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.