It only took me what, almost a year, but I finally ran a sub-40 5K. On dirt roads with hills, no less.

They gave out the bears at the finish line. The number on it is my place.

Soooo I’m thinking I’m not going to sign up for the Sylvan Beach Du after all. I wanted a triathlon. And they have one, but they call it a sprint and it’s… um, not.

It’s closer to Olympic distance, in fact (1K swim/18 mi. bike/ 5 mi. run) and while the run is maybe half a mile longer than my average morning run and the bike is pfffff nothing, there is no fucking way I am going to be ready for a 1000-meter open water swim in two months.  No way. So I thought about the du even though that’s not really what I wanted to, uh… do. It also doesn’t help that Sylvan Beach falls on the Sunday before I am to bug off to San Antonio with the Houston Area Ghostbusters for a comic convention and the last thing I need to be doing is shitting bricks about a big race and a big convention at the same time.

So I found another tri that actually IS a sprint. The entry fee is only $5 more than the Sylvan Beach Du, and it falls a couple of weeks after ComiCon. The problem with that one is, it’s a pool swim. Which in and of itself is awesome, but it also means that before I can even sign up I have to get my ass to a pool and see what my 300m swim time is, because I have not Clue Fucking One. And to that end I finally broke down and found a tankini top I can wear my sports bra under and got a cap and some goggles and will perhaps some day this week trudge over to the pool and see what I can do in the water.

…or maybe not, but my 13-minute mile days are well and truly over and good fucking riddance to them.

So where’s the “Top 10 Ways To Tell Him He’s A Shallow, Sexist Rear End in a Top Hat” article?

In less ragey news, I finally took the new bike out for a proper ride Sunday morning. It still needs some adjustment and after years and years of mountain bikes and cruisers with nice fat tires, riding a thing with tiny skinny tires makes you hyper-aware of every bump, crack, hole, and foreign object in the road, but oh man it’s nice.

There was a very strong wind blowing that morning, so I got to see how it handles in all sorts of wind conditions! With a strong tailwind, it goes fast! It cuts through a headwind like butter!

…and a strong crosswind will blow me right over if I’m not paying attention. D: As it was, I was glad I decided to take it for its first real ride on back roads, because more than once I got caught in a gust that blew me to the other side of the road.

I checked with ForecastFox after I struggled home from the grocery store on my old heavy Skyliner later with that same wind right in my face. 26MPH. No wonder it was kicking my ass.

I finished about six minutes faster than I expected to.  Now before you go HOLY SHIT THAT IS AWESOME, bear in mind that I was told somewhere to estimate my 10K time by doubling my 5K time and adding a few minutes, and I added ten minutes on account of hills to come up with 1:30.  So, uh… yeah. That last hill going past the Aquarium kicked my ass, but then there were belly dancers at the bottom of it, so it was all good.

I ended up not wearing the Tyvek Ghostbusters uniform and instead made one out of a decent T-shirt and shorts. My disguised Camelbak worked great, except I must not have washed it out well enough before I used it because the water tasted horrible and I ended up not drinking it unless I absolutely had to and only a sip or two at that, and got most of my water from the stations.

The costume was a big hit with the other runners and the people at the water stations, but I ended up losing the contest to a pair of Oompa Loompas.

So, I survived a 10K. I did not run the whole thing, but I did run the vast majority of it. Which tells me two things:

1. That I should have no trouble finishing a 2 mile/18 mile/5 mile duathlon in three months*, and
2. I would not be entirely crazy to sign up for the 2011 Aramco Half Marathon

* I’m not even worried about the bike ride. That used to be my daily commute to work and back. Now it’s a trip to the mall and a side stop at the grocery store on the way home. I just need to log some more time on the road bike to  get used to the little skinny thing.

So, I totally got revenge on Week 5 for the ass-kicking it gave me this past Sunday.

Which is good, because guess what came in the mail yesterday?

ok how do we do this…………….

lets DO this thing

lets make this shit work

where doing it man

where MAKING THIS HAPEN

(fun fact: repeating the last two lines of that stupid comic got me through my very first 5K)

(another fun fact: yes, Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is a terrible, terrible, terrible webcomic; that is intentional. SBaHJ is actually the deliberately-terrible creation of another webcomic character who is basically the second coolest sonofabitch in the whole world next to his brother)

New stuff!

The time to replace my Adrenaline GTS 9s had come. How did I know this? I knew this because around mile 1.5 of the EP5K, I realized I had sprouted a blister in a place where I had never, ever, ever, EVER gotten a blister from running before.

So after trying on a number of new and exciting shoes… I ended up with a shiny new pair of Adrenaline GTS 10s. Well, I do like the way they fit my teeny tiny narrow flat feet.

Freezin’ race!

Last week I ran a 5K in near-freezing temperatures. I had been told it would be in the 60s that day. Which it was… just, y’ know, NOT UNTIL WELL AFTER THE RACE, when I went outside to wait for my stepmom so we could go eat dinner armed with hat and gloves and jacket. “WELL, THIS IS JUST COMPLETE HORSESHIT,” I said as I went back in to change into cooler clothing.

Also I ran that race with a goodie bag hanging on my arm. I was told there would be a gear check. If there was one, I didn’t see it. Oh well.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH

I am running my first 10K in less than a month. In costume. AAAAAAAAAHHHHH. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH. AAAAAH.

…okay, no, although I will be walking parts of it I know I can do it, and if I can run the entirety of a 5K with a heavy bag hanging off my arm in near-freezing weather and nearly PR in spite of all that shit, I’m sure I can run/walk a 10K in a pair of Tyvek coveralls (I will hack them off at the knees if I have to) and a small hydration backpack disguised, with the lightest possible materials, as a proton pack. …yes, I am running in a Ghostbusters uniform, there’s a costume contest with a “movie theme” division, if I can’t bring home some actual race hardware I can at least gun for a costume prize, shut up.

FU210K!

I started week 5 of Freeway to 10K yesterday and nearly died. WTF, I thought, why is this so hard all of a sudden? And then I realized that the pace it had me on was something like a 9:30 mile, when left to my own devices I run a 12:00 mile on a good day, and there were six seven-minute intervals of my ass running a 9:30 pace. Do the math. SHIT MAN NO WONDER I WAS DYING.

Oh, I ran all the run intervals, all right. I ran every fucking second of every fucking one of them. I had to bump my walk breaks up to two minutes instead of the measly single minute they give you, but by God I ran every second of every run interval.

More new stuff!

I spent my tax refund on a new raceworthy bike! It is by no means top-of-the-line, but it’s light and fast and it fits my little short self and it will do. I rode it around a little Saturday–after fifteen or so years of riding nothing but mountain bikes and cruisers, a road bike is going to take some adjusting to.

I also spent a chunk of the remainder on a Moving Comfort Maia bra, since I’d heard good things about them.

Well…

I will say this. As an elliptical/cycling/weightlifting/other low-impact activity bra, it’s awesome. As an everyday bra, it’s PERFECT.  I had to go back and get another one just to wear as a normal bra.

As a running bra, on its own, it’s crap. Sorry. I love the bra, it’s just not worth a shit for running.

HOWEVER

If I put it on, and then put the Enell on over it… HOLY IMMOBILIZED BOOBS, BATMAN.  Alone, neither of these bras could tame the Twin Towers. Together, THEY ARE MIGHTY VS. BOUNCE.  Sure, there’s still some jiggle, but WOW.

And finally, my position on the barefoot-vs-shod running debate!

does that about sum it up?

Accused of starving their newborn daughter to the point of emaciation, a Bellevue couple now faces felony charges on allegations they were more worried about their infant’s appearance than her health.

And it just keeps getting worse from there.

I could go on about this being the sort of thing that’s bound to happen in a thin-obsessed society like ours, but I don’t have the spoons to deal with this bullshit today, so let me leave a thousand words’ worth of my thoughts on this whole mess:

Yo Whole Paycheck, I’m real happy for you and I’ma let you finish, but Central Market is the best foofy grocery store of all time.

OF ALL TIME.

Seriously, what is this bullshit? Setting aside the whole thing where BMI is a shitty measure of health to begin with, setting aside the fact that offering a bigger discount on healthy food to people who need it less seems awfully bass-ackwards… it couldn’t be more obvious that this has fuckall to do with ~*~health~*~ and everything to do with “ew, fatties.”

You know how you can tell? Because it doesn’t apply to both allegedly unhealthy ends of the BMI spectrum, that’s how.

Well… this was not my best race, but it sure was fun! I very much enjoyed running through the streets of downtown Houston. Also there was an Elvis impersonator and a young boy who I guessed was his son, and who was also an Elvis impersonator, right around the first turn.

Sadly, thanks to…

1. the germs that came to visit me between Christmas and New Year’s and made me take two weeks off from running
2. the blister I sprouted somewhere around mile 1.5 in the weirdest place (the big toe side of the next-to-big toe) even though I’ve run in these shoes a million times and worn these exact same socks about half a million times
3. my misunderestimation of the number of walkers present and the subsequent self-seeding way too far back in the pack, which led to 3.1 miles of chanting “excuse me… excuse me… excuse me… sorry… excuse me… on your left… excuse me… excuse me…” because every time I burst free of one pack of walkers I’d get hemmed in by another one that stretched most of the way across the street and would have to stutter-step and dodge and weave and wait for a hole to appear because I didn’t want to be a complete asshole and just bulldoze through although by about Mile 2.5 I was sure as hell tempted to

…I finished with an even worse time than my very first race. fffffffffffffffuuuu

Although most of the folks I ran with were lovely people, I did swear softly at a few people who nearly ran over me with strollers. And I’m not talking little strollers, either. Great big jogging strollers. LEARN2READRULESKTHX.

…Okay, yes, I had my MP3 player. But there is a huge difference between running with a Clip and one earbud in and the other ear free when the rules say MP3 players are discouraged but not forbidden, and running full-tilt-boogie with a huge fucking stroller when the rules say NO STROLLERS. All I know is, my Cip is not going to leap off my sports bra and start mowing people down.

Also I had cause to mutter “cheater cheater punkin eater” under my breath as I watched a guy go up on the sidewalk, cut across the area in front of a building on the corner (and I’m not talking about just cutting the corner by two or three steps, I’m talking a good 50-100 feet worth of cutting the corner, a savings of several seconds at least). I think I ended up passing him in the end, though. Why the hell would you cheat on a 5K, anyway!? It’s like doing a connect-the-dots and peeking at the solution in the back of the book before you’re done.

Anyway. Asshole.

At least this one gave out medals! And ice cream. And the T-shirt is very nice.

And I think I’ve got my first 10K scoped out.  It happens a little sooner than I’m strictly comfortable with, but the next one around here isn’t until October unless there are stealth 10Ks that just haven’t made the local race calendars yet. Still…agh, I was thinking more like May-June for the first 10K.

I don’t know what I’m shitting bricks about, really. I know, logically, that I could finish a 10K right now. I’d probably walk chunks of it, I know I’ll be hella slow but I can–and have–gone that distance on my own two feet before.

I got an extension cord on the way home from work last night so I could plug in my shiny new elliptical and fully enjoy its assortment of high-tech shit. So I plugged it in, the computer went *meep meepmeepmeep*, something in the ass end of the machine went *vrrm vrrm*, and the screen on the computer lit up… and said “ERROR 1.” I tried the machine out briefly to see how badly this impaired things. It let me run programs, and it would let me set a time or calorie or distance goal, but it wouldn’t change the resistance.

“Crap,” I said, and fetched the manual to see what the hell ERROR 1 meant.

“When the computer displays ERROR 1,” said the manual, “please check if the motor is good and if the motor wires connect well.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.

Because here’s the thing: you can’t really check the motor because it’s enclosed in the ass end of the machine, so hearing it go *vrrm vrrm* and nodding sagely was the only real checking of the motor I could do.

Which left the wires. Which are actually a ribbon cable that goes down the inside of the front post. There are two places where a plug was connected during assembly. The first, and easiest to get to, and thus the first one I unplugged and replugged, is the one at the computer end. Slide computer back out of its little bracket, unplug the plug, replug the plug.

*meep meepmeepmeep*

*vrrm vrrm*

“ERROR 1,” the computer said.

“SONOFABITCH,” I said. Because the other plug? The other plug I had to check? Do you know where that plug is?

In order to check this plug, I had to take those little silver covers off where the lower handlebars connected to the pedal bars… then disconnect the handlebars from the pedal bars… then remove four big bolts I had tightened the shit out of, which connected the front post to the main body of the machine… then carefully ease the front post up and lay it on a chair so that the stupid cable can stay connected without me having to hover the damn post over its mount, because I have not yet evolved far enough to sprout the extra pair of arms that’s really ideal for this step of the assembly.

So I did this, and I got the front post on a chair without accidentally yanking the cable out (and with my luck, it would have given at whatever point it connected to inside the bowels of the machine where I had no chance in hell of reaching), unplugged the plug there, and found a single bent pin.

I unbent the pin and plugged the plug in.

*meep meep*

*vrrmvrrmVRRM*

Ooo? That was different. I looked at the computer.

“MANUAL,” it said.

“WOOHOO,” I said, and set about putting the machine back together. I hopped on to test it out (and I do still need to take the pedals back off–I put them on backwards and should probably move them back a notch anyway) and all is well.

I leave you with a bit of amusing Engrish from the manual:

NOTE: It is suggested to cover your finger within the marked region to select functions in case of any wrong action

O_o