Thor's Running Journal

I got a call from the tour manager at 1:25am this morning saying the Uber canceled on him and the bus driver needed a ride back to the venue. This happened after I drifted off to sleep about an hour earlier. I didn't mind getting the call and indicated to the TM to give me a ring if this situation arose (and I expected it would). Even an hour worth of sleep helped put enough fuel in my tank for this final run. It felt like being woken up from sleep in the middle of the night a few weeks ago when I was sailing.  I drove to the hotel, picked up the bus driver, took him to the venue, and then back home. I went into sensory denervation mode where I lay very still with a special eye mask that contains speakers that I can play white noise through (airplane cabin sound is my personal favorite right now). Without difficulty I fell back asleep until my body natual woke up.  When I peeled off the eye mask I noticed some light so I knew it had to be after 6am. I cracked open an eye ...

  Long runs are strange. I'll feel OK and be cooking along for the first half, or even the first 3/4 and then things start to feel a touch more challenging. Not awful, but streach just a hair. It's almost as through it takes all those miles before hand just to get to the point of stress. Tapping out early and the whole run would have lost its effectiveness.Ok, maybe not the whole run, but the idea is that sometimes it takes doing something a long time to get to the most important part. It takes a lot of patience.

I woke up to fog this morning. I didn't check if there was an air advisory in effect from the wild fires in Canada. I rarely check the weather. I like suprises. "Is it  ____________ out? Welp. Looks like I'll be running today.  Frankly, running in the dark and in the fog is sorta fun. It makes all the lights glow a bit more. It also felt good to do marathon pace practice without hills. Sort of hard to believe it's already been a week since trying to do this workout in the hills...errr... mountains of West Virginia. 

I decided to try and mix up speedwork day (my least favorite day of the week) today with a pair of shoes I acquired a while back, but only tried out for one spin. They turned out to be horrible to my feet today. awful. If I were a kid I would call them the worst ever. They jammed up my little toe and chafed on my ankles. All while trying to do 1km repeats. Even during the warm up they felt slightly off, but I figured they couldn't be that bad. Welp, they were that bad. I even tried to match the shoes with my sweatband, but it didn't help. These shoes despite their boutique background felt so bad and painful I stopped eeked out the repeats and stopped back at home to change shoes for my 2 mile cool down. I almost thought about taking them off all together before I got home and just walking barefoot.  Typically I like to wear the snot out of my shoes or at least wear them to 500 miles, but these shoes won't see the light of day (or dark of early morning in my case) again. end...

  One of my favorite things to see when I'm running through neighborhoods are basketball hoops that are facing the road. I think that this is one of  the greatest signs of life for a neighborhood. I know that it probably drives drivers crazy to have kids playing in the street, but it also makes a whole lot of sense when driveway real estate is limited and there are games to be played.  Generally speaking, not as a hard and fast rule, but on most occasions these basketball hoops are in neighborhoods that are a little bit more worn out than the areas with well manicured lawns and two car garages. I recently noted an exception to this when I was running through Indianapolis and a basketball hoop on the street stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the extremely well kept new and renovated homes along the block. The basketball hoops are held down by all kinds of assortment of weights. Sometimes there's an old log to hold it down other times concrete blocks occasionally bags of s...

 After a 9 hour drive home, I made it home from West Virginia. Joy did 75% of the driving while I read a book, watched some documentary about sailing and surfing, and stared out the window. Vacation came to a close somewhat ceremoniously because it ended on my birthday. I bought a candy bar in Athens Ohio when we stopped for groceries and rationed myself to one of the five pieces for the next 5 hours of the trip home. Being in a car is much harder than being on a boat where there is opportunity to get up and walk around even if it is only a few feet at a time.  As I reflected on in a few previous posts, running on vacation is delicate because of the unpredictability of the surroundings. Hills/mountains, uncertainty about navigation, various road conditions or lack of sidewalks/pathways interrupt a standard workout on a small scale, and end up adding up for a bit of disruption in the broader training schedule and routine. But as I need to remind my daughter oh so often, it does...