Change of Pace

Durn it all to heck....I want to see the Philly Marathon results and they're taking their good sweet time in posting them. All I could find so far is that the woman who won was the same one who came in first at Columbus last year. That would be the little chicky who just ran it on a whim to keep her guy friend company and managed to easily qualify for the trials in her first marathon. I don't want to be a playah hater, but jeez louise. She is some kind of big time NCAA track star though, so I guess it was just a matter of time before she figured out she was a decent marathoner too.

Speaking of former track whizzes though, there's a girl that used to work with me who was a little speed demon at Penn who trained half ass for her first marathon a few years ago and got her arse handed to her. I think she ran a 1:19 first half and finished with a 2:57 or somthing like that. A respectable time certainly....if you totally ignore her splits! Anyway, I've watched her pay her dues and learn the ins and out s of the race and she was out there in the park all summer working her butt off, so I'm curious to see if she finally managed to qualify this morning. There's another girl who I think was running it too, who used to be about me speed and she's really worked hard to get to the next level. Of course both of these girls are all of 25 years old, so even if I admire them and root for them, I'm still allowed to hate them for their youth.

I need to sit down and do the math, but I think it's just about time for me to ditch my running shoes and move on to the next pair. I haven't even tried on the Asics I bought a couple of months ago at a warehouse sale, so I'm just assuming that they'll fit. They're one of the ones named after clouds... Nimbus? Cumulous? Stratus? One of those, I'm pretty sure. It really is kind of ludicrous the way I accumulate new shoes. I need to become more disciplined about getting rid of them right away.

I was psyched when I walked by this schmancy yoga shop a couple of weeks ago and saw they were accepting shoe donations to go to Shoes4Africa. They were making a window display out of all the shoes they had so far and honestly, it was a little pathetic. I think they had four or five pairs of running shoes in there. I filled up two giant shopping bags and helped them put together a respectable looking pile of shoes. And still I'm finding random pairs around the apartment! They finally put the Philly results up, but I didn't see either of the girls I thought were running it. Maybe they decided to aim for Houston instead?