1. It was the return of Monday Runday this week. That is where I get out of work, meet my friend Mike at a local school track, and run or walk. It is so much fun, especially when the weather is good. The return of this fun event was not without its challenges. Mainly, it was do I beat the hell out of a selfish, entitled dog owner. I took a detour off of the track to find a porta-potty. Once done there I took a long lap around the school. It was here that I was met with a dog running free while its idiot owners just watched. I yelled repeatedly to get their dog while it ran around me. I kept running but made sure to toss several F words at the moron dude who stood there leaking brain cells on the ground. It did get my adrenaline pumping but man, stupid people.
2. A new piece of training equipment I got to try this week is resistance training for your lungs. It is a mouth guard with a valve attached to it. You can adjust the valve to restrict your oxygen intake. The gist of it is that if you have to breathe twice(or more) as hard as normal to get a full breath then when you’re exercising in reality, you’ll have far more stamina. I suppose you could use it to strengthen your lungs just for daily life as well. My hope is that using it will leads to more stamina running while my calf wedge will allow me to run longer due to increased ankle and calf mobility. We shall see.
3. I don’t know if it is an example of the Mandela effect or if it’s just me, but how did it take me to my late 40s to realize that Tom the Cat from Tom & Jerry was gray during the first years of the cartoons? I thought he was always blue, but it turns out he was gray for a lot of the time. Maybe my sense of color was different when watching the cartoons as a kid? Maybe I am putting way too much thought into 80-year-old cartoons? But also what else from my childhood am I ‘misremembering’ as Roger Clemens once said?
How did I not notice Tom was gray?
4. There are plenty of times over the last few years when I feel like I am working on so many different projects and making minimal progress on each. Typically, my content itinerary consists of podcasts, videos, blogs, and various social media posts to promote all of those. I have also been working for months on a website for my podcast. This is the project that feels like I am making little progress on. Usually it’s because the rest of the content takes precedence. As we speak, I am working on loading in all of the links I’ve shared in 194(and counting) episodes, along with all of the old shows and artwork. You can see that it’s slow going based on the fact that I chose to stop that work to continue this blog. I’m sure the site will be up before my podcast ends, pretty sure.
5. I always find it weird and a bit off-putting when a random stranger likes a photo or post of mine on social media that dates back several years. Like how much are you stalking my pages to find something that far back when I have hundreds, if not thousands of posts? It’s especially creepy on Instagram, where I have nearly 6,000 posts. If you’re that big of a fan to go years back in my archives, then go support me on Patreon, if you’re just a weirdo stalker, then please make yourself known so I can block you.
6. My 5K race this weekend left me shocked and speechless in the best possible way. I had only semi-trained. I looked at this race as a kind of barometer of where I went with running afterward. My goals were twofold. Don’t get hurt, and finish the 5K(3.1 miles) in less than 35 minutes. I ended up beating my goal by more than 6 minutes, and actually beating my last 5K time by a good 45 seconds. To say I am shocked is an understatement. I was tired for sure but I set a pace from the start and barely wavered. As a runner, sometimes the hardest thing to do is run your race and not change your plan based on others around you. I fell victim to that more times than I can count. For some reason in this race, I felt like it was just me against myself, and it turned out better than I could have imagined.
7. The race was the Dennis Chamber 5K. It started and ended at the beautiful Mayflower Beach, which is on the bay side. This marked the 4th time I ran a race on this course. It’s relatively easy, there are a couple of hills but nothing that any average runner hasn’t seen before. This year’s race had about 250 people, so we were packed like sardines at the beginning. At my peak I used to line up right on the starting line and would take off in a flash. Now I tend to be in the middle of the pack. The faster people take off out of sight, while I still can pass my fair share of slower people who don’t understand that they need to be in the back of the group. There was music, free food, water, a potential free lunch afterward. It was a fun and festive time made all the better by my surpassing my own expectations.
8. I took pride in my outfit for the race. I had an idea for it in my head and had to hope for the weather to cooperate because a rainy day would put the kibosh on my setup. Luckily, it ended up being sunny and around 60 for the race. This meant that I was able to go all out. I had some styling powder from a company named Level 3. It’s great stuff, you can use it on your dry hair. So I spiked up my hair I’ve been growing for the last few months. This didn’t go off without a hitch, as when I opened the container of the powder, I did manage to spill some on my black shirt and shorts. Smooth. Then I had a killer headband from the Junk company. It was blue and black Hippie skulls. Combined with sunglasses, it was a great look. Things went off without a hitch until a few hours after the race. This is when I looked at myself in the mirror and saw that, thanks to the headband, I had a very specific red area on my face. The headband and sunglasses covered my forehead and eyes, so I ended up with what boiled down to a red line about ¼” wide going across my forehead right above my eyebrows. Nice. It was still a good look though.
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| You can see where I might have gotten red... |
9. The weather has been perfect especially over the weekend. It was time to throw open all of the windows and get that spring air flowing through my space. Of course this is the time then that the next door neighbor has a thorough cleanup done on their yard. This was complete with a backpack blower going nearly nonstop for close to 2 hours. It was the ultimate background music for me trying to edit my podcast. I ended up having to close my windows just like it was January again. Booo.
10. In this day and age I rarely have cash on me. I rely on my debit card for all purchases. Only when an issue arises do I wish we were still in the cash days. I was in a supermarket and only when I was at the self-checkout did I realize that the card reader was having issues. I had cash on me but only $5. I wasn’t going to leave my stuff, go run to an ATM, and then come back to pay the rest. After close to 10 minutes of trying and failing a different employee came over and suggested I try the ‘tap’ option. I had done it several times with no luck but to humor her I did one last time. Lo and behold it worked. I was so relieved and said she was a good luck charm. I then bumped into a few people I knew. I felt so good when leaving that I took that $5 and gave it to a group of little girls collecting money for their dance academy. Good karma for me.
Just a little spring photo to end the blog.
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