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March 06, 2005
Secret Wish
A few days ago, Alison wrote about how her dream house would have a washer and dryer in it. My secret wish is to never, ever have to do laundry again. It is the one household task that I absolutely hate. I don't mind bathrooms that much, cleaning the kitchen does not bother me, but do not ever make me have to do laundry. The down time involved in doing laundry kills me. I prefer to hang my laundry out on the clothesline, but even when things go in the dryer, they take twice as long as a cycle in the washer. I would wish for someone to do my laundry for me, but I am too picky about how it is done. Everything must be folded just so, and if something gets shrunk or ruined I am the only one to blame.
If it is not obvious after all of this ranting, today was laundry day. I could have gone a little bit longer, but I am running out of the running clothes that I actually like to wear. I probably did have another week's worth of clothes that could be used, but the weather was warm enough today that the clothes could hang out to dry. One of the factors that causes my laundry to pile up so much is that I do recycle the outer layers of clothing and when I actually do my wash, all of the clothes, even if only worn once get washed. Right now, I am finishing up and everything must get folded, which is an endeavor in and of itself.
Now that I've spent so much time bitching about doing laundry, I did run today. I participated in a race this morning. I woke up early and the weather was not all that bad. I sort of wished that I had decided to run in the real race (read: for money) this morning. After some thinking, I decided that my long run yesterday was more beneficial to my long-term goals for this year. I did a short warm up, most of it on the track that the high school this race started from uses. The top curve of the track is shaded, so that part was still covered in ice and snow, but I only wanted to warm up for about a mile and a half, so the run over to the track and the run back along with a few laps was plenty. The race was delayed because registration was bigger than they expected. J was there too, since he knows the guy who put this race together. We started together and ran the first mile together. It was funny because he's there saying "you know, there are people here taking this as a serious race". Well, duh, not everyone runs 16-19 miles the day before and does a race for fun. We went through the first mile in 7:32, which felt much slower than that. At that point, I just started to run my usual easy run pace and moved up quite a bit. I was picking off lots and lots of people, but kept telling myself, "this isn't a race, just have fun". That's exactly what I did. Every time I passed someone I knew, I would talk to them for a little while. When I passed M and one of her high school runners, she told me to go after 20 people. I kept telling her that I was only having fun and running easy. I think that I may have passed 20 people, but I most definitely was not racing. I ended up finishing the 4 mile course in 28:40 and was the fourth woman overall. I warmed down with a high school boy that one of my friend coaches. This guy takes all of his runs seriously, so the warm down was almost as fast as the race was. I ended up with 7 miles for the day and 69 for the week. This week is my highest mileage week in at least two years.
This week is a cut down week since I am racing a half marathon next Sunday. Tomorrow is a regular day and then the rest of the week gets scaled back some. Today I also won a $25 gift certificate to a local brewery and restaurant.
My laundry is calling...
Posted by Blondie at March 6, 2005 06:47 PM