Firstly, Blogger, I'm talking to you! What's up with the outage, then making it look like my deathless prose had been eaten? My Wed post disappeared, then came back again, and in the meantime Xenia was nice enough to send me the text of it. (No doubt that's why her dissertation is taking so long, compulsively reading and re-reading all my blog posts, archiving them, and no doubt mining them for tips on how to make her D more readable.)
Back to my nearly perfect blood. It is, you know. A-. That's just about as good as blood can get. Only about 6% of the population have this kind of blood, so Canadian Blood Services is on me like the white on rice to come donate when I'm due. What with starting the new job, and not feeling well for a little while, I missed an appointment. I won't say the calls were getting frantic, but they were happy to see me again.
My back has been gradually feeling better and better. After a 20 minute session of stretching and leg exercises on Thursday I headed out for a run. My legs were happy to run, but my very low back, just above the tailbone still felt very creaky. I'd like to say I ran 5 K, but that's not quite accurate. I ran 2x2.5 K. Just about exactly at the half way mark of my typical 5 K run, there lives a guy I used to work with. He was doing front yard stuff, and I haven't seen him for a while. Of course I stopped and chatted for a few minutes. I know some of you hard core running/training kind of people would have waved, looked at your watch, and kept on going.
Screw that! I'm not in serious training here. I'm running because I've come to enjoy it, and it helps me feel better. I've got my eye on a half marathon in October, and I'd like to build for that, but I'm not SERIOUSLY TRAINING. So I stopped and chatted. To me right now, chatting with a buddy is more important than a run time.
In the end, I did the run a bit quicker than I thought I would, but the rest in the middle probably helped. My heart rate was a bit higher than I'd like given my breathing and pace, but that's not something to worry about. It could be a bit high for any number of reasons. I ended up running a bit over 30 minutes, and felt much better at the end of it, than I did the other day. Then, I barely made the 30 minutes. Today I could have kept going. But I realize I'm still getting my back tuned up. Sitting all day in poor chairs for a course at Mount Royal University isn't doing anything to help. At one point I was seriously tempted to do some twisting stretches at the back of class.
Glad your back is feeling better. I think it's good to stop and chat with neighbors mid run, especially like you said: you're not hard core training for anything. It's easy to forget why do this this stuff. Runs like yours with a neighborly chat in the middle remind us why: it's nice to be out enjoying ourselves and the day and the world.
ReplyDeleteYou are correct, sir. :)
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