Boo!

Get Your Monster Name

(the above borrowed from Vanilla)

distance: 3.3 miles (outdoors)
total program distance: 18.3 miles
pain level: bizarre, see below
Happy Halloween! I was Axl Rose this year – it was for an 80s-themed party. The good news: everyone recognized me. The bad news: there was another Axl there! But he went for the acid-washed jeans and aviators look, while I was more "Live and Let Die"-ish. We had fun posing together. Good times. Tragically if I wore the whole get-up to work I think I'd be fired (or at least sent home for the day), so I'm not in full kilt 'n' bandanna regalia. Bummer.

I enjoyed the Marathon program last night, though I was disappointed by its brevity. Nova had so much material to cover that everything felt skimmed over, and it was really hard to get invested in the fate of the runners because they were hardly ever on camera. It could easily have been made into a much longer, multi-part documentary, maybe 4 hours or so. I mean they trained for 9 months! And it was all cut down to an hour! It took some of them five times that long just to finish the marathon. But I still enjoyed it (maybe I even cheered at the TV a little when they all finished…) and it reassured me that finishing a marathon is a reasonable goal for myself.

My run last night was about 3.3 flat miles, took me about 30 minutes with some stoplights in the mix. I really paid attention to my form while running, trying to follow the ChiRunning principles. I struggle most with relaxation – I tend to get preoccupied with keeping my head up, leaning, hitting mid-foot, and so on. And then all of a sudden I realize I've been holding my shoulders tense for two miles. It's a journey, I guess. The author advises that it will take 1-3 months to really get comfortable with the new form. So far, I think its been worth it. Last night I felt no pain at all. (Although I do wish that I had introduced the new shoes and ChiRunning independently of one another. I think that a lot of the pain reduction is from ChiRunning, but maybe the Mizunos are miraculous.) I did get a new and different feeling in my legs though: they feel kind of… weary. Like on the inside. I mean, it makes sense. The whole idea of ChiRunning is to use your core and line up your column so that it does the work and absorbs the shock rather than the relatively delicate muscles in your legs. So I'm trading muscle pain for skeletal discomfort. Now I'll take discomfort over pain any day, but I'm not sure what my run is going to be like tonight. I'm hoping that if I do a really good long warm-up I'll feel dandy.