Catching Up

I don’t know how many of you read the “The Sports Guy”, but I’m guessing its not many. The reason I bring it up is because about two years ago he began poking endless amounts of fun at sportscaster Al Michaels for excising the word “injured” from his injury reports. Michaels would say things like, “Tom Brady is out with an abdomen”, and this forced the viewer to derive that the abdomen was not healthy. If the player played on with the injury, then Michaels would presumably say, “Iverson is playing with an elbow.” The humorous bit is, naturally, that of course he is playing with an elbow. They all are. Two of them, in fact. (Interestingly, Al Michaels has never mentioned that Manu Ginobli has played basketball for years with no testicles.)
Anyway, in the spirit of all this, I want to remark that I am currently “running with a leg”. It is an injured leg, to be sure, but I like the look of a sentence that implies I am somehow doing all of this pogo-style.
The leg isn’t too bad, really. I just have a perpetually tight hamstring that is slowing me down and making me crawl up and down the stairs that separate our bedroom from everything else in our apartment. Classic post-race fatigue. I’m capping the miles and slowing the pace, and I’ll let you know in a week how it goes. In the meantime, we have a lot of catching up to do, and quite a few photos to dump.
My last month of half-marathon training took place in America, where I mostly had to re-learn how to dodge SUVs. This is similar to dodging buses in London, but at the same time quite different. You see, they come from a different side. It doesn’t sound like rocket science, but it’s a miracle I’m still alive. Partially because I’m not a rocket scientist.
Most of my running was in Phoenix, which is a place in which I’ve never really enjoyed running. There’s too much suburbia, and not enough burbia. However, my parents recently moved into a new house even further from the airport than before and as a result, I did most of my running in some very high quality desert.



No smog, no commotion, just me and the medicine men. I even had a fight to the death with coyotes, and saw a scorpion. Well, the coyotes ran away from me as soon as I got close enough for them to smell me, and the scorpion was hiding under the beer cooler in a decidedly non-running moment. But you get the idea. It was different, and I enjoyed the temporary shake up.

During training and pre-race preparations, I scored all kinds of running loot for Christmas, which can basically be summed up by the twin phrases “running tights/unitard thing” and “new shoes”.



For some reason, the sleeves on my new running outfit are long, and have a hole through which I can extend my thumbs. I do not understand this at all, because although I now have warm knuckles, I have a disconcertingly cold thumb.



I can’t even ignore the thumb-hole. I have to use it, because it is there. The shoes, meanwhile, are New Balance. I switched from Brooks because the sales lady implied that to not do so would be boring. Listening to her weak sales pitch might make me the stupidest consumer alive. I like New Balance, but I loved my Brooks and will immediately switch back after I dutifully kill these with miles. They are just not the same.
Anyway, after about twenty total miles on a treadmill in Chicago, I returned to Phoenix and ran my last “big run” before the halfer, which was supposed to be 12, but ended up being longer than 13 because the treadmill screwed up my Nike Plus for all eternity. I am convinced of this. (Pre-treadmill: near metronome-like accuracy. Post-treadmill: drunken weatherman-like accuracy. This is proof enough for me.) The run was smooth, but not fast, and pretty much set me up well for the half-marathon that was (interestingly) fast, but not smooth.



The actual race itself was a bit of a blur. There were bands at every milepost, and a lot of junior high cheerleaders. I mostly listened to “Car Talk” and tried to hover around 8:20 miles. I think my best mile was around 7:54, and my worst mile was around 8:56. I suppose if you put those two together, then you will arrive somewhere near 8:20. At the end they gave us medals, popsicles, and silly foil capes so we could pretend we were superheroes.



I then tried to find my family among the 34,000 participants. Luckily, they found me right as (this was weird) an impromptu dogfight broke out when a pit bull attacked a Labrador. Needless to say, that part was fucking nuts and I failed my first test as a superhero by running away.
Okay, that brings us up to date, and I again beg forgiveness for my lack of posts over the holiday. There is something about the blogosphere that is so unappealing when bowl games are on ☺. Right now, I’m in maintenance mode, which means logging twenty-mile weeks until I decide whether I want to run another half-marathon in March. And then, I will sit down at a small table in a dark room and seriously discuss running a marathon in either Berlin or Cologne with Sixpack. I’ll keep you posted.