Running; 5 Arrrrgh 2010 - LOL

Tight.  Tight.  Tight.  I should have fought the rain yesterday and ran.  I think the tightness in my thighs must be from Coach's Goin' to State workout from Monday.  My Dad calls them ladders.  Either way, I think running yesterday would have helped today.  I was running a bit late again today.  Jeeze, there is that word again...running.  Seems to be taking over a bit of my vocabulary.  Could this be the beginning of obsession, Jeff?  Anyway, after the 3 alarms on my phone went off, I must have dozed back off because one minute it was 5:10 and the next minute it was 6:10.  Arrrrgh, I hate that. 
I wanted to do 4-5 miles today, but because Rip Van Winkle here went back to sleep, I didn't have time for that.  I dressed up to the point of shorts and spent 5 minutes or so in my t-shirt and jock looking in my kids' dressers for my shorts.  Unbeknownst to me, one of my children had not taken the clothes off the line, so they were still outside.  So I threw on some sweat shorts.  Good thing nobody saw me.

I stretched and stretched.  The kinks were painful, but I knew I HAD to stretch good today.  I went downstairs and checked my blood sugar:  47...crap.  OK, 25g of Shaklee Performance and I was out the door.  I drove to Car Quest where the MCM's meet on Wednesdays, got out and stretched a bit more.  Heck, by now it was almost 6:30

Music on, watch set to stopwatch, and stretched, I took off. The route we run out here offers a couple different basic opportunities.  Either a 3.1 mile route or 4.3 mile route.  With me pushing the clock this morning, I took the 3.1 mile option.  As I started off, I glanced skyward.  There, off my left shoulder, in a pretty thin crescent was my running partner, the moon.  She seemed to be grinning down at me...in a rather supportive role.  Hmmm, another addtion to my "Coaching" staff I thought.  We ran together for the first half mile or so and then I turned east.

Turning east on Court takes you out of town.  This next mile-long stretch of road offers soft shoulders along the road (a welcome change from the paved streets of Winterset).  It has a long gradual rise then fall to it as it comes to a T at Norwood.  This piece of road runs past the softball fields, the Winterset Area Soccer Complex, and a quarry.  And corn fields.  And a dead doe.  Yeah, a freshly hit doe lay on the side of the road.  You know, I have this theory about dead deer.  You very seldom, if ever see a dead buck on the side of the road; and here's why:  They cross at the Deer Next 2 miles (or whatever) signs.  You naturally become alert for deer when you see these signs, right?  So the bucks stop here...wait for you to drive by and cross.  Plus, the image on those signs is of a buck, right?  Since does can't read, and the sign has a buck on it, does have no real place to cross the road.  So they wander out anywhere they please and run into cars and trucks and wind up dead.  If you have a better theory, post it.

Running.  Yes, back to the running.  The last half mile of my run this morning I added some sprints between power poles.  I would run 1, sprint 2, run 1, sprint 2.  I managed to get my heart up to 176 during the last set.  That's about high enough.  23:49 minutes - 3.1 miles.  If my calculations are correct, that's a 7:41 pace.  Not bad...and getting better.

Cannonball is 2 days away.  As of last night, I was the only entry for the Pump AND Run in my age group.  Mike Wells is running just the 5k (whew).  Root for me...

myk