How I Spent My Summer

Summer is not over, obviously (hello 105 degrees!), but with vacations left only to scrapbooks and Facebook, Jessica returning to work in a couple weeks and the boys back to school soon after that, it feels like summer is drawing to a close, is already a mere memory. So I thought I’d post a report, an update, a scholastic “What I did this Summer”.

As an aside, I sense that blogging is dead. Compared to Facebook and Twitter it feels so isolated, so slow, so old, out of date and alone, as if the blogger is writing in a vacuum, talking to a void (where are the friends? the status updates? the chat? the tweets? the apps? the photostreams? the iphone app? Hello … hello … hello ….)

Anyway, after Boston I took a week off from running, then jumped in the Chuy’s 5K in May and stunk up the joint … again. Ran the same exact time as last year, 17-forty-something. That’s just a bad race for me, though I did win a free dinner and a wooden fish for placing in the age group. The great part about that race though is that my 7-year-old ran it too, so I got to go back and finish with him. He was very proud to have run a 5k (though he will always point out that he’s actually run a 6K before).

After that debacle, I really took some time off, just running leisurely, then traveled with the family to Europe. My brother and his family live in Toulouse, France, so we went for a visit, stopping in Paris and London. It was utterly fantastic. The boys want to live there now, and who can blame them? Public transportation and pastry shops seem to us to be the height of civilization. I ran a few times in Paris, through the Tuileries, along the Seine, around the Louvre. Toulouse reminds one of Austin with a river and accompanying trail, on which I did some fine tempo type runs. In London I ran through neighborhood parks and down the Thames.

Coming back to the heat of Texas after the allure of Europe was a bit of a downer, and my running never really picked up that much. With the new Garmin watch, I stopped keeping my log, but I don’t always run with the watch, and its log applications blow chunks, so I’m really not sure how much I’m running. Mileage? I don’t know, maybe 50, forties? However, we swam every day for 3 weeks after returning to Texas, so much so that I got vertigo for a couple weeks from water in my ears.

Another respite from Texas, a mini-vacation to Colorado, 7500 feet, hiking and fishing, one easy 5-miler with a friend at 9:30/mi pace. I love the mountains, and would live there if I could.

I signed up for the San Antonio marathon, but only plan on running the half-marathon. Three friends are running the half, but it was only $15 more to sign up for the full, so we’ll see how training goes, how I feel 10 weeks out, then make a decision. During the Boston marathon I swore off marathons, by the next day I was ready to take another shot at 2:50, and since then I’ve vacillated between that goal and the sub-17 5k goal.

So here we are, today. This morning I ran a ladder workout: 400/800/1200/1600/1600/1200/800/400 with 400 jog rest (800 between the 1600s), and it was nails hard. Not supposed to be too difficult, but that’s seven miles on the track. I got the workout from this old 80s training book I found at the library one day, and the book had me excited for a brief period, until I actually started looking at and attempting the workouts. I’ll write more about the book in another post, but it is old-school tough stuff.

I have no ending.