I Always Win At Stratego

The title is in reference to the fact that Sarah is currently writing a song for one of her classes about the end of summer and she is falsely propagating the lie that she beat me at Stratego! That is an impossibility. I always win the first game of Stratego I play against someone, and then they never want to play me again. I think my skill at Stratego comes from years of playing a mental game with myself as a teenager: if an axe murderer was to walk in my room and swing his axe vertically at my bed in the dark, which side should I be sleeping on to fake him out? What if he comes two nights in a row? Three? Do you stay on the same side of the bed, or do you switch?

No, you're not allowed to call the police. That's not how the game works.

Kind of a crappy week of running - I had a huge, oh-shit-if-I-fuck-this-up-there-are-million-dollar-customers-who-will-be-super-pissed kind of project to finish. And I inherited it from someone who quit a few weeks prior to it being due (and a few weeks away from being anything close to acceptable). It's finally done but man that was unpleasant. It's the only time I've actually really felt stressed at this job - usually the planning goes a lot better than this but it's pretty hard to plan for the 'what if the main programmer for this thing suddenly quits' contingency. I think I picked up some sort of illness + huge headache out of it and just felt good enough again today to resume running, so c'est la vie. Quite a low mileage week. Being sick for a bit evidently didn't hurt too much because today's tempo went really well.

Sun: 10 miles, 72 minutes
Mon: planned day off
Tue: 5.75 miles warmup and cooldown
4.6 miles of 90 / 60 / 30 hills at Heartbreak. Went really well, did it with Steve.
Wed: sick
Thu: sick
Fri: sick
Sat: 5.75 miles warmup and cooldown
5 mile tempo at Fresh Pond w/ Paul. Also went surprisingly well - 26:50 for 5 miles. Definitely the fastest tempo I've ever done and the second fastest 5 mile.

So that's a solid 31 miles and 212 minutes of running. Oh well - stuff happens. Still won't be a bad month overall for me.

Week Deux - OR, I Just Ate An Incredibly Large Meal

We're not even yet out of summer, but the weather around here is finally calming down and sticking around the mid 60's. It's pretty much perfect for running, which makes me think I'd like living in NorCal, except for the people.

The second week of practices has been a lot easier - that's heartening, compared to last year. I think it took about a month before Jenn D. stopped crushing me in XC workouts in 2009. The group we're working out with is still fairly small - Saturday we only had Dan, Pete, Steve, and myself present. Colin's got to work Saturdays and haven't seen much of anyone else besides Paul and Andrea. We've got a few new guys who have shown up to practices but have not done any workouts yet.

Sun: 3 miles, 21 minutes - got back way late from NYC, just did something short.

Mon: off, IT band bugging me from driving so much

Tue: 7.25 miles warmup and cooldown

20 minute tempo at the res - 8:15 for first loop, 8:45 for second (whoops)

w/ Steve, Paul, Colin, Pete, Dan - stuck with Colin.

11 miles total

Wed: 8.5 miles, 62 minutes

Thu: 7.5 miles, 55 minutes

Fri: 10 miles, 72 minutes

Sat: 6 miles warmup and cooldown

5 x 4 minutes on, 1 minute off - about 4 miles.

With Steve, Pete, Dan - did most of it with Pete.

total: 50 miles, 352 minutes

Summah Wrapup

So my attempts to update this weekly over the summer were in vain. I got busy and lazy, so I'm just going to summarize my summer miles and launch right into cross country season and pretend the temporary hiatus of this blog o' the webs never happened.

O'er the summer I ran 410 miles in 9 weeks, giving me a solid average of 45.5. Not bad! I said many times, and I'll say it again: running in the summer in a humid environment is like slowly having your teeth sandpapered. I don't deal with it well. This is still probably my best summer of running ever - I don't know that I've managed to crack 60 in a summer before besides counting cross-training as mileage. It did feel a lot easier than summers past, probably just because I got started earlier in the summer and wasn't a fat blob at the hottest point. I think I also ran most of my easy runs quicker than I usually do - my typical pace used to be more in the 7:30 range but I'm down around 6:45 - 7:15 nowadays.

I flubbed one week or two - I wanted to try and run basically over 50 the entire time. There was one back in July where I think I ran 10 miles...somehow got sick in the middle of summer.

I managed to keep things going pretty well when I went to Chicago to visit one half of the family, but not so much visiting the Southerners for the Southern Baptist-Jewish wedding. Yeah, I am surprised it happened too.

With our first week of cross country underway, and Steve and I deep in mourning for our fellow JV squad member T. "Wedding Spikes" Kaijala, workouts are finally beginning and so I can at least have some more impetus to get out the door. Chris McC is also out with a now-healed stress fracture, but not yet working out. Haven't seen Kevin A., Rupprecht has been schooling us quite handily, and no Brendan or (most importantly) JeffPa. Though there was a sighting of some gnarled old root of a man at Franklin Park on Saturday...high-stepping away from Steve and I like Deion Sanders circa the early 90's.

Sun: 10 mi, 65 mins
Mon: 7 mi, 49 min
Tues: 6 mi w/u & c/d
3 x 3 min on, 1 min off, 2 min on, 1 min off @ The Res
(3.5 miles o work)
Kinda got thrashed. Did this one with Steve, Pete, and Merner at the end.
Wed: 8 mi, 60 mins
Thu: 6.5 mi, 47 mins
Fri: 8.25 mi, 59 mins
Sat: 7.5 mi w/u & c/d
6 x 2 min on, 2 min off @ Franklin Park
(about 3.75 miles o' work)
tot: 60 miles, 419 minutes

Saturday felt better than Tuesday. Promptly went home and bought a cake and drove to Manhattan. The end!