Note: I feel it’s important to remain consistent in the videos I present to you, so I made sure you get the same low quality you’ve come to expect.  You even get an added bonus with this one because I didn’t realize auto-focus was changing the lighting, so crossing my fingers…no epileptic seizures for you!   Until I get paid for this shyte, I’m not sweatin’ the particulars – it’s just fun.

Btw, if you want better quality, change the settings on the video from 360p to 480p (at the bottom of the YouTube playback window…it’ll sound way better).

Got My Insurance Bill
…via email today from the heatstroke 5K.
Hospital charges for ER + one-night stay: $34,988 (plus $600 in incidentals)
What the insurance company turns it into: $4760 (gee, somebody must know someone)
What they’re charging me: $150 in copays and another $150 for the releasing doctor to say I could leave.  The second $150 is total bullshit (I’m appealing it), as is the whole inflated pricing system.  I really don’t get the health system and never will.

The Sleep Nazi’s New Gadget
I’m loving my new-found affair with sleep – I swear, I feel rejuvenated and motivated again (thus the new video).   This is serious stuff!

So wouldn’t you know, after 7 months of nobody living above me, I finally got a new neighbor: a sweet, petite young woman who volunteered she’s “never around”…music to my ears.  That said, although she steps way lighter then the asshole did, the floors are always going to creak and I can hear stuff through the walls (not just hers).

So…I ordered this very cool white noise machine.  It’s got 1000 reviews and people love the thing – many of them apartment dwellers with my exact scenario.  Granted, I’m not thrilled about replacing sound with sound, but if it makes sleeping easier and deeper, I’m all for it.  I’ll keep you posted when I get it.

The Hot Week Ahead
It’s going to be a challenge with another heatwave of 100s and 90s.  I also pulled something in my groin on Saturday’s run which is still hanging about despite yesterday’s rest day, so hopefully it’ll be fine by the time I need to run hard, though considering the temps, we’ll see how hard “hard” is.  I had to bag my hill sprints today which bummed me out, but I’ll do them later in the week.

Be careful everyone, get out there early as you can, drink up and don’t be macho with your paces.

Occasionally I link to music on this blog and while my main favorite genre is Alternative, I’m a sucker for any style so long as there’s a great hook or a beautiful melody.  Nick made a wonderful slideshow of Vova through the decades with a heart-ripping A Capella song as the soundtrack.  It’s by a Ukrainian group called Pikkardiyska Tertsia (translates to Picardy Third, a type of musical chord).  Using this song was insurance that anyone who saw it would cry their eyes out.  I’m moved every time I hear it and the climax just kills me – doesn’t matter that I’ve no idea what they’re singing.

If my fancy new audio player plugin isn’t showing in your browser (I had to download the newest version of Firefox) here’s a link to the song.

As for running, I had a banner month, reached a new mileage high with 285 and today’s LR finished off a 71 mile week, so things are looking good.  ITBS, I scoff at you (though not too hard in case you come back).

Hudson had a 4-mile time trial listed for Friday, but if there’s one running phrase that makes me stick my fingers in my ears and go LALALALALALALA to drown out the thought, it’d be Time Trial.  I simply don’t do them and I’m at peace with that decision.   Something about running as hard as I can, alone, is comparable to sticking bamboo shoots up fingernails, so it ain’t ever gonna happen.

In its place, I’d planned a 4-mile tempo run, but it was so hot on Friday (dewpoint of 74, Heat Index 87) that I bagged it.  I did want to get something LTish in this week though, so I did a steady-stateish/tempoish progression yesterday before the funeral, middle 4 went 7:15, 7:05, 7:04, 7:00.  7 miles total at 7:45.

Then today, I’d planned 15 and went 16, albeit a slow 16 on Forbidden Drive (local trail) with some rain off and on.  Yesterday I was in high heels all day and had more than my share of wine, so I had no inclination to be anything but a turtle today.  It was so gorgeous with a dark sky (I love ominous-looking rainy days) and all that green on the trail that it turned out to be a slice of heaven.  Ended up with an 8:50 avg.

I’ll leave you with my month in review.  The grey text means it was in the plan but I didn’t do it.  The numbers on the far left are the weeks counting down to the marathon, so week 16 starts tomorrow.  Woohoo!

The weekend started on Friday evening with Nick’s Dad’s birthday.  How do you celebrate a 92-year old’s birthday who’s feeling like pure crap from chemo & cancer?  The whole time you’re thinking that this is his last birthday party ever and you know he knows it, too.  And as Nick said to me, he’s not giving into the idea of death at all.  He’s depressed and weak but his brain is ticking along, fully cognizant of what the score is.  Anyway, he’s to be off the chemo for a week starting next week, so hopefully he’ll feel a bit better.

Saturday afternoon, we went to see Bruno, because I’ve been waiting for that movie for weeks.  I’m not a huge movie gal, but there are certain choice comedies that I anxiously await and this was one.  I’m positive a lot of you will not like this movie, so I’m not saying go see it, but go see it. :-)

Later that evening, we saw another surprisingly excellent comedy on Pay Per View, The Promotion – about two guys competing to be manager of a grocery store, great cast and very funny.  Plus it’s got John C. Reilly in it, who can do no wrong in my book.

Sunday morning was my long run.  I had planned on 14, but only got to 13 for a couple reasons.  The more mundane of the two was that there was a Tri going on and the finish line was about 1/4 mile from my half-way point.  With tons of cyclists in the way, I had to turn around early.

The rest of the lost mile was due to the IT strap I was wearing.  At one point, I got quite uncomfortable with it, but not from my IT band, it was my calf.  I guess the pressure of the band was affecting it, so after a couple stops to rearrange the strap, I gave up and took it off.  Felt better running without it in the end.  That night, I could feel my calf was still tight, which scared me because I wondered if it was somehow an extension of the IT band problem, snowballing into something worse.

So I took yesterday off, which was certainly reasonable since June 18th was my last rest day.  I was in a bleak mood all day, my imagination had me falling apart in pieces, singing my swan song to running.  Stupid imagination.

As these things go, I woke up today feeling great and my run reflected that – 9 solid, untweaky miles.  I started easy with 8:40s then eased into 8:12 to 8:03s for the rest.  How I love normalcy.

Other than that, I’m still knee-deep in t-shirt designs, but now I’m finally making the music section of Fish Pie its own shop, which I’ve been dreading because there are about 40 different instruments (figure 20 designs in each one… big job).  But now I’m on a production roll and enjoying adding new stuff along with the old, so while I’m currently drowning in Accordion designs (going alphabetically) it’s actually kind of fun.

I know, I’m basically repeating myself these days (IT band, t-shirts, IT band, t-shirts) but it’s summer and there’s not much else going on.  I’ll leave you with a cool song Baptized By Fire by Spinnerette, whose lead singer sounds amazingly like Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie & the Banshees.  Love the octave doubling on the chorus.  Stupid video as usual, but at least you get to hear the song in its entirety.

Hudson had 3x10min @ Half/10k pace with 2min. recoveries, but dividing it up into three small parcels seemed “eh”, so I did this instead: 2 mile wu, 3mi@Half pace, 2min rec, 1.5mi@10k pace, 4miles home.

It went fine.  I wish I’d reigned it in better on the Half portion and kept it to 7:17s, because it convolutes my HR comparison to last week’s tempo, but I overcompensated for the wind.  Splits were 7:17, 7:13, 7:14 (avg. 7:14, Avg HRR 85%) , 2min recovery, 6:58, 3:28 (avg. 6:57, Avg HRR 89.5%).

Total for the run: 10.5 miles, avg pace 8:05.

Been having a weird thing with my left index finger these past few days.  It’ll twitch for a few seconds, then slow down and stop.   Of course, I stupidly looked up what it could be and discovered that Michael J. Fox’s first sign of Parkinsons was a twitching pinkie, but I’m not even going there.   It is mildy freaky though.

Other than that, I downloaded a lot of songs this week.   Of all the singles in my music collection, The Killers win for Most Songs From One Band because I just loooove their hooks and Spaceman is my new favorite sing-along.  Then there’s Manchester Orchestra’s I’ve Got Friends with that super swell chorus and the always uber-cool Dandy Warhols with Godless – excellent trumpet line.  A bunch more, too but that’s it for now.

This week’s Airbus landing in the Hudson River with no fatalities was so jaw-droppingly unbelievable, it most certainly qualified as miraculous.  I kept tearing up when I saw the thing on TV, especially yesterday a passenger being interviewed said something to the effect of, “You know how they tell you to put your head between your legs?  We didn’t.  Most of us looked straight ahead so we could see exactly how we were going to die.”  Jeez, if that doesn’t rip the heart right out of you, nothing will.

I had a miracle yesterday.  Nothing in the comparable realm of serious or life-affirming events, but definitely an unexpected occurrence that seemed to defy the laws of science and nature.

While searching for something in my desk drawer, I noticed my long-dead Ipod Shuffle.  Nick got it for me soon after I started running, in 2007.  That summer I sweated so much, it killed the thing.

A couple days after it died, still deep in denial, I tried one of the “fixes” I’d found online.  Immerse it in a glass of water to let the salt deposits dissolve.  Of course, you’re supposed to do this immediately after it dies before the innards crust over and this was days after, so it didn’t work.  I did have a moment of hope though, when my vegetative iPod’s light turned on, but it was just a tease, the thing was indeed broken.

Soon after, I bought myself a different clip-on mp3 player by Creative, which is still working great, despite an even sweatier summer.  It has annoyances though: playlists aren’t as easy as the Shuffle, if you want to hear the songs in a particular order, you have to use a program that renames the songs on the actual device and also, there’s a tiny wheel for fastforwarding that ends up doing other functions if you inadvertently press it, which you can’t help but do since the wheel’s so miniscule.

So I’m looking at the Shuffle in my drawer, and the fact that it’s even in my drawer and not in some landfill is Miracle #1.  I’m not a hoarder, I prefer living with the least possible crap, and if it hadn’t been for Nick’s inscription on the thing, I would have thrown it out the moment it died. But there it was, looking up at me in all it’s cuteness.

On my desk, recently purchased, is a bottle of electrical contact cleaner.  It’s great for twitchy headphone jacks and noisy pots (knobs) on mixing boards, etc.  So without even a Hail Mary, I squirt contact cleaner into my little blue Shuffle, connect the USB dock and PRAISE BE! as easy as that…I had lift-off!  The Shuffle came back to life.  It’s a miracle, I tell you.

I only wish we’d had such luck with our beloved Canon Powershot camera last month.  The lens suddenly stopped retracting and the pervading advice on the internet was “throw it down or bang it against something…really, it works!”  Unfortunately, heeding this advice, we broke it completely.  We now own a newer model Powershot.

Enough miracle gadget talk though, yesterday’s run was incredible.  Coldest so far, windchill averaging 8 degrees.  Getting dressed was amusing, after all, it’s hard to gauge your first time for a new temp and while I could have used a neck gaiter for my chin, all in all, I dressed well.

The Schuylkill River (how I’d love, just once, not have to look up the spelling of the river I run on every damn day) was frozen in large swaths, with small islands of water surrounded by ice.  I’d never seen it like that before so it was pretty special.  I’d planned on 7 but it was so sunny and lovely, I went 8, averaging 8:40.

Today I’m going out for 8 and then tomorrow (day 14 of my mini-streak) I’m set for 12.  This’ll put me at my highest mileage week to date: 59.25 miles.  Depending on how I feel on Monday, I might keep going with the streak, I don’t have a real reason to end it – nothing hurts and I’m not tired, but that may change after Sunday’s run, so we shall see.

Have a wonderful weekend and (however tiny or goofy) may you find a miraculous happening of your own.

So I took Friday off, did a short 6 with 8 strides Saturday, and then yesterday had a fantastic 9-miler. The weather was gorgeous – 45 degrees, and I guess the day off with the previous day’s strides energized me, because my usual training pace (about 8:50/mi) went on holiday.  I was moving along comfortably at  8:23s, 8:20s, feeling as if it was a normal everyday run.

What makes it even more gratifying is to look back one year ago, to November 18th when I ran the Philly Half Marathon.  My race pace that day was 8:28 and I was sucking air bigtime.   That’s progress.

Backtracking to my last entry,  I have an interesting addition regarding my mention of the supposed “10 days for speedwork to create its adaptions”.  Jim posted a comment questioning it so I started looking for evidence and, save for a passing mention in Glover’s book, couldn’t find anything, just memories of times I’d read it.  So I posed the question in the RW Training forum.

Thanks to one member, whose opinion I respect on all things physiological, I think it just may be an old wives tale, as he said there’s no way to test such a single session and he’s asked numerous sources about the subject.  Well good!  I like doing a light speed session on race week, so now I won’t have to feel guilty about it or think I’m just appeasing my brain…it probably does help!

So today’s the day for said speed session.  I’ll be getting to it in about an hour because it’s going to be stupidly warm today, low 60s, so no time to waste.  I’ll probably be doing 6 x 1/4 mile at 5K pace.  It was between that or Daniels’ race week 4×1200 at threshold pace but in the end, race pace sounds more enticing.

Lastly, on the subject of speed workouts, I wonder if my regularity on doing intervals and tempos weekly for the last few weeks is the reason my thighs are getting bigger.  I haven’t gained any weight, but damn, my jeans are getting pretty tight around that area.  I don’t even mind it really, they look good (and Nick keeps telling me so) but it is interesting that the body keeps changing.  Maybe now I can use them as a weapon, ala Bladerunner.

I’ll close here with a couple songs that contributed to my wonderful run yesterday, one of which is a free download for December.   Keane’s The Lovers Are Losing is gorgeous (as usual, disregard plotless video, enjoy beautiful song) and the freebie is Let It Rain by Living Things – great chorus.  Just right-click the download link to “save as” then go buy a gel with the money you saved.

As for me, I just completed a super windy 6, which brings me to 50 miles for the week.  It’s a good level for me, so here’s hoping 2009 lets it continue, uninterrupted.

Guess it’s time to do something productive because neither Tucson or CIM have tracking.  How’s a girl supposed to concentrate with all this marathon madness going on?  The injustice of it all.

I’ll leave you with my latest fave running song, Sex Is On Fire by Kings of Leon.