I Will Totally Make It Up To You

Ok, now that was just inexcusable. I can't believe how I have neglected you. It was irresponsible and selfish, and I swear it won't happen again. Seriously. Look, I'm sorry, Ok? What else do you want? God, I can't talk to you when you are like this. Let's just talk about something else, ok?

First of all, I have some updates for you. Remember when I told you about the website where you could map all of your runs and save them and basically have your own map-a-licious website? Well, we totally got in on the ground floor of that one. Now, it's gotten all famous and the whole website has improved quite a bit.

Also, remember my lifelong quest for some sort of apparatus to keep my hair out of my face while I run like the wind? Well, I think TNT friend Kate was the one to recommend Goody's StayPut line of hair stuff. I finally got my ass to a Target and found them, and they are easily the best hair holder-backers I've found so far. I know, you're excited. I can tell.

Anyway, onward ...

So, some of you may have suspected that my blogging habits indicated my training was going down the tubes. Not true! Training is going great. Here's what I did Thursday, Friday, Sunday, Wednesday -- and tonight I will probably do about three miles on the treadmill.

Tomorrow morning is exciting, because I am back to nine miles! I'll let you know how that goes.

10 Years is a Long Time

The ticket has officially been purchased.

August 30, 2006, I spent nearly $400 so that I might have the opportunity to judge and be judged at the 10-year R.L. Turner High School Reunion. Oh, yes, let the judging begin.

Sounds fun, huh? I don't really know what to expect, but I think it will be a good story at the very least. I think I will measure up ok, but it's comforting to know that I have this marathon training gig in my back pocket. I am not afraid to use it.

Speaking of that, I ran four miles yesterday in the searing heat, and that went well. I'm going to try to run three miles today. Then, tomorrow I get to run seven miles -- hooray!

I am as optimistic as ever. I also checked on my back up plan, which is to run the White Rock Marathon in Dallas on December 10. That means I will have over a month in additional time if I suffer anymore setbacks.

I was going to sign up, just so registration wouldn't fill up, but it doesn't look like it's necessary.

I am going to run a marathon, and it is going to be this year. I am going to run a marathon, and it is going to be this year.

The Sun is Shining, But Today Still Sucks.

It is SO HOT outside right now. Ew.

So, things are not exactly going a planned today, but I will try not to allow that to affect our relationship.

The best thing that happened today is that I was in the Great Gray Mass Called Virginia this morning, when I suddenly spied a Trader Joes! Oh, how I love TJs. Anyway, I thought that it couldn't get better than that, but there was more. When I was checking out (with a basket of random and unrelated items, which no person could ever pretend were on a list together), and the TD employee and I were having a big "me too!" conversation about how chocolate is good, she pointed out this product.

I am drinking it right now. I want to go on the road just to promote this wonderful, wonderful invention.

Anyway, that's as good as it gets. Otherwise, I have little sunshine to offer you.

That said, I can offer you some limited sunshine left over from Saturday. That's when I ran 6 miles! The leg was fine. The endurance was a slightly different story, but that I can handle. Oh, and I'm up to 19 minutes on the stairmaster. Once again, if that doesn't impress you, well, let's not be friends anymore.

I plan to run tonight.

Peace out.

I will be more fun tomorrow. Promise.

COW-BOYS! COW-BOYS!

I am trying not to get my hopes up, but I think I may have arranged for FOUR Cowboys-Redskins tickets at Fedex Field on Nov. 5. Now, if that isn't the best post marathon present ever, I don't know what is. Some of you may recall the last time I went to this game. If not, let me refresh your memory:



I am planning to try for a similar look this year (except for maybe the addition of a wheelchair, depending on how this damn race goes one week prior).

The seats are about as high up as you can get, although I believe they are actually slightly closer than we were in 2004. Since the website for Fedex Field allows you to see the view from every section, I have verified that I will be able to fully witness all the asskicking that the Cowboys will undoubtedly inflict on those sad little Redskins.

Oh, and I rocked that Stairmaster today. And if you don't think 15 minutes is an accomplishment on that thing, you obviously are no longer allowed to read this blog. Or, maybe you are this guy.

Stairway to Nothin.

Do you remember the Stairmaster? I means the ones that look like small escalators to nowhere? Well, about a half-dozen of them reside at my gym, where I have happily ignored them for months. They look like relics from a less enlightened time to me, like anyone on them should be talking on a cell phone the size of my head and reading a book called "Pasta: a dieter's best friend."

But, no, my physical therapist has informed me, those monstrous machines are still quite relevant. And they would be helpful in solving my "glute problem," actually.

(The aforementioned problem, as well as I can ascertain, is that I have a weak ass. That's unfortunate for many reasons, including but not limited to its negative effects on my running gait.)

So, today, I set out to do 15 minutes on one of those instruments of evil. It turned out to be a miserable 12 minutes. Tomorrow, I will do the full 15 -- promise. Those things better be extra effective, because I can tell you that they extra suck.

So, the run on Saturday morning went well. I did five miles while everybody else did eight miles. Turning around earlier than the group, I learned, makes you feel fast. It also puts pressure on you to be fast, because it would hurt a lot if a bunch of people passed me.

Anyway, I ran again last night (four miles), but my leg was really bothering me, so I walked some, too. I am trying not to worry about it, though, because the PT session was particularly torturous yesterday. Maybe the leg was just saying "enough!" for one day.

Oh, and from the department of awesome news: My sister Christi and her gentleman friend Aaron are coming up for the marathon! Soooo, I better run it, huh?

Well, Can't Be Out Partyin ...

... so I might as well be in bloggin. Me, and about 18 million dorky high school kids.

Which reminds me. Anyone who has come with three or four yards of me lately knows that my high school reunion is coming up next month. Which made it all the more interesting to visit it a high school track yesterday. Don't judge -- I had a good reason to be there.

Work is a little slow these days (quick, find wood. Knock on it.), so I pretty much get to pretend I am a high level editor or an unpaid intern and come and go as I please. Thus, when I got two emails at roughly the same time -- one from my physical therapist cancelling our appointment and another announcing a speed training session that night -- I got thee to the track (actually, I got thee home to change and make a sandwich, but I was at the track within hours).

My physical therapist did not give me permission to do the speed drills, but she said I could run 3 to 4 miles at a normal pace. I was anxious to bust out my new runnin legs.

I have no prior track running experience, so I was anticipating some treadmill-grade boredom, but I was so wrong! The track was like a little ant hill of activity. Varying sizes of little boys were tottering around in huge football pads, track teams were doing drills, locals were were running and walking, the marching band was somewhere within earshot and the cheerleading squad was practicing. I learned a cheer:

F! F-I!
F-I-R-S-T and ten!
It's first! And ten! Yeah, it's first and ten!

Note: I don't want to be critical, because it was a fine cheer, and the young ladies performed it very well, but is that cheering? Should they not be somehow encouraging victory, rather than simply making observations about the yardage of the play? But I digress.

The whole thing was very entertaining. But it was also very weird to look at all those kids and think it's been more than ten years since I was in this funny little temporary civilization called high school.

I decided that 18-year-old Me would probably like 28-year-old Me. Young Me might be disappointed that I don't live in New York City in a revamped loft filled with controversial art, but she would overall be on board with the current state of affairs.

So far this week, I've run 6.5 miles. In seven hours, I will run five more. So I better go to bed. Happy Friday.

A Letter for the Benefit of Humanity

I'm restless. I want to do speed training. Doesn't that sound fun? It involves running fast around a track twice, and then running normal for one. If I got to play like all the other kids, I would do that five times this evening. I'm really tempted. In all likelihood, I will instead be on the stupid elliptical for an hour. Oh, well, at least I get to watch TV.

Oh, before I forget, there's something I need to do.

Dear Lady Who Wears Perfume at the Gym,

I hate you. I know that seems extreme. I didn't hate you when you first stepped onto the elliptical machine next to me. In fact, you sort of amused me then.

I tried to imagine if you would seem so absurd if you were wearing streetclothes and walking down the street, or a ball gown at the Oscars.

Yes, I decided. The only way you would not seem completely ridiculous is if you were basically in one of those bubbles that they make for people with no immune systems. Because maybe, just maybe, your Defcon 5 perfume reek would be muted to a semi-appropriate level. I'm not totally sure, but it's possible. I'm trying to offer solutions here.

But really, someone needs to stage an intervention. It should probably be someone close to you, so you will understand that the criticism is coming from a place of love. If it is someone who hates you, like me, for instance, you might feel defensive. You may have difficulty taking away the right message when I am rifling through your gym back and locking all the toiletries in a vault and then eating the key.

Look, we potentially have to spend more than an hour together. And I think we can agree that neither of us are having the best time during that period. I'm the first to admit that I can be prone to grouchiness after 45 minutes of fake-running.

So, let's do this the easy way, ok? You arrange for your crappy perfume to be disposed of at Yucca Mountain or similar, and I will not cut the brakes on your car.

Gosh, I feel better. I guess what they say about expressing your feeling is all true.

Best,

Daphne

Dirt Flirts Are Tougher Than They Look

I heard once than women forget how much childbirth hurts. They don't
look back on it as a walk in the park, but if they were able to fully
recall the intensity of the pain, most of them would be like "yeah, I
think the one will be enough."

That little factoid came to me after the Mud Run Saturday. I was lying
on the sand with my feet up, eating a bagel and drinking a beer. Right
after I heard myself say "we should totally do this again next year!"
I had a sudden flashback to about one hour before.

This race was misnamed. There was no mud. Only sand. Probably about 4
miles of running on sand. Initially, my team thought the sand would
only last for about the first mile, so I powered through,
congratulating myself with every step. We were wrong.

Almost the whole race was in deep, soft sand. There were parts that
look like scenes from Star Wars, except with no Ewoks and tons of steep
hills. The obstacles that we were so concerned about turned out to be
welcome breaks from the sand. Kristin and Grace were big champs, but I
slowed them down when I couldn't run anymore on the sand. Walking didn't feel much better.

We crossed a waist-deep river early on, so our shoes were little, gritty lakes.

An article in Runner's World says that running in sand burns 1.6 times more calories per mile than running on a hard surface. My preparation was one 3 mile run in more than three weeks.

But then we finished! It was an incredible feeling. We were 15th out
of 19 – a huge accomplishment in my book. You don't want to see the
rest of these competitors in a dark alley. Seriously.

Not only do I want to do it again next year, I want to do it right. We
were actually disqualified this year, because two team members bagged
at the last minute. With a full team, some sense of what to expect and
matching t-shirts, we will be unstoppable.

During the race, I couldn't really tell how my leg felt. I was hurting
all over. Trying to pinpoint pain was not possible. But I iced it like
crazy for the rest of that day, and it hasn't hurt since. I may have
been compensating with my right leg, because that one is actually
still sore.

The upshot of all of this? I'll see you on Oct. 29. I'll be the one
kicking all that ass.

Doing The Swim. To Outkast.

Everybody was totally jealous of me at the pool today. And not just because I have the uncanny ability to move down the lane but still look like I'm drowning. In fact, it was because they were trying to figure out what the hell was on my head. They were saying Could it be? But no, there are no headphones in swimming ...

Oh, but yes.

My mom got me this technological marvel in honor of my birthday, and I've eagerly anticipating it's arrival for a week. It showed up today, and I got myself to the pool. It definitely made the swimming experience about 43 percent less boring.

Here's what I learned:
1. You have to make sure you push the headphones jack all the way in. I didn't do this correctly for the first lap, and I freaked out and thought I already broke it. This brings me to my second issue.
2. The stakes are high. I was sure I was going to break the damn thing somehow or another. One false move and you are basically not allowed to play anymore. This is the reason I probably would have never bought this for myself.
3. Swimming music needs to be purely high intensity. With running music, you can have an occasional Journey song for variety, but Journey is not welcome under water. I recommend 82 percent hip hop on swimming mixes.

We are T-minus two days from the mud run. I'm stressed. My physical therapist seems to thing that 5-mile run could tell us a lot about whether I will be able to train up to the marathon in time. That's pressure.

Twenty Eight Years of Rawk

Sorry this is so late in the day, but I have basically been slowed down by the overflow of total awesomeness that has occured over the last 72 hours.

First, I had a wonderful birthday. Absolutely perfect. I decided not to go to the group run in the morning, because I needed to get on the road early to purchase my new raison d'etre:



Isn't she pretty! She is a 1999 Volkswagen Cabrio. This is basically what she looks like, except with black interior. Some of my more aged readers may remember her grandmother, the Cabriolet. She is also related to the Golf.

More from the department of good news: Our first roadtrip together will be this Friday, when we go to Virginia beach to compete in the highly anticipated mud run!

Annnnd, I will not be limping behind a walker with tennis balls on the bottom of it or anything, either. I just got back from the doc's office. And there were a lot of words used that I don't understand, but here's the information I gathered up: The lining of my my muscles is inflamed. That's pretty much it. Aparently, that's called shin splints.

So, I have to be careful and listen to my body yadda yadda, but I am cleared to run and ready to rock. He said I have to add distance really slowly, about 10 percent at a time. Whatev. Also, I have to continue icing my leg like it's my job (might as well do something like it's my job right?). Once Doc said I could do the race, his words were drowned out by the roar of finish line crowd at the mud run.

Yesterday, I ran THREE MILES on the treadmill.

Happy, Happy Friday

So, today I am working from home, so I don’t have much time to blog and stuff. Yeah.

Are you guys excited about tomorrow!!! Yep, it’s true. It’s time to celebrate the TWENTY-EIGHTH anniversary of my birth.

I have a bad habit of taking half the fun out of my birthday by rounding up for the last three months of the previous year. So I won’t get the full charge out of saying “I’m 28” for the first time. I guess I’ll find some other source of joy.

About the running. So, I have the 5-mile mud run in one week. I haven’t run in approximately 1,000 years. I extracted permission from my physical therapist to try to run three of the eight mile training run tomorrow. But, if it hurts or something, I’m kind of worried that it will bum me out on my birthday. So maybe I’ll do it on Sunday. But I want to be with the group. So, I don’t know.

Also, since I may not update this beforehand, I should mention that I have a doc appointment Monday. He’s going to tell me what the MRI says. He may order a bone scan, but I hope not. Tired of being a gimp.

I want to give up some good time-wasting links (it’s the new Friday tradition), but all this work has tuckered me out. I might check back in a little bit.

BACK IN BUSINESS, BABY

Today's word of the day is "Radiology Report." Apparently, after an MRI is performed, the radiologist takes a look and writes a letter to the doctor who prescribed the test. And when an eager patient calls up her doctor's office, they will just fax that baby right over.

If "Radiology Report" were not the word of the day, it might have been "Wimp" or "Yellow Belly" or possibly a more vulgar synonym.

Yep, those squiggly lines ain't no thing, according to the report. In fact, the worst news in the letter is "mild prominence of previously vascularity within the calf." Ohhhhhh.

Obviously, I don't know what that means. But I do know that I AM RUNNING A MARATHON!!! My confidence had just started to slip, which is why your blogger had not been as attentive this week (well, there is also that whole work thing), we are rocking and rolling now.

I have a PT appointment Friday morning, and I am going to lobby to try to jog a smidge this weekend. Tom Petty is now playing in a constant loop in my head, and I'd like to see someone try to argue against that.

Well I wont back down, no I wont back down
You can stand me up at the gates of hell
But I wont back down

Is that a Crack or a Vein?

I am totally swamped, so I am just going to give a quick update, and then come back later to fill in the funny and the clever.

I got an MRI Monday, and I have several recommendations for improving that particular system. I will expand on that later. Anyway, the MRI experience sucked, they gave me the films, my leg looks broken and I don't have another doctor's appointment until MONDAY. Seriously.

I really wish I didn't have a habit of breaking every digital camera I buy, because I would love to show you just how scary are these pictures of my insides. Actually, through the miracle of crappy cell phone cameras, I can present this:

You can't see it that well, but there is a squiggley line down the middle of what appears to be my tibia. But what the hell do I know? If there are any professional MRI readers out there, now's the time to show me what you got.

Ok, back to work. That means you.