February 2nd

February 2, 2006
I went running today. Running. Shall we define this? One of the many forms of bipedal locomotion. Some other forms include walking, skipping, jogging, skating and who know what all. I choose running to describe my activity.

The activity was preceded by the donning of appropriate clothing. I wore too much clothing but only had one change of outfit. I am sure I don't need to explain that a serious exercise regimen must be accompanied by just the right clothes. For my debut performance I chose polypropylene shirt (or whatever is supposed to wick away the sweat), fleece, cotton sweatpants (which used to be called fleece until fleece was created), Thorlo socks, well broken-in Saucony shoes. All ready to go! What? You say this outfit will just suck up the drizzle? Fine, I shall add a nylon wind breaker and change to nylon sweatpants. I did not however take off the fleece. Maybe I should talk about the weather. I realize I may have been dressed for exercising in Buffalo not Port Angeles. At least I was not cold.

Now that I have the clothes I need a running plan. Right now I am training to become a novice. Once novice status is achieved I can then train as a novice for the half marathon.

As you may know, the novice training plan for the half marathon is 1-2-1-2-3-2-3-4-3-4-5-4-6. I believe there are many ways to interpret this training plan. The way that I wanted to interpret the plan is to have the numbers stand for the miles I should run each day. This means it would only take me 13 days to complete. I would be done training in two weeks. The problem with this interpretation is that I have heard that the half marathon goes all the way up to 13 miles and my program seemed to only go to 6 miles. Even if you run 6 miles there and 6 miles back that is only 12 miles. It turns out that if you read the small print in the chart under 1-2-1-2-3-2-3-4-3-4-5-4-6, those numbers stand for weeks. 13 WEEKS! Who can keep this up for 13 weeks at a time? I guess novices. And that is why I am training to become a novice. My first week as a novice culminates with a run of 70 minutes. –yes, all at once.

Okay, I am bored of this blog. Let me just get the last few of my thoughts out. I would like lights to wear on my jacket, gloves, and a waterproof shell. And a thermometer for checking the outside temperature. As for the actual training, tonight I ran into town. One mile in, one mile out. If I had run the entire way that would be two miles. I did not run the entire way. I ran through the dark portion each way – that was three minutes (x 2) Then I ran one minute on and one minute off, which worked out to five street lights running, two street lights walking for as long as I could stand it. This worked to a total of 5 minutes of running. So 11 minutes of running all together.

I don't have time to write about how the lining of the sweatpants got wrapped around my leg due to the bizarre physics caused by the interaction of my thighs and the nylon of the sweatpants and the lining. I will address that tomorrow. Or next time I write. Maybe that will be tomorrow.

I also need a place to store my shoes so that the cat doesn't chew on the laces. I am sure these are all the little details that Novices have already worked out.

Lets look at our window of opportunity for novice training. It looks like we have 5 weeks until week 1. March 19 is our red letter day. You can see that by the red letters. Well, you would be about to if I could format this with color. The thing that makes it a red letter day is the 70 minutes written there. It doesn't seem possible.

This is the table that I was telling you about: it wasn't a table until Andrea showed my how to create it as a jpeg. You can see from the various sizes that I still need to practice. Apparently I am not yet a novice at blogging either.