The tragedy of jogging

Somehow, I have become a jogger. I used to be a runner, but I am now sufficiently slow that I do not feel that "run" is the verb that accurately captures my forward momentum, or lack thereof.

As you have probably guessed from the title of this post, this is not a development that I am pleased with.

A friend wants to run the Portland Marathon in 2016, a race that I've already completed three times. Immediately after finishing my most recent marathon (not Portland), I swore I would never run another again, but as my running partner prophesied, I'd change my mind. (She didn't. She's still over marathons.) Which means I have a year and 5 months to turn myself not only back into a runner, but back into a marathoner.

I have several books related to running, including anatomy, specific workouts, and even a few memoirs. The first step is, honestly, to lose some weight. Not because I'm trying to be skinny, but because I'm about 25 pounds over my  marathoning weight, and that's a lot of extra weight to carry for 26 miles. (I blame all of the thug muscles I've gained doing CrossFit. And the squats. Don't get me wrong, I still love CrossFit. But for me, CrossFit and marathons are not compatible.)

I'm trying to up my running (and cardio in general) to get to a consistent number of miles a week so that I have a base on which to build a training platform. (At least I sound like I know what I'm doing!) Oh, wait, I do know what I'm doing! I'm becoming a runner again. I'm becoming a marathoner again. I'm transforming my self and my life.

Marathoning, in retrospect

I recently ran a marathon. And it was terrible. It was the worst run I’ve ever had, and it was the slowest marathon I’ve ever run, second only to the marathon that I stubbornly ran despite my torn calf muscle.

A marathon is 26.2 miles, and a lot can happen in those miles. Runners twist ankles, fall, bleed, and acquire new and mysterious injuries. Professional runners die running that distance. Marathoning has become increasingly mainstream in the last few decades, but it is not for the faint of heart.

My running partners and I set a goal of running a sub-4 hour marathon. A sub-4 hour marathon is a 9:09 pace. It’s a good clip, but not impossibly fast. This was to be my fifth marathon, and I felt confident it would be my best. I knew my weaknesses, I knew how to train, I knew what it felt like to push myself, and I knew how long those last 1.2 miles were after already having run 25 of them.

I created a training plan, and bolstered by my enthusiasm and the promise of blueberry pancakes, my friends and I proceeded to knock off mile after mile. We ran up and down hills. We ran in the fog. We ran in the sun. We ran past beach volleyball players with hateable bodies. You know—those tan women with sun-bleached hair who make wearing a paper bag look like couture. Yes, even distance runners hate those people. To be fair, the lone male among us loved running past the volleyball girls.

At mile 14 of the race, my last running partner dropped behind me. I thought as long as she could see me, she’d keep up, but after the race was over she told me she developed severe thigh cramping—something that’s never happened before. At mile 14 I was about two minutes ahead of where I needed to be based on the meticulously plotted racing strategy developed by my sister, who is a 2:55 marathoner. (That’s the insane pace of 6:40 per mile. I sort of hate her, too.)

Two minutes was a nice lead, but not enough that I could sit back and relax. I wasn't worried that I had gone out too hard—my sister and I anticipated this and figured any lead I had was padding for when something unexpected happened up ahead. I just didn't expect it to happen in the next three miles.

By mile 17, I was behind schedule. By mile 20 I was running 12-minute miles. And by the time I saw the finish line, I was just glad to stop running.

My husband and I have a code: he watches me race, and when he sees me, he says “You’re doing great! See you at the finish line!” and I answer “Yes!” This exchange informs him that I’m fine and planning on finishing this run, no matter what. As he says, “You better show up.” Not finishing this race didn’t even cross my mind.

When I look back on this race, all I can say is that it got very hot and very humid very fast. My training was great and I didn’t suffer any unexpected injuries. You can only do so much planning for the weather. The week before the race, my friends and I knew it was going to be hot. We drank extra water every day to stay hydrated. But you can’t train for a marathon the week before the race. By that point, if you haven’t done the necessary work, it is already too late.

It is disappointing to set a goal and not achieve it, but this marathon wasn't a failure. I finished the damned thing, and I did so with the support of my husband, my sister, and some good friends. It was okay that I didn't meet my goal, because my family and friends were still proud of me, and I was, too.

In the event of a zombie apocalypse...

In the event of a zombie apocalypse, you're going to have to kill some people, or at least former people, in order to survive. This is what every zombie movie ever made tells us. And this was my first thought when Captain America told me that a box had been stolen off our front stoop.

My second thought was that the fucker who stole it probably wasn't even going to use the DVDs, and that's just really wasteful. (But then I realized that all theft is wasteful.)

So here's what happened:

A while ago, upon the advice of some friends, I purchased the Insanity set of DVDs. I did the first month of workouts faithfully and noticed NO CHANGE WHATSOEVER. So I decided to stop. I didn't loose weight. I didn't loose inches. I didn't even gain stamina. And according to my heart rate monitor, I burnt only about 50% more calories in an hour of Insanity than I did in an hour of yoga, and about a third of the calories I burnt in an hour of running. I decided that it was simply not the workout for me. It took up too much time, and was producing no results.

But I kept the DVD set because I paid for them, and I figured I could take them on trips or something and watch them on my laptop if a gym wasn't an option. Or maybe I'd try them again later and have better success.

So fast forward to a few days ago when a girlfriend asked me if she could borrow them. Of course I said yes. I told her I'd leave the box on the stoop for her and she could stop by whenever and pick it up. (I realize there is always an inherent risk that something will be taken off your stoop by local delinquents.)

All day long the box sits on the stoop. Captain America comes home from work. I come home from work. I leave to go to yoga. A few minutes after I leave, Captain America comes around a corner in our house and sees the back of a woman walking away from our house carrying the box.

The back of the woman doesn't look like our friend, but it does look like our friend's best friend. So Captain America assumes that our friend was busy or tied up at work or something and sends her friend to come get the DVD set for her. (In hindsight, of course, this is a little silly, but the mind can invent fantastical scenarios when needed.)

I come home from yoga and notice the box is gone, and figure our friend stopped by, like she said she would.

Captain America says, "I don't want you to be mad at me. I'm mad and you have every right to be mad, but I don't want you to be mad."

Captain America frequently gives such prologues before delivering news of any sort, but especially bad news. He is also a bit of an overexplainer. There are worse people to be married to.

Anyway, he proceeds to tell me that the Insanity DVDs were stolen, and how he's mad at himself because he saw the person who took them, but because he had assumed it was our friend's friend (now a seemingly odd mental concoction), he didn't stop her. He's mad at himself for being so trusting (again, there are worse people to be married to). He says our friend showed up about an hour after the theft, rang the doorbell and asked for the DVDs. Which of course, we no longer had.

But I didn't get mad that the DVDs were stolen (apparently it's been that kind of week where thefts from my front stoop just go along with everything else). My first thought, evidently spurred by Captain America's comment on being trusting, was that in the event of a zombie apocalypse, he'd have to shoot some people. You CAN NOT trust zombies. They WILL eat your brains. My second thought was that the person who stole the DVDs probably wouldn't even use them. Of course, when the zombies come for her, she's going to regret that bad choice, as she won't be able to outrun the zombies.

Oh, karma will get even with her...eventually.

The other day, a coworker I'll call David (who is not, in fact my coworker who is actually named David), asked me if I had any upcoming 10Ks or if I was taking the summer off.

It was nice that he remembered that I'm a runner, although I really don't run 10Ks. I told him no, that my next race is the Carlsbad Marathon in January, so while I'm not actively training this summer, I'm still running.

I explained to David that last year, my running partner and I ran the Portland Marathon in October, so we did all of our long runs in August and September when it was miserably hot here in San Diego (yes, I realize San Diego is really far south and basically a desert, but it is rarely miserably hot here).

Here's what a typical Saturday looked like for me last summer:
4:30 am: Get up and eat a bowl of cereal (For those of you who are not distance runners, you CANNOT do long runs without eating first. You're going to be out there for hours.)
5:00 am: Leave my house to meet my running partner at the predetermined designated location
5:20 am: Arrive at the predetermined designated location. Debate the usefulness of putting on sunscreen BEFORE THE SUN IS UP. Decide to put it on anyway. The sun in California is out to get you. And you. And you.
5:30 am: begin 16, or 18, or 20, or 22 mile run.
sometime around 9 am, on your return trip through Torrey Pines, observe that you've burnt 1,642 calories. Have a random stranger say in astonishment, you've burned 16-hundred calories?!?! (It is only 9 am, after all). Respond, yeah, we just bench-pressed a whale. Because this somehow seems a more logical explanation than the fact that your 22-mile run started at 5:30 am when weather.com told you it was only 74 degrees out (we actually considered starting to run at 4:30 am, but weather.com told us it would be 73 degrees, and we decided one degree wasn't worth an hour of sleep) AND that you still had 5 more miles to go. And it's now 95 degrees. Let me tell you, the Torrey Pines park water was the most delicious thing I have ever consumed in my entire life.

The cool part of this was...oh wait, nothing was cool about this. The sun god was all, I hate you bitches. I'm going to turn your running playground into a sweltering death zone. It's going to be awful when you start running, and then I'm going to peak my rays up over the rest of the country and hone in on you so that all of your sunscreen has melted off well before I reach my zenith. So not only will you be hot and miserable, but you are now almost certain to die of skin cancer. BWAH-HA-HA-HA!

So what did we do this Saturday? We ran approximately 5 miles and then went and ate doughnuts and walked around the convention center, admiring the amazing people watching that is comic con. And I even got a Captain America doughnut to bring home to Captain America.

Resolution follow-up

While I seriously doubt that anyone is actually keeping tabs on whether or not I'm accomplishing any of the goals I set for myself this year, having a giant chart of them in the office is (I think) helping me keep on task.

I had nearly complete success in reading The Hunger Games trilogy and books 3-5 of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, more commonly called Game of Thrones, which is actually the title of the first book, and not the name of the series (unlike The Hunger Games, which is both the name of the first book and the name of the series). And while I'm being weird, I can't remember if grammatically, I'm supposed to remove the "a" in A Song of Ice and Fire, since I have to use the article, the, with the noun, series. And I don't feel like looking up the answer.

Anyway, I'm part of the way through A Dance with Dragons. The problem is that Clash of Kings is a doozy to get through and took me a really long time to read.

In terms of my exercise/losing weight resolutions, I burnt more than 700 calories in a day 17 times in March and April, and ran at least one mile 26 times. And, I have been managing to lose weight, although I may have undone all of that progress this week, but sometimes life smacks you upside the head and hands  you a 19.5-hour workday. What can you do?

I also managed to watch all of the Dirty Jobs and 30 Rock recordings I had, and am ahead of schedule with about 40% of the DVR space available.

I'm thinking of moving my "run a sub 4-hour marathon" goal to next year, mostly because I haven't found a marathon this year that I want to train for.

Resolutions for 2013

I've just looked at my Goodreads stats, and I've read 10 fewer books and 1,841 fewer pages in 2012 than in 2011. That's sad.

Anyway, I am yet again making New Year's Resolutions, although really, they're more like goals, although I suppose all resolutions are more like goals.

One change you may notice (if you pay attention to this sort of thing) is that I'm not going to list all of the books I hope to read in 2013. Instead I'm going to list the ones I have read. I never manage to read much of anything on my resolution reading list, because I'm always too busy reading something else, so I just thought I'd dispense with that altogether.

So, without further ado, here are my resolutions:

1. Consolidate my reading lists (and boy, do I have a lot of them!)
2. Accomplish some financial goals:
1. (I'm not sure why Blogger started numbering again and didn't move to lowercase letters. I just wanted to let  you know in case you though I may have come up with this bizarre list convention myself. I assure you, I did not.) Pay off student loan 3-03 (again, I didn't come up with this numbering convention).
2. Pay off credit card
3. Put $5k in my IRA
4. Pay off student loan 3-04
5. Get our savings account up to $25k
3. Spend a day watching the Lord of the Rings movies (this and #4 were both things I hoped to accomplish during one of my unemployed stints, but sadly? they didn't last long enough for me to get around to this)
4. Spend a day watching the Harry Potter movies
5. Edit the novel I wrote in November into something passable
6. Read all of the books I borrowed from friends (yes, I haven't forgotten)
7. Lose weight
8. Run a sub-4 hour marathon (I'm pretty sure that this is directly dependent on #7, at least to a degree)

Do we all just live in a perpetual state of anguish?

This isn't Cicero.

Sometimes I do what I want to do. The rest of the time, I do what I have to. --the character Cicero in the movie Gladiator.

I was on the phone with Captain America the other night, complaining about how busy I am when it occurred to me that it's all my own fault that I'm busy. The problem, in a nutshell, is that there are so many things I'd like to be doing, or doing a lot more of. 

For instance, I love to read. Probably more than I like to do anything else. And I read a lot, but not nearly as much as I'd like to. I feel like I am so far behind on what I want to be reading that it's actually stressful trying to figure out when I could fit more of it in. But I also feel like I'm so close to getting to a point where I could read as much as I want...like if I could just get caught up, I could stay caught up. 

I feel the same way about exercising. When I'm unemployed, a trip to the gym can take me four hours, door-to-door. That allows me 15 minutes of driving each way, an hour of ellipticalling, 40 minutes of running, 40 minutes of lifting weights, 40 minutes of stretching and the like, 20 minutes in the sauna, and 10 minutes to deal with things like peeing and filling up my water bottle and changing my shoes to use said sauna (don't get me started on how stupid I think that rule is). I get that four hours is a lot of time at the gym, and obviously this would be the long day (the short workout is the alternative days when I don't lift). In real life, I do get to spend about two hours a day at the gym, but then I have days where there is no way I can fit in 30 minutes of cardio. Which, for me, is a stupid amount of time. I have to spend the same amount of time wrangling myself into my sports bra, and the same amount of time stretching, for a whole lot less exercise. I realize this sounds like an excuse, but somehow 30 minutes is just where I say, I have better things to do with my time. If I know I can get in 45 minutes, though, it's worth it. 

So, I'm perpetually feeling frustrated because there are SO MANY THINGS I WANT TO DO, and instead, I have to spend my time at work, or even worse, commuting to and from work. (I am aware that all of my problems are first world problems. As I was discussing with a friend the other day, isn't that sort of the goal? I mean, how awesome would it be if everyone's problems were first world problems?) Don't get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with my job. The pay is good, the company is good, the people are nice, the hours are even reasonable. It's just not nearly as enjoyable as reading or exercising.

What I was wondering aloud to Captain America the other night, though, is whether or not everyone else lives in this same perpetual state of anguish that I'm in that I'm not doing what I want with my life, or if everyone else has managed to grow up and accept it and I'm still the teenager raging against the world. 

Good Lord, I hope not. 

Why I think the Mayans might be on to something

Sometime around Halloween-ish both my cell phone and my car battery died within two days of each other, making it very difficult to call AAA to have them come fix things, and to get to the store to get a new phone. The car battery had never been replaced, and was probably due to die, but the cell phone was a total fluke because NOTHING EVER HAPPENS TO MY CELL PHONE. I don't accidentally put it in the washing machine. I don't leave it on top of my car and then somehow back over it. I don't wear it running, so it gets neither sweaty nor dropped. I don't give it to small children to keep them entertained.

Okay, so fast forward about a month. Randomly, the GPS thing for my running watch stops working, the keyboard on our PC gets all persnickety IN THE MIDDLE OF NANOWRIMO no less, and one of the mice we have also stops working (that's mice, as in plural of mouse, the computer thingy, not mice as in a whole breed of vermin...I mean pets).

I kinda hope the world hurries it up and ends soon, because these little things portuning Armageddon are so damn annoying.

P.S. Somehow blogger is okay with "persnickety" but not with "portuning." Have I totally made up a word here?

So many different things, I don't know where to begin

I have such an unbelievable amount of stuff to say today that I've actually begun five different posts.

First of all, somehow the rest of my life is so much more interesting than what I do at work. I'm actually quite glad of that because I'm an accountant. For the most part, I don't mind being an accountant. The pay is good, I know what I'm doing, I work in a nice climate-controlled office; all-in-all, I can't really complain. Except that today there was a brown grasshopper dying in the corner of my cube. I'm pretty sure it was a grasshopper, although I always thought they were green, but it had that body type. I didn't want to touch it in case it was more alive than I thought and jumped down my shirt or something. I didn't think that kind of hysterics was appropriate on my second week at work.

Anyway, this post is not supposed to be about grasshoppers. It's supposed to be about how much more interesting my life is outside of the office. However, I do have one other office related story. While I usually attempt to keep other people's internet profiles low, I really don't know how to tell this story without revealing this person. So I work with a woman who's first name starts with an S and who's last name is Slover, which means that her login is sslover. Like a boat. When I saw her type that in, I almost told her that's what she HAD to name her yacht. But I caught myself before saying anything because I wasn't convinced that she'd appreciate that kind of thing. I mean, if that were my name, I'd tell everyone to call me S.S. Lover, but that's just me.

So back to my interesting life.

As you may or may not recall, I've been training to run a marathon. I've developed my marathon training program partially from a program I used years ago and partially from trial and error. However, just for fun, my running partner and I like to mix things up a little bit. Last weekend, we added in some cetaceanus fun. (How do you like that adjectification?)

Last weekend, Running Buddy (whom I shall now refer to by her Jersey Shore name, Mo-Scream, which, further paranthetically, is a tool she told me about because for father's day she renamed her dad G-Train. How cool is that!?!?). Anyway, Mo-Scream and I were on our final long run before we begin our taper. We were doing 22 miles and had started running at around 5:45 am because it was supposed to be balls-ass-hot out by about 9am. This run was intentionally designed to be suckier, albeit shorter, than the actual marathon.

On our return trip, we stopped at a bathroom in a park to refill our water bottles. I was reading our stats off on my watch: we'd been running for 3 hours and 22 minutes, we'd traveled 16.9 miles, and we had burnt 1543 calories. At this declaration, a fellow park-attending dude whipped his head around and proclaimed, "You just burned 15-hundred calories?" I'm still shocked that he didn't get whip-lash from his sudden interest in our athletic prowess.

Yes, I responded, we bench-pressed a whale.

If you Google an image of that, you get 152,000 image results, and yet, no one took a picture of ME doing it!

Park-dude looked both astonished and baffled, but I had another 5.1 miles to run, so I couldn't really hang out explaining all of the details involved in accomplishing such a feat, but it looks something like this:

Oh, adulthood, how you vex me sometimes!

So I'm trying really hard to be a mature, responsible grown-up. It's not easy, people.

I started a new job. At a pretty awesome company. The catch is, they want me to change the dates I'm in Portland for the marathon. I was originally scheduled to be in Portland from Wednesday-Monday, but they want me in the office on Wednesday-Friday. For some meeting. And that's really all I know about that. I have a meeting with two of my bosses on Friday to sort that one out.

As you may recall, I became a really bitter person at my last job (okay, I've actually had three jobs since my last job, but they were short-term consulting affairs. Except one. Which was a mistake, but not because of anything I did...the position was presented as one thing and ended up being another. Anyway.). One of the things that really bothered me is that we were NEVER ALLOWED TO TAKE VACATION. There was always something going on at work that was more important than anything anyone on my team could possibly have going on in our personal lives. It really sucked. Big, hairy monkey balls. Yes, that much.

So, this job asked, before I started, if I could move my trip. I explained that I could change my flights, but that I couldn't move a marathon. So yes, I agreed to all of this before I started. Because it's a good company. A really good company. And I didn't want something like a few days in a city I've lived and visit at least once a year in to be a reason I couldn't get a job with a good company. But I'm still not very happy about it.


But because of my experience at my old company, I have this niggling feeling that I'll never be able to take a vacation when I want to. Which is totally not fair because it's not like the two companies have anything to do with each other or anything. I'm just projecting. At least those years of therapy have been put to good use--I can now identify my emotional behavior. Go me!


I'm trying to be accepting of my feelings that I'm not happy about moving my flight, while at the same time, accepting that I've also agreed to this, and that I shouldn't let it make me bitter. (I'm trying not to make "good" the opposite of "perfect"--It's still a good company to work for, and I'll still have a good time in Portland, it would just be perfect if I could have my proverbial cake and eat it, too, but wouldn't we all like that?)

And if you write good enough times, it starts to seem like a funny word...I mean why isn't is said with the oo-ee sound like gooey?