Tagged

This is doing the rounds again. My perspective on those is perfectly schizophrenic. If somebody tags me, I start rolling my eyes. If nobody tags me, I feel left out, so thanks, Eric. I'll play along half way - I'll answer the questions, but I won't tag anyone. I just don't like chain letters. Ok, here are 5 facts about myself, some random, some weird.

1. I used to be the nerdy kid at school that was crap at most sports. I was quite good at skiing, though (that was in Austria, not Ireland).
   
2. I can't tell left and right apart. I always have to think, and I get it wrong plenty of times.
   
3. I started going out with that Irish girl in Vienna, 2 months before she went back for good. Everyone said we were mad. Not true, we were just mad about each other. When she left, we wrote a letter to each other every day, for two years. We're now happily married, with 4 children (yes, I'm perfectly aware it sounds like a soppy Hollywood story)
   
4. Despite running high mileage I think of myself as lazy.
   
5. My passport says I've got blue eyes, my wife insists they're green.
   

Let's get back to running. The weather forecast for this week was absolutely foul, but reality was much better than anticipated. It was very windy, both today and yesterday, but manageable. The wind came straight from the north, which explains the drop of temperature; it's now around 4C/39F, but much colder if you take the wind-chill into account. So far I'm still running in t-shirt and shorts, but if it gets any colder I'll dig out the long sleeves and the tights.

Monday saw me back on the 15.5 mile loop around Caragh Lake yet again. I started quite slowly with an 8:20 mile, but got into the groove soon after that. After cresting the highest point of the loop, around 40 minutes into the run, I tend to run the following downhill miles fairly hard, and take it from there. I tried pushing it again over the last 5 miles, but they were against the wind, and the pace doesn't really reflect the effort. I felt good though. The most spectacular sight was a shooting star that came from behind into my field of view and exploded in a shower of sparks. It was quite a spectacle, if short-lived. Running with the headlamp turned off has its rewards. Unfortunately the clouds took over the sky towards the end of the run, and I got drenched once again, which wasn't particularly appreciated in the cold.

Immediately after the run my eyes started hurting, and I could feel them swelling up. It was yet another allergic reaction, most likely to something a farmer had sprayed on the fields. I checked my blog entries, and it last happened in December last year, which is close enough to be called the same time of the year. I'm almost used to that by now, and an anti-histamine tablet took care of the effect, though it left me a bit drowsy for the entire morning. It's a good thing I didn't drive to work.

I decided I need to get more sleep, and stayed away from the computer in the evening. There's always one more website I'm interested in, or one other thing to do, and I tend to stay online much longer than anticipated. The only solution that seems to work is to leave the box turned off entirely. As a result once I managed to go to bed early for once, and subsequently felt very good this morning. I decided to push the pace a bit more than in recent days, but made sure to stay aerobic for the entire workout. It was quite cloudy, which was a shame, because the annual Leonid meteor shower must have been on display. Due to the clouds I couldn't see any of the actual shooting stars, but noticed one bright flash after the other. It felt like being flash-photographed all the time. In the 71 minutes I was out there I counted no less than 15 meteors, and I only counted the ones I was quite sure about. I still managed to sufficiently concentrate on the run to handle a very good pace. But the most encouraging sign was afterwards, I didn't feel tired at all and felt like I could have gone out and run the workout again (though in reality that most likely would not have been the case). I know I've said it before, I feel in great shape and wished there was a race in the vicinity now. I'm aware that you're not supposed to race during base training, I just feel in such good shape that I'd love to test it out for real.

19 Nov

15.5 miles, 1:56:19, 7:30 pace, HR 147
last 5 miles in 37:00 @ 7:24, last mile @ 6:54

20 Nov

10 miles, 1:11:29, 7:09 pace, HR 153