Year 2, Week 8 Wrapup

I was snacking a little more than normal this week, and I fell completely off the wagon on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I still ended up with my average down .2 pounds for the week, so it wasn't a complete and total loss.

We were down in Green Valley for most of the 24th, so I ran my tempo run down there. The forecast was for a high of 48, so I brought a long sleeve shirt, but the temperature was closer to 70 by the time I went out. Consequently, I was very hot. I got so hot in the long sleeve shirt that I actually took it off and carried it for the rest of the run. When I first tried running in 2001, I only remember running sans shirt once, on a particularly hot summer day. Back then, I wouldn't have considered doing it again because I was really embarrassed about it. I was pretty fat, so there was a lot of extra jiggle with every step, and I don't feel that it's kind to force that vision on people.

Nowadays, I'm considerably leaner up top. However, there's still a lot of reasons why someone would not want to view my naked chest. For starters, it's very pale white, although that could be remedied by the sun if I made shirtless running a habit. The drawback with that is that extra sun exposure would exacerbate problem #2: I'm covered in moles. If you could look past all that, there's still the problem that even though I don't have a lot of fat under my skin, there's zero definition in my muscles, so it doesn't help to be able to see their flaccid puniness more clearly. And to top it all off, I have exactly the wrong amount of chest hair. It's enough to put me squarely into the category of "hairy man", which is generally undesirable, while not being enough to actually be a hirsute badge of virility, like it would be if I had one of those Sasquatch-like pelts. Plus it's all wiry and dark, which stands out in stark contrast to the pale whiteness previously discussed.

So, I'm probably not going to be making shirtless running a habit, even though it did make the run a ton easier that day. The whole time I was doing it, I kept thinking how weird it was that it was Christmas Eve, and here I was running in just shorts and shoes.

On Christmas Day, we had our second annual Family Fun Run, although we could only muster up 5 people for it this time. However, this time was a full 2 miles non-stop, not the run/walk that we did last year, so that's progress.

I was getting tired of my Forerunner not beeping 3/4 of the time, so I took advantage of a recent Costco sale to upgrade to the 305. My brother Tyler has been running the last couple of months, and needs to keep up with the training in order to do Ogden with us in May. So, for Christmas and to help him not have any excuses, I passed down the old Forerunner to him, along with a couple of tech shirts, my winter running pants, and a big winter tech pullover thing. The clothes are all too big for me now, and it's my hope that they will all be too big for him soon as well.

The marathon is less than a week away. From the looks of the course, I'm guessing that it's a bit hillier than Park City, but offset a bit by the lower altitude. So, I'm going to call the difficulty the same. I'm definitely a lot faster than I was at Park City. I'm fifteen pounds lighter, too, for whatever that might be worth. I've also made sure I do a small amount of hill training every week. So, I feel prepared, but without any read on how well I'll do. I'm 99% sure I'll beat my last time, but by how much? And, more importantly, will I beat Oprah (4:29:20)? Only time will tell.

(Totally off-topic aside: I just wrote that last sentence above ("Only time will tell") and thought, "Hey, that was a great Asia song". Since I have that CD, and it's in my iTunes library, I just hit command-space to bring up the Spotlight (built-in system-wide Mac OS X search utility) search field, type "only time will tell", hit the return key to select the top hit, and immediately hear the song coming out of iTunes. Total elapsed time from having this random thought to actually hearing the song play: Less than three seconds. These are the kinds of things for which I thank my Heavenly Father in my nightly prayers.)

Scott's coming down to Las Vegas for the marathon (it was his idea, after all), and most of my family has now committed to coming along as well. Two of my brothers signed up for the 5k, and then the two of them signed up a third one, Steven (the cocky one) to run as well. So, I'm curious to see how well they all do, although I'm fairly sure that Steven will actually win. I swear that kid would be an amazing runner if he would ever actually do it. The only times he's ever run more than 2 miles in his life are the two times I challenged him to race. He ran the family fun run with us on Christmas, and at the end I tried to outsprint him. He blew past me like I was an old man or something. He obviously doesn't have the endurance to keep up with me for long distances, but he definitely has way more raw speed than I do. He might not have the right body to be a sprinter, but he definitely has the body for distance running. I think if he just worked on it a little bit and joined the track team for the little bit he has left of high school, he could be a star middle distance runner.