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May 13, 2006
Celebrating
Thank you to everyone who expressed birthday wishes. It was a great day, all day long. I only had one real present from my parents, something that I picked out months ago. I wanted a digital camera since I have been living in the dark ages with my camera. I didn't get a fancy camera like Alison has, with a huge zoom lens. I don't need that much, it isn't what I do for a living, or even a hobby. I simply need a camera for snapshots.
Thursday night was tons of fun as well, fun that was paid for yesterday morning. I learned that in my older age I can't party like it's 1999 anymore. In 1999, I could party like it was 1999! Three hours of sleep just does not cut it when you have to work. I don't regret the night/morning and there was no "I'm never drinking again feeling", only "I'm not staying up until the time I used to wake up in the morning!".
So, onto running...Thursday night was a track workout. The forecast was for the possibility of showers in the evening. From what I understand, Boston has been soaked recently, but the mid-Atlantic seems to have a very strong high front that has caused every storm to fall apart and we are in drought like conditions. It was chilly and windy and the sky looked threatening. The workout was 5 x 800 with a 400 jog. J advised me to take it easy during the workout and just do the 800s kind of relaxed. I felt good and didn't push it, doing my 800s in 3:05, 3:07, 3:07, 3:07, and 3:02. The pacing on these was kind of off, some of them had a fast first lap and then we would adjust and others had a slow first lap that we would have to work the second lap. The quarter recovery was pretty quick, about 1:46. Doing the intervals a little bit slower makes it possible to do the recovery fast, so it's more of a tempo kind of effort. Sure enough, as we're about to head out on the warm-down, the skies opened up and it absolutely poured. Apparently, we got about an inch of rain in only a few hours.
Thank goodness yesterday was my regular day off. There was no way that I would have been able to run given how exhausted I was. Even getting in bed early last night didn't help matters all that much since I was having trouble staying awake when I got out of bed this morning. I wasn't sure what I was going to do this morning. I had been saying that I wasn't going to run for over an hour for the rest of the summer, but that drastic of step really isn't necessary. I went with a group that was going a little bit longer and did a loop that is somewhere around 11.5 miles. It rolls a lot early on and in the last two miles it has a terrible hill that just keeps going up. I felt stronger at the end of the run and actually felt relatively strong on the hill. Before the run, it started to rain for a bit, so I put my cap on. When we started the rain stopped but I kept the cap on. I hate running with a cap unless it's raining. I was happy that I had it on since it started to really rain sometime in the last fifteen minutes of the run.
After running, I went to the gym for the first time in ages. I rode the bike for 30 minutes and once again found some classic issues of Runner's World. There was one from 1987 and one from 1988. This time I took them home with me. I guess that it is technically stealing, but the magazines are nearly 20 years old. It isn't like there are recent race results or recent findings in the articles. I stretched some, but it didn't seem to help much. My right IT has been extremely tight recently. My massage therapist has noticed it for a few months, but it is just starting to bother me. My entire right leg is out of whack. I lifted some, but it isn't something that I enjoy.
Thursday was also the one year anniversary of my mom ending her chemotherapy. She had to go in on Tuesday for a mamogram since she must go every six months. Apparently there are some spots that they might want to take a closer look at again in her right breast. In November, there were two spots on the right side that required biopsies. She isn't sure if they are concerned about the same area or not. The radiologist she saw seems to have a very poor bedside manner and wasn't very helpful. She was actually argumentative when my mom told her that she had two spots biopsied in Novemeber. The doc didn't think that she had them, but I think that I would remember if somebody did a biopsy on me. Her appointment with the surgeon to go over the films is in another week and a half, so she'll find out what he wants to do then. He did call and didn't seem to think that it was too bad from the report he heard, but he still needs to see the films.
Posted by Blondie at May 13, 2006 01:36 PM