Intermission

I’ll get back to the wedding stories soon. In the meantime, before I lose my inspiration, I want to tell you that I’ve decided that I’m going to run either a half-marathon or a full marathon in May 2008. I’ve even come up with my personal training plan to get me to that distance, without worrying about my pace, before May. First milestone: hit 45 miles total distance between this past Wednesday (10/17) and November 1st. Since Wednesday, I’ve already logged a little over 11 miles, which is super. While I’m in Vegas next week for the sales rally, I really shouldn’t have a problem fitting in 3 miles a day, and it’ll for sure be cheaper than gambling.

I wanted to put that milestone up here so you guys (all three of you) can keep me honest, and you can ask me how my training’s going, and I’ll be more motivated knowing that I have to report back to my blog if for some reason I don’t hit a goal. R’s a great accountability partner too, but there’s something about the faceless guilt that you, dear reader, can impose upon me that I want to avoid even more than the wrath of my wife (!).

So keep me honest, bitches! I have 5 months (plenty of time) to learn how to run 26.2 miles without dying. But I only have 11 days to run another 34 miles, and I plan to take tomorrow (Sunday 10/21) off so that I don’t go too crazy too quick.

In case you’re interested, I did 5.5 miles today, along this route. It was definitely one of the clearest Saturday morning runs I’ve ever experienced; you could see the bolts in the GGB from the Marina Green. AWESOME. Love this city.

I’ll let you know when I pick my race and hopefully figure out a pace / time goal. The way I’ve been going, it looks like it might take me over 4 hours to finish. But if I can manage to get in some speed work and pick up the pace a bit, I can MAYBE manage to break 3:30. We’ll see where I am after the honeymoon (we get back on Jan. 2nd). If I can finish a 10-miler in less than 90 minutes by then, I should be able to pace it up to 8 minute miles, getting me to a 3:30 finish for the 26.2. But we’ll see.

Quickie

Not gonna spend a lot of time here today, because I’ve got lots to do and want to have a productive end to a relatively productive week. Some interesting things I’m doing:

1) scheduling (FINALLY) a dinner cruise that my parents got me for my birthday;
2) thinking about buying a condo (check it out) for a cool $975K – 3BR right on California street with a shared roof deck from which you can probably see the GGBridge.
3) wishing I had really rich relatives who would see “contributing” to our purchase of said condo as an “investment in our future” and would let us “pay them back” over our lifetime and then for our first wedding anniversary they’d just wipe the debt away & say “L’chaim!”
4) reading Impro by Keith Johnstone – if you’re at all into theater, drama, acting, teaching, improv or creative writing, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you check out this 40 year old piece of mastery;
5) trying to get back on & stay on the fitness train – I was dead asleep when the 5:25 alarm went off this morning, so I ended up putting on the gym garb and crawling right back into bed.

Fridays can be productive too, especially when you view them as the lead-in to your weekend instead of the last barrier keeping you from it. (It also helps when you have next to nothing planned for the weekend – you don’t have the pressure of trying to get everything done before some official type of fun begins, you just know that the weekend will be fun simply by virtue of being the weekend.)

More later, and yes, I do intend to continue to blog over the weekends. The traffic is starting to pick up a bit (at least since I started tracking it with that counter), so even though no one is COMMENTING (!) on anything, I know it’s getting read. Now if I could just stop obsessing about checking that little counter thing, my therapist would take me down in dosage.