22 mile single run with a 6.5 mile progression at the end. Here's how it went down: Miles 1-9 (7:18 avg pace) Miles 10-14.5 (7:19 avg pace) 6.5 mile finishing progression run: Mile 14.5-15.5 (6:39) Mile 15.5-16.5 (6:28) Mile 17.5-18.5 (6:32) --uphill slight Mile 18.5-19.5 (6:07) Mile 19.5-20.5 (5:54) Mile 20.5-21 (5:50 pace) Mile 21-22 (6:50 cool down) 50 miles cumulative in 3 days ------------------------------------------- This run kicked ass. I was extremely pissed off at my attitude and my outlook last night. I was so far in the valley that I dug my way to China and popped my head out on the other side today. I did a couple things to right the ship: 1. Bed at 9:30 last night 2. Steak dinner/veggies last night 3. Massive hydration today 4. Sound lunch eating: eggwhites, beans, salad greens, and nuts 4 hours before the run. I'm convinced that my malaise comes around because I am not taking my diet, hydration, and rest seriously. These are dire matters and I'm treating them in a flip manner, like a caveman would. I need to PAY CLOSER ATTENTION TO THIS IN THE UPCOMING WEEKS! My adductor problems have gone away. A few of you have written me with the reason: no posting of my ab workouts. As I ramped my mileage up, I cut all that cross training out and I need to get back to doing crunches again. ------------------------------------ The comedian Dave Attell has a good routine about runners. He says he'd never be a runner because runners are always the people that find the dead body. This posting is close, and it affirms my belief that it's only a matter of time for me; I've discovered simian couples in the solecistic act of open procreation out there, so why not find the other end of it all and get to act out Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet when he finds the ear and the ants? It's funny how us runners never get anything in the middle. We are polarity incarnate; we are at the opposite ends of everything--from our rigid belief constructs (ie. God or no god), to stumbling upon the course edges of the world, out where the wild things are. I'll admit, it's why I am so drawn--yes, magnetically-- to this hobby. The world has increasingly been normalized, standardized, and made into a boring series of sunrises and sunsets where whitebread folks do whitebread things safely between the pull of the poles--where these same folks never shake the dust off of their existence and end up lying in a bed of it, over in the plot next to the Superfantastic Shopping Mall (TM). A long time ago, more people lived near these rough edges, these small opportunities to make life worth living through danger, risk, and adventure. I don't want to say that I want to stumble upon a body, but the fact that I push myself close to it all, makes for a worthy series of sunrises and sunsets. --------------------------------- One cool thing about my place of employment is that someone got the idea to open up a charitable used bookstore downstairs near the cafeteria. The books are all donations, so you can imagine the selection: the okely-dokely Left Behind series in its entirety with uncracked spines, WEB Griffin's testosterone with brown-flecked toilet paper for bookmarks, and a smidgen of Anne Rice and Chicken Soup for the Soul literary pieces of garbage. I usually go in there and leave in about three seconds. Things I'm looking for--real literary fiction or worthwhile non-fiction about crazy mountain climbers and Congo expeditions--never seem to make it on the book racks. But I reluctantly bought something today. It's Faulkner. I've always avoided Faulker; his works call to mind sweltering humid nights and jackhammering cicadas or sitting on rocking chairs on large porches under slowly turning fans while sipping mint juleps decked out in Colonel Sanders attire. Well I bought him and I'm going to read him. I've got a paperback version of a Light in August for $1. Why not. I wavered on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. However, all I needed to read on its back was a comparison between it and something flowery by Jane Austin; life is too short to waste it with your nose behind a book about prancing 19th Century dandies in ball-hugging breeches, romantic intrigue spilled out over 1000 pages, and giggling ladies in curls behind large fans at the grand ball or some such silly climactic scene. So I immediately set it back down next to ten copies of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics.