004) wasn’t helped by having almost no food in my stomach thanks to the earlier-mentioned cramps, and I can only imagine that I made a blithering fool of myself. Still, if you’re going to do so, being in a bar with friends who are also drinking is absolutely the way to do it.

(When the dust settled, I walked over to Charlie’s to see how painting an accent wall in his condo was coming along; he drove me home although by that point it’d been long enough I was stone-cold sober, but why risk an accident?)

Saturday was primarily a couple of errands in the morning (the Home Depot paint counter at 11am can best be described as chaos, hold the theory) and Chip’s tree-decorating party in the evening, which was fun. It also reminds me that I need to get my own Christmas tree, now that everything is re-arranged so I have room once more. Hopefully later this week.

Then today was the start of my winter running program, which is using “explosive running” (sounds like a different kind of stomach ailment if you ask me) and focuses on shorter distances. It was a low-key but good start to the program; I’m really excited about future weekend installments. (And in the future I will make sure to remember that it starts at 8:30am and not 8:00am. Oops.) Add in a brunch, and finally carting the old bookcases out of my place, and life is pretty good.

It is, however, clearly winter in the DC area. This morning for my running program I had on long running pants (which I bought at the OBX Marathon expo and are fantastic; they’re tapered so they stay much closer to the legs and keep you warmer, while not ever turning into tights), a short-sleeved shirt, a long-sleeved shirt over it, and then a jacket over that. (Plus gloves and a hat.) The jacket came off once we got warmed up, but towards the end of our cool-down stretching it had to come back on. It’s just the right kind of winter weather, too; cold but not frigid, just that sort of snap on your face that lets you know you’re alive and the seasons have shifted again.

(If I need an extra barometer of the weather changing, it would be my calves itching this morning. If I have to start applying the lotion to the arms and legs, it is definitely winter.)

Oh, last but not least? Apparently, you better all lock up your Christmas tree stands if you have them, because otherwise I will come in and steal them out of your houses. Even if the stand is in fact mine and has my name on it. I learn something new every day, myself. Christmas tree stands, here I come!

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Welcome to the Arctic

I recently bought two new bookcases (the Sloane from Crate & Barrel), which I absolutely love. I spent Monday evening putting them together, and then moving everything off the old bookcases (which are now sitting in the middle of the living room) and then onto the new ones. But in the process, of course, a lot of dust got stirred up. (It’s amazing how much dust was piled up on the very top of those shelves.)

I’ll be giving the entire area a good vacuuming once everything is picked up and done (there’s still some piles of stuff from the old shelves on the floor, plus of course the shelves themselves still hanging around) but the one other thing that’s always helped in the past is opening up the windows and letting the apartment air out. So after two lovely days in which we’ve had temperatures in the high-50s and even hitting the 60s, I chose this morning to open the windows.

Naturally, that means the high today will be something like 46 degrees. I suspect when I get home from spinning tonight, I’ll have flashbacks to the walk-in fridges from past employments. And now, looking at the weather forecast, tomorrow? High of 58 degrees. Hmmmm, maybe I should have waited until tomorrow. Oh well.

On the bright side, I really do love those bookshelves. And I might be doing a little reorganizing of the living room area in general as a result. Woohoo!

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Two Hours, Two Races (or, Things I’ll Never Do Again)

Before you run a race, there will at some point come that moment where (despite the amount of nervousness before and after), you believe you can do anything. Climb Mount Everest? No problem. Bench press 3000 pounds? Piece of cake. Fortunately, said moment passes pretty quickly. The problem, I’ve discovered, is when you are given something much more sane but still slightly nuts, because then later on you might still want to do it. Like, oh, run two Thanksgiving Trot races the morning of Thanksgiving, two hours apart, a mere 11 days after your marathon.

8:00am brought the first race, the Arlington Turkey Trot 5K. This is a new race, in its second year, that runs through the neighborhood streets of Clarendon. The combination of it being Arlington (we love our running) and a gorgeous, 70-degree day meant a huge turn-out, probably over 800 people (last year was around 400) and general chaos. I got to walk to the start from my apartment, and the area was festive and exciting. Of course, what I was forgetting was that since this race is in Clarendon, that means it is a race full of hills.

I’d set out to beat my 5K PR from two years ago (a 26:23), which was on a nice flat course and where I was much more rested. Still, anything was possible. I actually ran into my cousin Ann about a mile into the race; she’d caught up with me, but then quickly dropped back. When two miles in I was at 16:15 total, I knew that barring disaster it wouldn’t be a problem to PR. About half a mile later, I also knew that I was suddenly and without warning out of energy. This was a problem. Gasping and dying on those hills, I did the only thing I could; much to my shame, I walked for about 30 seconds until I got to the top of another colossal hill before I carried on. I finished in a 25:40 (meaning the last 1.1 miles were at an 8:34 average), which while not the finishing time I was hoping for (heck, I ran my 3-mile training run in May at a 23:46) was still good enough.

Afterwards I hung out with Ann, ran into no less than two different acquaintances through running (Ted and then Deborah), and decided that running the other Turkey Trot was crazy. Completely ludicrous. I was still a little sore from the marathon, it seemed, I should just stay home. But one more race meant an extra helping of Thanksgiving dinner.

And so…

Continue reading Two Hours, Two Races (or, Things I’ll Never Do Again)→

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Outer Banks Marathon — The Photologue

Giving credit where credit is due, the photographers at TriDuo.com did a fantastic job with photographing the OBX Marathon. I liked my pictures enough that I actually ordered a CD-ROM with high-res images, but in the meantime, here’s some amusement for everyone. (Sadly nothing quite hits the, “Help me I am lost and have amnesia” photo’s level of hilarity from the Firenze Marathon last year, but still, good stuff.)

This is my absolute favorite picture from the marathon; we’re exiting Nags Head Preserve Woods and I just love how you can see the varied terrain of the marathon here as well as the big grin on my face. Don’t get me wrong, the last mile of the woods was true trail-running, straight up and down, and it was hard as hell and I was thrilled to escape it, but at the same time? I really enjoyed it.
The secret to getting your picture taken? When you see the photographer, do something to pay up to the camera. This year my strategy was “pump the fist in the air.” A nice sort of victory stance. And it worked well.

Continue reading Outer Banks Marathon — The Photologue→

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Five Things That Make Me Happy (part 6)

It’s really been a while since I’ve written one of these (October 2006, yeesh) but that doesn’t mean there’s a lack of good things in my life. So, anyway, here are five more things that, as of late, make me happy.

Good race photos. This year’s batch of photos from the marathon are really great; a combination of “oooh, that’s a nice picture” and “I cannot stop laughing at that photo” categories. I’ll do a longer post soonish showing off the better ones, but in the meantime, this is just as we’re exiting Nags Head Woods Preserve at mile 13. I look so… well… happy. Part of it was just finally getting off of that up-and-down torture trail, but also because I was having a great time; I felt strong and confident halfway through the race, my best one yet.

A cleaned-out closet. Now that colder temperatures are here, I took the shift in weather patterns as an opportunity to drag everything out of the closet, sort through it, and get rid of things. I’ve now got two very large bags of clothes heading off to Goodwill, and everything that’s left is sorted and much better organized. Going to my closet in the morning no longer makes me flinch, which is always a nice feeling. (Now if I can just tackle my other “problem areas” before too much longer…)

The Palm Centro. It will probably shock people to know that not only has it taken me this long to get a combination PDA/phone, but that it was not in fact an iPhone, but the new Palm Centro. But you know, I really love it. It syncs perfectly with all of my software at home and transfers exactly what I want it to, I’m very familiar with the Palm software, and I don’t feel like I’ve got something that I will drop and break in a matter of minutes. (What can I say? I would never actually enjoy owning an iPhone because I would be petrified that I would destroy it.) It looks cute, it works great, I’ve got my custom ringtones, and finally I have the combination of phone and data that I’ve been waiting for. (I also have to say that I am impressed with the quality of photo it can take for being just a cameraphone.)

The Savage Lovecast. Call me juvenile (it wouldn’t be the first time) but listening to Dan Savage’s sex-advice podcast while working out at the gym just makes me snicker. In a good way, really. He’s got a good sense of humor, usually has good advice, and it certainly makes the time go by quickly. (And sometimes it’s just super-sweet and touching.)

Finish Line!Clever co-workers. When I got back from the marathon this year, Laura had taken all of my Doctor Who action figures (which are in my office) and had all of them running a marathon. Complete with the Empress of Racnos handing out Gatorade, Daleks cheering people on, and actual photos of the Outer Banks Marathon’s course used as scenery. What can I say? Laura is really, really clever. (As are many of my other co-workers.) I promise a bigger gallery of photos of this event are coming soon, too!

 

(The first five of these posts were on my old LiveJournal site. For those who simply have to know… part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.)

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Greg vs. the Outer Banks Marathon

Well, this morning I went up against the Outer Banks Marathon… and emerged mostly triumphant!

My plan was to break the race down into three segments; a slower 10 miles, a faster 10 miles, and then an even faster final 10k (aka 6.2 miles). And up through mile 14, things went great.

Then, two things happened in rapid succession. First, someone decided they were going to drive across the course without checking for runners first, and stopped about a foot and a half from me (and only because I screamed, “Whatareyoudoing?” really loudly and with a real edge of panic in my voice). Then, about 45 seconds later, my right calf muscle tightened up and never really let go. I stretched it out as best I could and kept going.

I finally briefly crashed and burned in the 25th mile; my knees were starting to kill me (they’d begun to ache around mile 20) and I ended up walking the majority of that mile. Once I only had 1.2 miles left to go, though, I forced myself to keep running again and finished in 4:29:06 — a new personal record. (My previous best in November 2006 was a 4:46:48.)

It was a beautiful course (or at least the first half was, the second half was primarily highways) and I’m delighted with my finishing time considering the physical pains I was going through.

Phew! It was a tough, but good day.