TV Timeout

Thankfully, my week calmed down after Wednesday. I ran 120 minutes on Thursday and did 30 minutes in the morning and 80 minutes after school on Friday. On Saturday, I ran 30 minutes and was supposed to do a long run today. Those plans fell through when I felt something strange in my left hamstring about 35 minutes into my run. I don't think it was anything serious, but didn't want to take any chances. I called it a day after 80 minutes and was sure to stretch well upon getting home. I ended the week with 710 minutes on 10 runs. Next week I need to be more consistent with my morning runs so I can be at or above 110 miles. Now that my running has been fully addressed, I need to let my loyal readers know about my new favorite TV show. I generally don't watch a great deal of television, just The Office and a few minutes here and there of whatever my roommates are watching, so I decided to make use of my three day weekend by plopping down in front of the boob tube for some quality relaxation time. As luck would have it, The Discovery Channel was having a marathon of the show Man vs. Wild. In this show, a man named Bear Grylls (yes, his name is actually Bear Grylls) gets air dropped into a treacherous and uninhabited wilderness with only a knife and a water bottle. His goal is to get back to civilization in under five days. Before doing the show, Bear spent three years in the British Special Forces and was the youngest British climber to ever summit Mount Everest. The stuff he does on the show is like Boy Scouts on steroids. Here is my top three craziest things I saw in my five hours of watching Man vs. Wild today.
3. Using his pack as a flotation device to go through over ten miles of rapids in a river in the Rocky Mountains. He got into the stream because the ridge he was traveling on dead ended in a cliff and he was worried a bear was following him. He jumped off a 70 foot cliff into the river.
2. In an attempt to get out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains more quickly, Bear unsuccessfully attempted to tame a wild horse to ride back to civilization.
1. Bear was in the African Savannah and was concerned about dehydration since he couldn't find any water. As luck would have it, he stumbled upon a fresh elephant turd. Bear promptly squeezed all the liquid from the dung out into his mouth. Absolutely unbelievable.
You really need to watch this show. The next season begins June 15th at 9 PM. Just in case you don't watch, remember that, when you are lost in the wilderness, you need to go downhill until you find a stream, follow the stream until you find a trail, and then follow the trail until you get to a road. You're welcome.

Feast or Famine

I need to find a happy medium in my life. Last week was almost entirely uneventful, with not much exciting or out of the ordinary happening. This week, there has been entirely too much going on and I am pining for the calm of last week. In order to save you all from reading (or scanning through, or checking out the title of, or not even looking at) a small novel at the end of the week, I decided to make a mid-week post in light of all that has been going on. On Monday, I ran 30 minutes in the morning before school. We had a softball game that afternoon and, after an hour on the road, we finally made it to the field. We got down five runs early and then slowly chipped away at their lead. We tied up the game in the top of the final inning and had them down to their last out. The batter popped up to shortstop and our best fielder dropped the ball, letting them score the winning run. Upon returning to school, I found that my laptop had been stolen. Despite locking down the school and checking all students' bags, nothing turned up. I am getting reimbursed for a new one and I had most of my stuff backed up, so it is more of a hassle than anything. It just sucks that I can't be confident about bringing my laptop to work. Anyhow, later that night as I was running, I remembered the saying about how bad things usually come in threes. I tried to remember if anything happened before the softball game that could count as my first bad event. Unfortunately, I drew a blank. For my entire run, I felt like I was in a low-stakes Final Destination movie. Somehow, the third bad thing was supposed to happen to me, yet I kept avoiding it by the narrowest of margins. Fifteen minutes into my run, the urgent need to go to the bathroom struck, but I was right by a golf course clubhouse with public restrooms. Ten minutes later, I was nearly hit by a car who was driving without their lights on. About halfway through my run, I almost got hit by a bike when the rider blindly turned a corner at near top speed. Then, on my final stretch back home, I noticed a large seagull perched on a lamp post. Just before I passed underneath the bird it dropped a huge turd. Those things must poop about half their body weight. I survived my final near-not-quite-death experience and headed home to finish my 100 minute run. On Tuesday, I ran 120 minutes at GBTC practice with 32 minutes of tempo running in the middle. It was fun running fast, and doing these quicker runs has allowed me to run quicker on my easy runs while keeping the pace comfortable. Yesterday, I ran 30 minutes in the morning and 90 minutes in the afternoon. The highlight of my day was our softball game. We got rocked, but the girls played hard and had a great attitude. We don't have anyone who can throw strikes at all, let alone consistently, so I asked the coach of the other team if I could pitch but still have one of our girls field if the ball was hit towards the mound. They ended the first inning by the five run slaughter rule since our three pitchers we tried out walked eight batters. Now, I am a competitive person and am all for taking sports seriously, but this woman was downright excessive. She got mad when we didn't want to play with stealing and actually had the umpire sign her score card at the end of the game. Meanwhile, we are still working on throwing and catching at practice. It took some arguing on my part, but she gave in. I took the mound in my first ever middle school softball game a few minutes later. I was lobbing up perfect strikes but managed to somehow strike out the side in the first inning. I couldn't help but laugh while I was on the mound as the girls screamed things like "Go Bonner!" and, commenting on my resemblance to the Scooby Doo character, "Let's go, Shaggy!" I ended up giving up some unearned runs in the next inning on singles followed by three-base errors. All in all, I struck out seven batters in three innings of work. We have another game today and I hope to keep my role strictly to coaching.

If They Don't Win It's a Game...

This past week has been fairly uneventful, although I did get in a decent amount of minutes. I ran 30 minutes in the morning on Monday and 70 minutes in the evening. I doubled again on Tuesday, getting in another 30 minute morning run and two hours at GBTC practice Tuesday night. I ran a workout for the first time in a few weeks and felt pretty solid. The workout was designed to simulate going out too fast in a longer race, recovering, and then bringing it home strong. To do this, we ran a fast mile on the track, then did a 35 minute tempo run, and finished with another hard mile on the track. I ran 4:48 for my first mile on the track and then went right into a tempo run around Castle Island. I just continued at tempo pace for my final mile on the track instead of picking the pace back up. I felt smooth running at tempo pace and figure I was going around 5:35 to 5:40 pace. I ran 100 minutes on Wednesday and Thursday, both times after school. I also had the most exciting event of my week on Thursday. During the last period before lunch, one of my coworkers asked me if I wanted to go to the Red Sox game that afternoon. There had been a rainout the previous night and somehow he had tickets for what became the first game of a double header. I didn't have any commitments at school, so I ended up spending the afternoon at Fenway. It was great to see the park but, unfortunately, the Red Sox beat the Tigers 2-1. The rest of the week was fairly boring and it rained from Thursday evening through Sunday. I ran 60 minutes on Friday, 30 minutes on Saturday, and 170 minutes on Sunday to end the week with 710 minutes on 9 runs. This was a good week overall, but I still feel like I could be doing more. It really bugs me that I am running over 100 miles and think it is not enough. Then, it bothers me that I get upset about being upset for thinking I am not running enough. It's a vicious cycle. Either way, I am hoping to be around 800 minutes next week. Maybe that will ease my mind. This is getting ridiculous. By the way, the title of this post is intentional and is a direct quote from Kevin Gale at a Cardinals game.

Not Too Far From the Tree

So this week was another week of inconsistency, although I did log quite a bit more mileage than last week. I got off to a good start, doing morning runs of 30 minutes on Monday and Tuesday as well as a run of 100 minutes after school on Monday and a 120 run with my GBTC teammates on Tuesday evening. On Wednesday, I only ran once, getting in 100 minutes after school. After that, things took a turn for the worse. I didn't run Thursday morning because my shin was sore after finishing up my run the previous night and I didn't want to risk it. There was no time to run that night because I went to an Arcade Fire (see above picture) concert at The Orpheum Theatre. The show was awesome and, while I went by myself, I bumped into two of my GBTC teammates at the show and we met up for some beers afterwards. The only bad part of the night was waiting an hour for my train home to leave the Park Street station. I turned out that one of the green line trains had caught fire and my train couldn't leave until all transfers arrived. I got to see some cool pictures of a burning train (nobody was injured) on some guy's camera phone but it was hardly worth the wait. I didn't run Friday either, this time not due to laziness instead of prudence. I was tired from the concert and didn't get up to run in the morning. After school, I had another commitment and I ended up just not running again. We have dinner at school four nights a week. In order to encourage the students to use proper table manners, the teacher at each table scores the students at the table from one to ten on things like saying please and thank you, asking people to pass things instead of reaching across the table, and not talking with food in their mouths. Twice a year, the students with the top scores go to a French restaurant as a reward for their outstanding manners. It was great interacting with the kids in a different setting than the classroom and I had a lot of fun. My favorite part is explaining the menu to the students while we figure out what to order. Most kids that age aren't very familiar with foie grois (I say most because I had a strange obsession with the Food Network growing up and was entirely aware that it is duck or goose liver. Maybe I should have said normal instead of most) and seeing their reactions to my explanation of menu items like escargot and sweet breads was hilarious. On Saturday, I got back into the swing of things by running for two hours. In the middle of the run, I passed a cop with a radar gun. As I ran by I asked him "What did you get me at?" For the next couple seconds, I chuckled proudly to myself thinking how clever I was. I then came to the frightening realization that I was acting entirely too much like my father. Now, as I am writing this out with a smirk on my face, I am realizing that, in this instance, I am acting even more like my father than I initially realized, since he feels the need to recount every clever thing he says and laughs harder than anyone else at his story. Scary thought. Anyhow, I finished the week with a 170 minute run on Sunday and ended up with 670 minutes on 7 runs. Much like last week, I am hoping for more consistency in the upcoming seven days.

Cut me, Mick.

This week was disappointing in two ways. One, I got sick and didn't get in as many miles as I had hoped. Two, there was only one funny thing to happen to me on my runs (this is partly due to the fact that I only ran six times but if I start talking about correlation and causation I will probably begin to reminisce about falling asleep in statistics class as I. Norman Katz drones on and on at the chalk board). Anyhow, I ran 60 minutes on Monday and was very sore from the race. At the very beginning of the run I was having a pity party for myself about how bad I was feeling. I was no more than two minutes into my miserable run when I saw three guys sitting on a porch one block ahead of me. One of the guys pointed to me and, as I approached, the three of them started to do an a capella version of the Rocky theme. This immediately lifted my spirits and I shot my arms up in the air. After I passed them, one of the guys yelled out "Adrian!" This instantly shot into my list of top interactions with total strangers while running and probably makes the top three. I doubled on Tuesday, running 30 minutes in the morning and 120 minutes after school. On Wednesday I doubled again, getting in 30 easy minutes in the morning and 100 minutes in the evening. I woke up on Thursday and was absolutely freezing. Even a 20 minute warm shower wouldn't warm me up. After a few hours at school, I started to feel pretty crappy and people were telling me I looked like hell, so I checked my temperature. It was at 101 (fun fact: my normal body temperature is 97) so I went home, ate a big bowl of cereal, and went to bed. Four hours later, I woke up feeling fine. We had a teachers' retreat at our Headmaster's house in Maine and I really wanted to go, so I was begging our Dean of Students to let me go. I took my temperature for her and explained that the lower than normal temperature was totally fine (see above fun fact). She finally gave in but said she didn't want me in her van. Maine was awesome. I took off two days from running to make sure I was back to full health, which was a smart move in my mind. Then I was lazy and took another day off, which was satisfying at the time but bugs me now. Today, I ran 100 minutes to end the week with 440 minutes on 6 runs. I was going to take a down week this coming week if I had gotten in another 100 mile week, so I will just count this week as a down week and get back to work tomorrow.