It’s Friday, and I couldn’t be happier about that. On the other hand, I’m running 10 miles tomorrow with my running group, and I do not expect to survive. I haven’t run all week, and I missed last Saturday’s run. If I do die from tomorrow’s run, there’s a 6-pack of Negra Modelo in the fridge for whoever feeds Skokie.

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6237 = my bib number for the Houston Marathon.

And here is a link to my 2006 Houston Marathon donation page.

In return for your donations to any one of the many worthwhile causes, I will provide high entertainment by attempting to run 26.2 miles around the city of Houston.

This weekend was all about new running gear. Yay!

By the way, being a member of local running groups really pays off. At any of the running stores around town (Luke’s Locker, Runsport, Fleet Feet), members of HARRA (Houston Area Road Runners Association) get 10% off merchandise and a buttload of other stuff. Discounts can also be had for members of HoustonFit and Power in Motion.

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‘Cause sometimes you feel tired, feel weak,
and when you feel weak, you feel like you wanna just give up.
But you gotta search within you, you gotta find that inner strength
and just pull that shit out of you and get that motivation to not give up and not be a quitter,
no matter how bad you wanna just fall flat on your face and collapse.
- eminem

Although my running-related blog entries have been on the light side, I’m still faithfully chugging along. I did encounter a few unexpected challenges this week, however…..

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Just got back from watching an advance screening of Saint Ralph, a story about a boy who tries to win the Boston marathon in exchange for a miracle to save his sick mother. The film plot had obvious appeal, given my current marathon training obsession. Although all the characters were too much charicatures of themselves, and you couldn’t get a grasp of whether the thrust of the film was about Catholicism or the Boston marathon, the film was cute and sweet. On the weepy Kleenex scale of 1 to 3, it was a 1.25. There weren’t enough training-related scenes in the movie, and I wish they had played out the Boston Marathon a bit more. 

The film was shown at Market Street in The Woodlands. I’d only been to The Woodlands once before (it was for a concert way back in my college days….and let’s just say I don’t remember much) so I viewed the excursion as an adventure. Surprisingly, it only took us 30 minutes to get up there. The area around Woodlands Mall and Market Street were very…..woody. One could definitely appreciate how The Woodlands earned its name. In fact, it was very serene and quiet, and I found myself wondering what it would be like to actually live there. Then we arrived at Market Square which was really quaint at first, but then something about it started to feel like we were in one of those Disneyworld planned communities. I can’t quite put my finger on it. [As it turns out, the actual Disney planned community of Celebration, FL has “a unique collection of charming shops and tempting eateries nestled around a dazzling lakeside promenade” called…..MARKET STREET. Coincidence? hmmm……] 

Anyways, I have more updates to come later this week. I’ve been a bit distracted, and need to let things settle down. 

As for running/training, it’s been a great stress reliever. On Monday, we started doing hill work at Allen Parkway…..reeeaaallllly painful by the end (I thought I was going to pass out a few times), but it was a great workout. Still going to pilates, haven’t missed a scheduled run, getting back into my strength training routine, and swam some laps this morning. Ok, swimming laps is reallly hard. Much harder than I thought, yo. But, I’m loving that hour of each day where I can block out everything else. 

So, I’m at the office and our server’s just crashed. What’s more irritating about not being able to get to my files is the incessant

BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP

coming from the server room. We turned off the server - as in, unplugged the power - and the thing is still making that noise. The IT department is baffled, and we are slowly going crazy. As a coworker just mumbled, “That noise is making me want to jam an ice pick into my head any minute.”

It’s the audio version of Chinese water torture.

So, in order to avoid descending into madness from the beeeeeeeping, a blog update:

• Soupy air: Ran 4 miles with the Reds on Saturday morning. As usual, I barely made it on time. The run started at 6:45am - the exact time I was scrambling out of the car. Luckily, I found some Reds and joined the herd. The run itself wasn’t too bad, but the humidity was so thick it was like swimming through the air instead of jogging. Yuck. Though, I did discover that running consistently during the week is making a huge difference in my endurance and energy level, making the Saturday morning runs feel pretty easy. I had been worried that running only 35-40 minutes a day wouldn’t be enough to prepare me for the increasing mileage each week, but I’m surprised at how easy the runs are getting.
• Cloned Scottish Men: On Friday night, a group of us went to see The Island at the Angelika. It was essentially a cross between the Matrix, Gattaca and Total Recall. And very cheesy. Not funny cheesy, but *groan* cheesy. Before the movie, we had drinks at the Sake Bar (mmmm….cold, unfiltered sake), then Muffinboy took us over to Mingalone for the food of his people and some yummy wine. Needless to say, I woke up on Saturday morning with a slight hangover and I’m surprised I even made it to the run.
• Chocolate Johnnies and Carbo Loading: Saturday afternoon turned into a chocolate marathon. I met TBus at The Chocolate Bar for some homemade chocolate ice cream (I got a mix of chocolate orange and chocolate peppermint) and chocolate coffee. I haven’t had ice cream in forever (thank you, lactose intolerance), but damn it was good. Afterwards we headed over to the movie theater, armed ourselves with nachos, a huge tub of popcorn, two diet cokes (because the ‘diet’ part makes it all healthy) and settled down to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. TBus said we were carbo loading. The actor that played Charlie was cute, Johnny Depp was entertaining as always (though not at all like Michael Jackson, as all the critics are claiming) and the Oompa Loompas were funny. One of the trailers was the next Harry Potter movie - YAY!!
• Bonking: After a few weeks of almost incessant rain, Sunday turned out to be warm and sunny so I went to Memorial Park for some tennis. Well, the lesson I learned was that I really, really, really need to acclimate myself to exercising in the Houston summer heat and humidity. About 30 minutes into tennis, I completely bonked. It wasn’t pretty. My heart rate monitor read 226 - I’ve never seen it go above 200. Afterwards, I went home and passed out.
• Comfort Food: Exhausted and hungry from the tennis incident, I trekked over to my parent’s ‘hood in Koreatown for some groceries. Picked up some baechu kimchi, fresh and pickled gaenip, tofu (gonna make soontoobu jigae) and two huge, white flesh peaches. Afterwards, I dropped by my parent’s house for my monthly “Hello, Parents” visit. My mom was at work, and my dad was passed out on the couch…..but my mom had made some kong gooksu from scratch. My mom rocks. YUM.

Update on the BEEEPING:

My coworker has left after annoucing, “I can’t stand that noise anymore. I’m outta here.”

I’m leaving too. Whee.

Suddenly the weekend’s disappeared, it’s Sunday night, and I have yet to start reading Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. In fact, I just bought my copy tonight - yes, yes, nearly a full 48 hours since it’s been available for purchase. I’m such a bad muggle.

So, before I head off to discover who the Half Blood Prince is (Tbus has some verrry interesting theories on who it could be), a quickish recap of the weekend. whee.

Running:

• Ran with my fellow Reds on Saturday morning, bright and early. Surprisingly, I didn’t have any trouble getting up and out of bed at 5:30am….but I underestimated the amount of time I’d need to find parking at Memorial Park. The Coaches had warned us that parking would be pretty tight, but I thought, “Hey - how crowded can it really be at 6:30am?” Well, as I discovered at 6:50am, very crowded. The parking lots were packed, and the roads were filled with runners, last minute HoustonFitters (comme moi) and serious bikers (many wearing yellow jerseys. ha).
• At last week’s orientation, we were given color-coded tags to attach onto our shoes. I.e., since I’m in the Red group, I have a red shoe tag. This is to help Coaches and runners locate each other. Seriously. After (finally) finding a parking space, I ran over to the nearest group of runners….and realized everyone was wearing yellow tags. I hurried up the road, found another woman with a red shoe tag, and made it to the Red group just seconds before everyone took off on the run. Moral of the story: Yay for colored shoe tags. That, and leave 20 minutes to find parking.
• We ran 3 miles….an easy distance normally, but after 15 minutes it didn’t feel that way. 7am on a July morning in Houston means 75-80 degrees with 90+ % humidity. Yuck. I really need to get used to running in the heat and humidity. I miss running in the cold.
• I ended up running with some pretty friendly women. We chatted for the first 5-10 minutes….then, silence. “You can tell when people are getting tired when things go completely quiet,” I panted.
• It looked like at least a hundred runners that morning. One of the women I ran with commented, “Whoever said Houston is the fattest city should see all these runners and bikers out here on a Saturday morning.”
• One thing that impressed me on the run was how considerate runners were/are to each other. Everyone was shouting friendly warnings to the people in front of and behind them. Anytime there was a post/pole in the running path, the folks in front of us yelled “POST!!” These posts were waist high, and could seriously knock the wind of out someone not paying attention (like moi). Anytime a non-HoustonFit runner came up the path, everyone made sure that we made room for them by shouting, “RUNNER UP!” I kept cracking up. It was like an audio version of the wave, or dominoes….I’d hear someone faaaaar ahead of us yell “post!” and then slowly, but surely, it would make its way through the crowd up to we were. We’d contribute to the wave with our own “POST!!”, and then listen as it continued to travel backwards towards the end of the line. Hilarious.
• After the run, there was a brief intro to core exercises, and then a seminar on running & hydration.

After Running:

• Dropped by the Westpark Recycling Center to drop off my carload of junk: old desktop computer, tons of office paper, glass containers and a year’s worth of magazines/catalogs. The Westpark Recycling Center is basically a recycling drive-thru - after pulling into the center, I found myself in the middle of a huge warehouse. I stopped the car, and about 10 very friendly recycling center workers appeared and started unloading all my junk. In less than a minute, my car was empty and I was on my way. Yay for Houston’s recycling program. If only my other errands would go as smoothly and quickly.

• In the afternoon, I met a biking buddy to play tennis at his swanky club. Gotta love that indoor tennis, yo. Plus, the club is some serious posh…..makes my gym seem ghetto in comparison. And the women’s locker room was nicer than most hotels I’ve stayed in, yo.
• Dropped by the Phoenix School of Massage for a loooooong massage. $45 for a 90 minute massage. Can’t beat that.
• The tennis adventures continued into the evening. Went to the Westside Tennis Club for World Team Tennis, where we watched Martina Hingis and John McEnroe play tennis (and throw a few temper tantrums). Fun! The (crappy camera phone) picture on the right shows Johnny Mac in the middle of a serve.
  
  
• One of the strangest things I saw this weekend was something called Women’s Boom Run. It was part of the equally strange Outdoor Games on ESPN. Basically, two people run across some logs floating in a pool. Here’s an ‘official’ description:

In the Boom Run both competitors in each bracket will begin at the end of a dock at the same time and at the call of “GO” will run across their own chain of spinning, floating logs, reach a second dock, circle a stanchion, run back across the chain of logs and return to the first dock. The first competitor in each bracket to complete their run wins the bracket and will advance through the rounds.

Bizarre.

Anyways, off to get some HP in before bed.