5 mins type up, turned into 90 mintues.

A friend said it best: “I've been meaning to blog, but can't find the time to focus on writing.”
I feel exactly the same way about it. Lately, as much as I want to write about stuff, and I’ve had the time to do it, I just haven’t felt up for sitting down and typing away at these black plastic letters. (My friend Mike called them that the other day, and eluded to how our lives are wasted sitting inside pecking at black plastic letters while beautiful days go on outside. )
And I peck all day at work, if I’m not on the phone, I’m pecking, so when I get home it gets hard to motivate myself to either make a phone call that is way overdue, or peck away.

This week I’ve run more than usual. I was running this morning with Jo Dee and Kerry and Karma on the greenbelt. It was quite the quiet run, instead of our normal banter filled outings. So I thought about many things… one of which was,”hmmm… I don’t feel like I’ve run much lately”, but then, I counted out what I’ve done of late, and I’ve been actually running more than usual. However, I have this weird feeling that I haven’t run much at all. Last Saturday I ran 14 on the road at a crazy fast pace, Sunday I ran 4 on the greenbelt with my favorite 4-legger. Monday I ran 9 or 10 with Nedra before work, Tuesday, I ran with performance project: 20 min easy, 20 min hard, 20 min easy… came out to about 7.5 miles. Wednesday I ran 4 with Kerry and Karma on the greenbelt with a headlamp. Thursday I took a rest day. Friday I ran 4 with Kerry and Karma at a fast pace on the greenbelt with the headlamp. Saturday I ran 7 miles extremely hung over with the Marathon group. Sunday (today), I ran 9 on the greenbelt. (Karma did much better than expected!) add that up… 59 miles in 8 days with only one rest day. Yikes. But it doesn’t even feel like I did that much. Probably because I didn’t click a single button on my watch all week. I just looked at the approximate start time, and when I finished.

I have some pains:
- My left leg’s IT Band has really been flaring up on some of my runs. The pains come in waves, such as today, it was almost unbearable. But yesterday’s 7 miler, I had no issues, nor did I on Friday, but Wednesday was bad, and so was Tuesday, but not on Monday.
- The bottom of my right leg (lower shin) started to rally hurt today as well. And it’s been hurting all day. Either this is a phantom pain, a pain that is due to the overcompensation I did due to Pain #1, or Shin Splints, or a Stress Fracture. I’m running 10 tomorrow morning, so hopefully it’s not a stress fracture or shin splints! Ha!
- One of my lower right back muscles is in pain. This morning Karma was in the back of the car, and I was digging out something from the hidden compartment of the trunk. (I can lift the rear floorboard, and there’s room under there to store stuff), anyway, so I’m holding up the floorboard and karma decided to walk on it, so all of a sudden the thing went from weighing 3 pounds to 50 pounds, and I wasn’t looking. Anyway, I strained a back muscle, and that is still pretty crappy today.

I’ve got some rather long runs planned in the coming weeks, so it’ll be fun to run through all those!

I’m also a little disappointed with myself over this weekend. I drank 1 too many beers on Friday night, so Saturday after the run was spent sleeping until I went to a marathon speech by my running coach for all the people that are running the Austin marathon next week. Even if I’m not in race training mode, it’s always rewarding to hear good speeches. He’s a fantastic and inspirational talker, and he didn’t disappoint. After he was done at 8i’sh, I stuck around with some friends as we talked about their upcoming marathon, and then ended up sitting around with my current 2 coaches and my prior coach as the last 4. Ruthie went home, and then there were three of us. I was there till almost 11. So today’s Sunday run was fun, but it was a rough wakeup, I felt weak in the run, and even had to pull into the woods for a nature break. My stomach’s pretty upset with me. (Note to self: Do not drink beers, margaritas and more beers two nights in a row if you’re running both days as well. Not good).
So all that to finally get to why I’m disappointed in myself: I meant to call a few people, I meant to hang out with a few people, and I meant to go to some store to get some errands done, but instead, I just hung out in my little cave, sleeping the days away in bed, or on my couch,
I shouldn’t feel too bad though… I did stay out till well past my bed time two nights, and ran 16 miles over two days. I just didn’t do what I should have done, and I feel bad. So if you are reading this and feel like I let you down, I’m sorry.

My fridge died on Tuesday. I didn’t get a new fridge till Thursday. In between, I quickly reacted and loaded up as much as I could into a cooler with ice. The ice was still hard and fresh looking when I opened the cooler 48 hours later, so I decided everything had survived. However, all frozen foods were thawed out, so I threw the few packs of chicken breasts away and then cooked up ALL other frozen foods on Thursday night. I then re-froze everything. You can’t re-freeze thawed out food, but you can freeze cooked food!
But I did have to throw out a ton of stuff that simply didn’t fit in the cooler. All dressings, and tons of condiments, pudding snacks, sour creams etc… so now, my fridge looks pathetic. It’s always been full of options, but now it’s dead. There’s about 4 things in it (not counting the door stuff).
I bet it’ll cost me a good $200 to get it back in shape. The apartment complex told me they’ll deduct one day of rent, but that’s around $30. I’m thinking of asking them for 100, so they pay for half my stuff. After all, I emailed them at 5:36am on Tuesday morning, and they could have easily had done something by noon that day to save my food. We’ll see how that goes.

On the TV front…
As you may or may not know, I’m a TV heavyweight title contender. I love watching TV.
Is there a better show on tv than Entourage? I don’t have HBO, but I rent the videos of their episodes. I just watched 3 more today, but alas, there are no more until they release more sometime in the future. I am craving some more Entourage.
I also finally started watching all the recorded episodes of terminator: sarah connor chronicles. It’s surprisingly better than I expected it to be, except the friendly chick cyborg isn’t the best actor. But I’ll keep watching.
Friday Night Lights continues to satisfy. That show is the best DVR’d show period. Enough said.
Need to catch up on recordings of LOST, and Moonlight (kind cheesy, but it works), and oh yeah, I still have the last 4 episodes of last season’s Heroes to get through.
It’s hard to get caught up with all the other good stuff going on. I know you’re wondering: what other good stuff. Well, if you have High Def, then you understand, if you don’t, then well, you simply don’t/won’t understand… You just get sucked in to watching so much Discovery Channel HD, National Geographic HD, Food Network HD, history Channel HD, and others… The shows doesn’t have to be the best in the world, but on the TV I have, it’s hard not to watch those things.
I love my Pioneer Plasma. Love. It.

Shit… I really wanted to watch 60 minutes tonight, but just saw that it’s 6:53. Dammit.

Last thought: I’m absolutely fascinated and addicted to the election coverage. If I’m not watching it on TV, I’m reading it on my computer, or looking at headlines on my phone. Can’t wait to vote on March 4.