Running - Twenty Nickels

If I had $699,950, I could be home now

There wasn't one highly-notable thing that occurred on my 4-mile loop this morning, but there were a lot of small things. Sort of like twenty nickels making a dollar. Never hurts to start the day without a bang. Predictable and quiet can be good. The highlights of this non-highlightable morning were:

Ran a little farther - After putting Jack on the bus (actually he does a darn good job of putting himself on the bus), I walked down through our neighborhood, stretched my legs against a light pole, and started running soon after. Not thinking I was going to make it far, I was surprised to have the energy to continue. I was able to make it halfway up Northup Hill, which has long been my evil lung-burning nemesis. After walking awhile, I was on the run again for another rough-measured quarter mile. More walking, then more running. Each time I ran farther than planned. The words of my sister-in-law hung in my head with every foot drop:

Don't concentrate on how much heavier you are than when you were in college. Just keep focusing on how far you've come...keep up the momentum!! We're all behind you.

Made a huge difference; I have a great family.

Ran a little slower - I may have run more today, but it was at a slower pace. My legs just didn't seem to have the spring necessary to keep it up. Call it weird, but stretching seemed to slow me down. I know the reason behind stretching is to warm up your legs in preparation for running. I would seem that my body prefers a more natural warm that includes walking for 15 minutes or more. Throughout my loop I noticed that my foot strikes (for lack of a better more "Runnery" term) seemed to jar me with an clear lack of shock absorbing ability. But I kept it up. It's 6:20pm and the fronts of my legs still ache. Worth every nagging pain though.

Listened to great music - Music and exercise, hand in hand. Since the dawn of the massive radio headphones of the 70s, listening to music while mobile has changed the way we look at walking, running, or commuting. I walk and run slower if I don't have any music. In fact, another side effect of walking in silence is that I get a song stuck in my head...and I can't get rid of it. Imagine experiencing an entire hour of THIS while walking. ...the horror...the horror...But thanks to cellphones and big memory cards, I can carry 2 Gigs of music with me each day when I walk; of course my headphones make me look like a WW2 tail gunner on a B-17 but I'm not in it for the style (unless that's your style). For whatever reason I can think straight if I have a soundtrack in my head. Music is a huge part of what I do each morning, and thanks to the Internet and Creative Commons I have an almost endless supply of great tunes. I've compiled Super Loop 2010, a typical Playlist that gets me motivated to run. It's just under an hour's worth of music. I'm into heavy guitar, instrumentals, and female metal vocalists. You can listen to the playlist online, download it - free and legal - and hear what Kurt hears. You ready? ;)

Viewed drop-dead gorgeous Olympics - Most people who live in the Central Puget Sound are well aware of the Cascade Mountain Range towering above their activities day in and day out, but it's easy to forget that we have another mountain range to the west - The Olympics. On a bad day they are craggy reminders that we don't live right on the ocean. On a good day they are stunning. Today they were beyond even that. White and blinding from the rising sun, and looming high above Seattle as I ran down Northup to 156th. Pictures can't do justice for what I saw. Well okay...pictures from a cellphone can't come close to capturing the awesome hard-edge beauty I saw. I never want to forget that I can see this for free, just by exercising.

Saw a V8-powered motorcycle - Yeah. The same engine that's in my truck. Call it overkill. Call it suicide. Call it what you will, but it's a lot of motor for two wheels. This one was black with orange flames, and was cleaner than any January road would leave it. I had a sudden desire to go home and purge anything from my house that was gaudy or blingy.

Did 25 lunges - I figure that if I couldn't control my legs in the way that I'd hoped, at least I could do some lunges. Success. And they felt great. Oddly enough, the control I wanted throughout the loop emerged after lunging. As one of my friends wrote recently,

If you want another good work out, put a 50 pound kid on your shoulders & do some squats! Boy are my legs sore today!

Took eight pictures - No, they won't win awards. Yes, they will probably have people scratching their heads. For whatever reason, stuff catches my attention and it seems right at the time to take a picture. Maybe that's why I love carrying a cameraphone with me, because it gives me an opportunity to document stuff before I forget about it. More than once I've gone back into my archives and pulled an innocuous picture from the files to use in a blog post. And it will happen again, guaranteed. I mean, seriously...just look at the top of this page!

So all these 'nickels' I had this morning made a dollar of a day. I goes along with my desire to hold a Half Full mentality about life. If that means I celebrate the mundane, then I'm all for it!

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Super Loop 2010 Playlist Link: http://www.jamendo.com
Blog Link: http://baconstripmall.blogspot.com/search/label/Running
Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMIDpmxMxhc