Mainzelrennchen

So, I'm lying in bed and my legs are tired and I know I have to run again this afternoon but I need to spend a good fifty hours in the library before I go to grandma's for porridge and tea.

Oh yeah, I remember this part of the schedule.

A few quick notes about running this time 'round:
First
-- I'm faster than I used to be, but not fast in any traditional sense of the word. No blue-light shifts here, just a couple of snail stompings.

Second
-- I like running in cologne, but it's way too flat. The Bay Area's hills, although excruciating and evil and just plain dire on paper, at least make different demands of diffferent parts of Dayton. Mi piace cosa nueva.

Third
-- Cologne may be flat, but there are mad runners here. Crazy, wicked, mad runners. It's a great community. In fact, I'm joining it this weekend with a half marathon that has a really funny name I just can't recall. I just read that Stuart Murdoch ran here not long ago. I wonder what he listened to on his ipod...hmmmm.

Alackity alas--On to the most recent run of consequence

Distance: 10 miles
Time: 85.50 minutes
Place: A Mainzish stretch along the Rhein
Overall Impression: Good Since I drank Five Beers and Two Shots the Night Before (GSIDFBTSNB)

Well, I half-assed Julie's Kenyan method, but I think it still affected me slightly. It was either that or the cake I had for breakfast. It's always a great sensation when you're midway through a run and you realize you didn't take it seriously enough. The result is that it exacts evil revenge on you for the next day.

Cyclists call this "bonking", but quite frankly cyclists are doping wankers.

I still kept a sub-9 minute mile, though, and this along a particularly windy part of the Mainz. (Which reminds me, I've now run a long various stretches of this river. Shouldn't we just run along the entire damn thing? Raise money for orphaned Romanians, as Tessa would say?)
What I love about running in Germany is the alternating green and grey patterns stemming from some very fine arboreal habitude mixed in with some very horrible architectural choices during the sixties and seventies. (See, we go to modernism exhibits, and we say "ooh, ahh. you were a fine man, mr. gropius." Then we leave the museum, look at everything that actually came about, fleshed out in graffiti no less, and we ask the tour guide to take us to the castle with poor lighting and ventialation, and with no consideration about maximized efficiency of movement in the kitchen.)
The moral of this whole post is, of course, that I have finaly reached the stage of training where cake and alcohol almost wholly get excised from the routine. The thing is, ten miles is a long ways, sure. But it shouldn't have felt that long, especially since it was a little short (fast), if you know what I mean. Time to start thinking about the best ways to fuel this here Hendersonic Flyer.

Oh yeah, odd knee pain tells me its time for new shoes. I just looked, and I'm at about 450 miles since January, so I'm due.