Random things!

1) The Olympics have ended without incident (which is great), not without controversy (because otherwise what fun would they be?), and with plenty of lovely moments that totally, utterly sucked me in (I think I scared someone with my gasp when I was in the library, watching Mikaela Shiffrin go up on one leg in her last slalom run and then somehow manage to plunk it back down and finish her run for the gold). Sure, there were plenty of un-lovely moments as well, but that’s part and parcel of any large international event. I think I come away from these Games proud of the people of Russia but not entirely enthralled with their leaders, which is about the same as I felt before, so I guess all’s well that ends well.

2) We had fantastically gorgeous weather over the weekend that made a sizable dent in melting the foot-plus of snow we got during the Valentine’s Day storm. Some of the ten-foot-tall piles are still not melted in shopping center parking lots, but it’s no longer hazardous to drive on 99.99% of the road surfaces here in town (or at least any more so than it would normally be). I spent a shameful amount of time inside doing school work, but I did get my runs in (yay recovery week) and managed to go see a college baseball game yesterday that was a pure delight (we’re #1 in the country right now, and we sure are playing like it :)). After all of that damn snow I miiiiight be looking forward to spring a little, but I do plan to do some skiing still, so I don’t want the snow to go away entirely.

3) I bought new shoes on Valentine’s Day, because my (now-old) pair had racked up a record 646.66 miles on them and it was time for them to be done. I’ve been running in Sauconys since the Guide 5, and have now graduated to the Guide 7 – and, apparently, bought enough pairs of shoes at this particular shop to get 30% off my next pair. Woohoo! Anyway, they’re this color:
which I didn’t even realize I’d subconsciously chosen because THEY MATCH NEARLY EVERY TOP I HAVE AND THEY’RE SOMEHOW SUPER-BRIGHT IN THE DARK. And oh good LORD do I LOVE THEM. I’m usually not able to tell what Saucony’s changed about a shoe from one version to the next, but they did something with the toebox that makes my bunions feel nonexistent and also replaced the ProGrid sole with the PowerGrid sole, which makes my joints sing. I need a life if I’m this excited about shoes, but these babies are going to carry me through my next marathon. Which is…

4) A little less than 5 weeks away! I’m at the point now where a given week is either a stupid-high-mileage (50+) or recovery (about 35), and it’s exhausting, but you know, I’m enjoying the process in terms of the bigger picture, even if the thought of running 22 miles on my birthday (that’s this Sunday, the 2nd, if you want to send me chocolate or beer :)) makes me want to puke right now. I gotta say, as much as I love running, I am so, so, SO much looking forward to taking a break from scheduled training once this marathon is over. I dream of a day when I can just decide that I want to go run wherever my feet want to take me for a couple of hours. April… or maybe even May, since I want to give myself a full and proper recovery time for once.

5) ….hmmmm. I guess I ran out of things, though I feel like there’s something else. Oh well. Happy end-of-February, y’all!

Cue the Bon Jovi – a week late!

If I ever organize my own race, it will, regardless of distance, have the chorus of Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” blaring from a stereo at the halfway point. It might be funnier if this was a one-mile fun run, but still: every time I run a race, this song pops into my head at the median point. Feel free to steal this idea and pass it on. 🙂

I’m on week 10 of my 17-week plan, which is why the Bon Jovi is a week late; technically I reached the median of my schedule last week, but didn’t get around to this until now. I wanted to see how many miles I’d end with for January, in any event. (It’s 156.05, in case you were curious, which is the most I’ve ever run in a month. Woohoo!)

I’m happy to report that my experiments with crunching all of my runs into the weekdays and skiing on the weekends have produced good and non-injured results, though I was so very glad last week to be able to back off and run a normal week/weekend per usual. It was a lower-mileage week anyway, which was well-timed. I even got the elusive, far-too-rare, extremely and guiltily pleasurable luxury of sleeping in this past Saturday, since I was scheduled to run a half-marathon on Sunday and rest for both the Friday and Saturday prior (and boy, was it great fun to do that run on fresh legs – there wasn’t a race I could enter, so I just ran a course around town that I thought would make a fun half). Saint had to work, and I confess that I giggled a little mischievously to myself when I rolled my eyes open around 9am and thought, “hmm, he’s already been at work an hour”. Glorious, wonderful, magical, and I *so* enjoyed having a leisurely morning of coffee and laundry to myself. I could see a bit forward into the future, in, say, April or May, when this happens again after this marathon is done, and the thought makes me quite happy indeed.

Week 10 is when the runs start getting longer and harder (oh baby!), and the familiar feeling of somewhat-permanent exhaustion is already starting to settle in. I’m doing okay in taking care of myself, though I could probably use a bit more sleep, but the tiredness is a good kind of tiredness, like it always is. I’m still looking forward to the rest of the process, and the end result, though I feel like if it rains one god-damned more time on my Sunday long run I am going to throttle Mother Nature somewhere unspecified, unless this is some master plan to prepare me for a gullywashed marathon experience at the end of March, in which case, carry on, you fickle mistress, you. It’s been… interesting running through all of this cold and snow, but it has certainly toughened me up (not to mention made me immensely grateful for a working heater and hot water).

In other non-news, baseball starts very, very soon (pitchers & catchers report in ten days, and my college team’s first game is two weeks from today), which is good.

DIPAs are coming out in droves now, which is also good. It’s still cold enough for stouts and the like, but I do also love me a good DIPA on a chilly winter evening.

The Olympics start this week, which is… I wish it was good, I really do, because I love the pageantry and the incredible feats of athleticism and the usual proclivity of the world to ignore politics and get along for a couple of weeks, but it feels different this time, and it makes me uneasy. There’s some element of corruption and wasted money and exploitation in every Olympic games, sure, but I’m much more attuned to the effects of these Olympics on Russia and Sochi because Russia is “my” area of the world – it’s what I study, it’s what I read about over my lunch break. This also means I’m more aware and fearful of terrorist attacks there, and while I hope to God that nothing happens, it wouldn’t surprise me too much if something did. It also makes me a bit sick (for lack of a better word) that NBC – who has said they’ll not ignore the political and social conflicts surrounding these Games – seems to be carrying on like nothing is wrong. Their tone strikes me as insincere, a bit head-in-the-sand, a bit “ignorance is bliss, viewers!”, and I hope they do find a way to address the “real-world” goings-on outside the Olympic village. I’ll still watch, mind you, but with bated breath, and I hope (and as close to praying without actually doing so) that everything proceeds safely and soundly. Who knows, maybe this will end up being something spectacular, but I can’t shake the feeling that this will amount to little more than what NPR’s David Greene referred to as “Putin’s Potemkin Village” (read the story in which he uses the phrase here).

Sorry about that; I got a bit away from myself there. 🙂 To bring it back to running, this all makes me think of the Munich massacre in 1972, and how they ran the marathon anyway (Runner’s World had a great article about it a couple of years ago). The spirit tends to find a way to prevail, I suppose.

OK, what about you? Do you watch the winter Olympics? Which sports are your favorites? (Mine are figure skating, speed skating, downhill skiing – for obvious reasons 🙂 – curling, and the bobsled. Oh, and ski jumping, which women are finally allowed to compete in for the first time!) How is your winter running going? Are you ready for spring yet?

Happy running!