Two Sundays

Last Sunday

I was in Chicago on business and called up Lora to see if she wanted to go for a run. She'd done 10 the day before but agreed to meet me Sunday afternoon. Having gotten a GPS with the rental car made getting round easy (I have GOT to think about getting one for my motorcycle) and I was soon meeting Lora in the parking lot of the clocktower, where she usually starts her runs. We jogged along the lake shore trail but both of us were having great difficulty with the unexpectedly warm and humid weather. We were doing about 11 m/m, a nice easy jog most days, but it was real work and we had to take walk breaks. It's a pleasure running with Lora, since just as I start thinking about slowing down, she actually does. So we sync nicely on that.

Turns out, though, that she brought the wrong key with her and was locked out of her Jeep. After some phone calls turned up no help, I drove her to her home, which she just moved to recently - a nice condo apartment in Evanston. The view is fantastic and includes a panorama of the lake. I met her bf too and he's just a big teddy bear.

all in all, a very nice visit, though I'm sure Lora wouldn't have wanted it to end with so much drama.



Yesterday

The Scotland Run 10K

My 35th roadrace turned out to be inauspicious. In fact, I'm going to mark it down as one of my top five worst races ever. It wasn't quite in the range of that disastrous Manhattan half of more than a year ago, but it wasn't anything like it should have been. I do NOT want to settle for having to walk hills... But that wasn't even the problem this time - it was just that my legs and lungs weren't ready for this race. At first, my legs hurt and I had to stop and stretch - that's fine, I've done that in races before, and about the halfway point, the pain went away and the legs were good. But I felt lacking in energy and that really hurt my race. Most problematic were the lungs. Even though I was taking hills nearly as easily as flats, my lungs would just run out of air at a certain point. I guess I could get in five to eight minutes of jogging, then have to walk for a minute. It was incredibly frustrating, since this would happen even on downhills. I coughed my head off the entire race and that was even MORE frustrating because it wasn't even a productive cough! So the race went.

To further rub salt in the wound, I failed to out-kick a handful of rather overweight runners at the end of the race. I just couldn't catch them and with every fifty yards I kept losing steam palpably. And that just pissed me off. This was just a bad race in most respects and I just want to put it behind me.

Final time: 1:12:23, my slowest 10K by four minutes. Ugh.

to add insult to injury, I didn't even get to go home, shower, and nap. I spent the next ten hours running from rehearsal to rehearsal and ending with a late dinner with a producer.