Not To Be Trusted With Knives

One Week Today….

March 29, 2014 by Beth

… I’ll be running the Hollywood Half Marathon!

Now that the plague that had infected my lungs is down to a mere biosafety level of 2.5, I’ve been able to get out and do a couple of runs this week, confirming that I can, in fact, break the previously-elusive (at least in the past 3 weeks) 7 min/km barrier. So I might just finish this race in a halfway decent time after all ((Assuming my foot holds out – it’s been a bit sore since the running study, though nothing that a bunch of stretching shouldn’t be able to fix – and that there’s not an earthquake. Yesterday’s news of an earthquake in LA reminded me that LA gets earthquakes. I hadn’t even thought of that until now!)). But, as is the case with all my races in the last few years, I’ve downgraded my goal from “personal best” to “hope it’s not my worst time!” Actually, my hopes are a wee bit higher than that. Here’s the graph of all my half marathon race times:

As you can see, I managed in my most recent race to turn the tide of the downward spiral I was in (remembering that this is a graph of race finish times, meaning higher is worse) and it would be just peachy if I could continue that and  beat my time from the Fall Classic of 2:17:25. Honestly, I’d be happy with a 2:15.

More importantly, though, my two runs this week were actually enjoyable. They were short and quickly (for me) run and along the pretty riverfront and dry and zombies were chasing me ((Hmmm. I thought I’d blogged about the zombie running app that I use, but a quick search of the blog reveals that I have not. Guess that’s the subject for an upcoming blog posting!!). Pretty much everything one could want in a run. This winter and spring has had far too much running on treadmills or in the dark and the rain and I’d almost forgotten that I actually *like* running. But when I ran one day after work this week and actually felt the warmth of the sun as I set out on my run, and when today I felt like I was flying as a cruised along the pier, smiling happily at others out for a walk or a run, I remembered: this is why I run.

As if to reward me further, the running gods decided to put someone at the Waves coffeeshop by my place giving out free samples when I was was on my way home from my run:

I generally don’t like Waves coffee, but this vanilla latte wasn’t too bad ((Kalev, remind me to give you the coupon that I got, as I’m not likely to use it, but I know you like some of the stuff at Waves.))

Also, my Runkeeper app tells me that I’ve achieved 32% of my running goal for the year:

And we aren’t even quite 25% of the way through the year! If I managed to do that during the hardest part of the year to run, I think that I’m going to crush this goal now that the better weather and long days are here!

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