Long Run # 1

After having the Sunday run postponed due to rain and lasagna, I hit the road last night. It felt great for the most part. A couple things got to me.

First, my GPS is hooked into my headphones so it cuts into my music every half mile to update me on total time, distance and pace. It cut in after one mile with a ridiculous split that I knew I wasn't running which means that it had misplaced me and given me bonus distance. Bonus distance is annoying because it makes it difficult to fully appreciate my workout and instead of updating me every half mile, it annoys me but I can't turn it off because it's giving me a total time which I can use later to figure out my actual pace. It probably shouldn't matter but I need constant feedback and validation. So every time the voice updated me, I rolled my eyes and made the ya-right-jerk-off motion (sometimes) in my head. I figured an extra half-mile would undo the damage done to me by my oppressive but free iphone app. It was distracting enough to the point where I lost a lot of confidence and even started phoning the run in - which led to the second problem I had - which I'll get to after I apologize to my GPS and blame myself. The GPS was right, I had remembered the mile markers wrong; the hazard of running too many similar routes of varying distances. So every update was precise and correct and I thought I knew better and I was wrong. First time for everything. However I did run the first mile about ninety-seconds faster than my training pace and didn't notice any extra effort, so it's a tie as far as embarrassment vs self congratulation.

Since I was not-confident in my progress, I didn't take the run as seriously and let my cadence dip which led to an overstride which led to my first sesamoid pain episode. It went on for three miles and would have continued had I not been forced to rest at a stop light - I run in West Los Angeles so every route I run is either loops in parks (yuck) or riddled with stop lights. This pain was terrible, but called attention to some work I need to do on my short runs, so it's not all for naught.

I had my usual run-ins: impatient drivers, general dolts with no foresight and apparently no ability to see a 6'3" 215 lb man in day glow orange running in the spot where they want to aim their missile; dog owners whose animals lunge on a leash that's not quite short enough; dog owners who stand on one side of the sidewalk while their dog stretches the leash all the way across the rest of the sidewalk and most of the parkway so I have to stop and step over or run in the street; pedestrians who don't realize that they need to share the sidewalk with other pedestrians (me) especially 6'3" 215lb men in day glow orange running downhill at them with a lot of angst and passive aggressive rage (i'm not sorry you dumb cunt. maybe if you tried running we'd both fit down the exact middle of the sidewalk); but nothing really story worthy. Maybe I'll dissect these city-running tropes at another time but it'll just be a lot of me typing in all caps and using "cunt" unoriginally, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it.

And yesterday was weigh in day. I'm down 2.7 lbs total, 1.7 lbs (0.5%) of fat, which is exactly my goal. A bit more muscle loss than I anticipated (0.9 lbs) but I'll just add another strength day to counteract. That was 7 days of work without "The Big One," so I'm excited to see how I'll measure up at the beginning of week 3, though my expectations are tempered because week 3 is on the other side of butter/bread/white potato/celebration ale and 4 days of sleeping in.