Wednesday, March 12, 2014

...and I'm all out of bubblegum.

The last few days have been lazy, several 20-30 min runs in there, including a couple of doubles, and some ab work and yard work, that's it.  The roads and hills kicked my ass on Saturday, which means that I should hit back harder.  Hopefully, tomorrow will be as cool as anticipated.  I won't run for three hours again, I think, but I might do the same road portion.

Meanwhile, since today was humid, I jogged for 93 minutes on the TM while I watched a movie.  I still haven't watched the documentary, though...I think I'll have to preview it and check if it'll be suitable for a treadmill run.  I've been caught high and dry before.

Oh, gosh, I must seem so spoiled, and I am.  The garage is uninsulated, the treadmill is special (and FREEE! best score ever!), and my laptop stand is a cardboard box atop a semi-busted bookshelf...but my laptop and headphones are super, probably almost top of the line for 2011 or even 2012.  I'm not being sarcastic--I love them and have used them so much I've had to buy replacement parts for each (by the way, Bose sells replacement cables for JUST $7 PLUS FREE shipping--I was going to peel the casing off and see if I could secure the wires better, but with just $7 on the line, why bother except for funsies?).  With my wonderful laptop and headphones, I get to plug into an infinite number of strange new worlds instead of staring at the same crappy abandoned beach ball each run.  Seriously, it's been sitting outside that fence for months.  There's not much to look at here, even when the snakes are out.  A couple of days ago, a kid rolled almost onto the street in front of me without looking, and I was like (after "oh, shit" and braking and profound relief) yeah, I understand, but don't worry, little guy, there is more to the world than a ticket out of this boredom against the grill of this car.  And then I felt my inner downtown child contempt, long story*

However, if I repeat the hilly road run tomorrow, I will get to see not one but two communities of goats!



*So, when I was seven, we moved in with my grandmother, except for my dad who was still working up north.  My new school bus stop was on the wrong side of Somerset St.  This is not an especially large or fast street, but it is a busy downtown street, and the lights were blocks away (this was before they put the one in at Percy, and maybe it was even before the one at Lyon).  Didn't have time for that!  Anyway, somehow, my parents found out about the situation and asked the school to have me dropped off on the right side of the street.  Maybe it was my grandmother.  So, stop, cross the street, stop.  This was not ideal because I was a skinny small kid and the school was kind of rough.  This was before I'd started my reluctant three-year Ottawa Catholic School Board pugilistic career in earnest, but my last school was kind of rough too and I knew what would happen even before I was given to understand that, if I continued to waste everyone's time, then I wouldn't be the only one getting off at that stop anymore.  Kids are brutal.  I wasn't an angel either because I'd already been busted for putting ice chunks in snowballs back in Edmonton (older kids have the best ideas!), but I was definitely overpowered.  One of those kids was all the way up in Grade Six, I think.  So I told the bus driver that I would just get off at the first stop with everyone else.  And so, every day, I waited for a gap in traffic and then dashed across.  I'm trying to remember if I ever timed my crossing with the bus--maybe it was too fast.  Anyway, I didn't blithely roll out almost in front of the only fricking car on the whole street, although a year or so later my bike brakes failed and I ended up running a red light on Gladstone--got a new bike soon after, score!

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