I’d Rather Be Running

Last night I did a fairly slow (9:45 miles or so) 3.2 mile run with my usual Monday-night running group. Actually, only two of us turned around at the 1.6 mile mark, and the other person who did had run a marathon just two days earlier, so she had a great excuse. I guess “I’m trying to rest a bit before my first half marathon” isn’t an entirely bad excuse, but it doesn’t have the same punch.

Even though my ankle was a little tweaked from ultimate frisbee on Sunday and my glutes and groin muscles were feeling it too, the run felt really good. This morning I’m feeling sore again though. I’m going to go ahead and count the ultimate as a full-fledged workout and skip tonight’s run.

Link

I went to a MiPL Ultimate Frisbee game this evening. It was in the mid to high eighties, and it was humid, whew! This was the first time I’ve played Ultimate since college. I forgot how much running around it involved. Plus, back then, I could probably make it for about three plays before I’d be too tired to move. It was really a treat having some endurance. It wasn’t that I wasn’t sucking air after sprinting for a little bit — I was, hard — but I recovered within what felt like a few seconds after stopping, and I was ready to go again. I’m also pretty good at throwing and catching a Frisbee, so I had a great time, even if it was completely exhausting. Only eight people showed up, but most of them were pretty good.

Portland Fit’s schedule has us running intervals Tuesday, but I’m going to count the Ultimate as my week’s intervals session and just make it a normal run Tuesday. Or maybe take it off entirely.

After this morning’s run, I went to get dim sum with MiPLers. We met at Jin Wah, a place by the Fred Meyer’s in Beaverton that I’ve always heard good things about. Um. It was really mediocre. Fong Chong in Chinatown has tastier dim sum by a factor of four. Almost every item disappointed me in some way, and half of them were filled with the same shrimp cake mixture, hidden under one guise after another after another. “Hmm, what’s this? Oh! Shrimp cake wrapped in glutinous rice! And this? Shrimp cake wrapped in fried noodly things! This?” etc… It’s a “Vietnamese and Chinese restaurant”, that should tell you enough right there. Ever heard of the “hedgehog principal”? Do one thing and do it well.

This was a recovery week on the Portland Fit schedule, in preparation for the Helvetia Half Marathon next week. So today’s long run was only eight miles. Ah, I can remember when that was my longest. Time flies. Portland Fit’s usual Saturday meeting was disrupted by Rose Festival preparations taking place in “our” parking lot. I could have run with the group in Vancouver on Sunday, but you know me and my Vancouverphobia. Instead, on Wednesday, I posted a Forest Park run as a MiPL event. Three others signed up, and to my surprise, all three showed up, even at the early hour of 8:00 am. There were two seasoned runners and one less experienced one; pretty quickly we let the experienced ones head off at a faster pace and I hung back with the slower one. She was a trooper and gamely made it up the big climb the Wildwood trail takes south of the Lower Macleay stone house. We did a 5.7 mile loop or so (I forgot to restart my watch for one stretch), coming back down the last third mile of Leif Erikson and then down Thurman to our starting point at Lower Macleay park. My running partner was done, so I headed back alone down the trail again, hoping to catch the other two on their return trip. Which I did, with almost perfect timing — returning with them, I finished with a total of around 7.7 miles.

I have an obsessive personality. I tend to zero in on something and give it all my focus. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m also over-competitive. Meetin Portland caters to both these dark urges. They have a “Junkies” list on the site (visible I think only to registered Meetin users), ranking everybody by the number of events attended over the last 90 days. A few days ago, I cracked the top 10 and got on the first page of the list, having attended 52 events over 90 days. (For comparison, number one has 102.) That’s all well and good. Now I’m fretting about needing to stay in the top 10. That’s idiotic. This isn’t a competition, and if I go two days without attending any events — as I just have — it shouldn’t make me anxious. Like it does.

3.27 hilly miles around my house, in 33:33. I didn’t feel that great — mostly just sleepy, I guess. Not that I should have been — for once, I went to sleep early. My breakfast might have been weighing me down too.

Going back to work after a five-day weekend sucked, of course. After work, I had to do my run — I say “had to” because it was really hot out there. I should be running in the morning on days like that, but I’m running Monday evenings with the group, so I’ll probably be stuck running Tuesday evenings too, otherwise I’ll get only the night’s worth of recovery time. Anyway, it was hot. And I didn’t have much time to squeeze in the run — an interval training session — so I had to do it on the ups and downs around my house, rather than going somewhere flat. The schedule called for 10 repeats of 30 seconds fast, 30 seconds rest. Based on last week, I upped the rests to 40 seconds. In the heat and with the grade, this still wasn’t enough:

The first half was mostly uphill, the second half down. I did a bit better at not having my HR go up and up, but it’s still too high at the end of the rests — certainly I should get it down at least to 80% and probably to 75. And that was with 40 seconds, and walking most of the rests rather than jogging. Ah well.

After that I showered — then immediately resumed sweating, sigh — dressed, and went to play 42. Lost both games. Well, actually, I only played one game; for the first game, I was coaching a newcomer. I impressed our waitress by knowing how to pronounce her name, Thuy. A Vietnamese name, it’s pronounced “Twee”, which I know only because there’s a Thuy in MiPL.

After 42, down the street to the Buffalo Gap for, you guessed it, Karaoke. No crazy theme last night, so I didn’t get to wear a fez or a bright yellow Spongebob shirt. But it was a great crowd, with a lot of my friends showing up. Karaoke at Buffalo Gap is sooo much more fun than at the other bars I’ve been to. I sang two song: Talking Head’s “Burning Down the House”, and (for the second time now) R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It.” I thought I did a decent job on both. Maybe I’m improving, a tiny little tiny bit. Naaaaaah. I was just tipsy.

It being Memorial Day, only a small group showed up for the Monday night run from Portland Running Company’s Beaverton store. And of the five who did show:

• One was tapering for the Newport marathon next weekend, and had a sore knee
• One had what seemed to be some fairly severe back pain and tightness
• One had, well, two broken legs. Bone scans had confirmed last Friday that he had stress fractures in both legs. Should he be running at all? Um, no. I think he might be in the first stage of grief — denial.

That left only two people who were even candidates for our normal six-miler, me and ultrarunner lad Tim. I usually “cheat” and run quite a bit more than the Portland Fit schedule says I should on Mondays. But it worked out right tonight: I was scheduled for 30 minutes and the group turned around after a mile and a half. Totals: 3.19 miles in 28:29 (8:56/mile average).

Afterwards we had a little barbecue at our running group’s fearless leader’s condo. A few other runners were there too, and one of them brought a chiweiner: a chihuahua-dachshund mix. Soooo cute.

I went down to Eugene yesterday to visit Mom. One of the things we did Sunday was to walk the first couple miles of the Butte-to-Butte route, so I could get an idea of the hills (after the first two miles, it flattens out onto streets more familiar to me). The race starts gradually uphill, progressing to what I’d call a medium uphill, then, somewhere short of a mile, goes distinctly and steeply uphill for a short stretch. After that there’s a very short little steep downhill, then a nice long, consistent, and pretty medium downhill.

This morning, after breakfast at Eugene’s ancient institution The Glenwood Cafe, Mom and I and the dogs hiked up Mount Pisga. The trail is 1.4 miles, mostly gravel, fairly steep in sections, and very busy. Mom was a trooper for making the attempt; she’s not much of an uphiller. Or downhiller. But we made it up and back.

My right leg might be starting to have some issues — a little hip pain there, which has never happened to me before. I suppose some aches and creaks are to be expected after Saturday’s 11-miler.