Turning 26

For my birthday, I got up before dawn and drug my family downtown so I could run just over 13 miles at just shy of an 11 minute pace. No, I'm not fast, but I ran it, and it was great. There was a light rain, off and on, and it kept me nice and cool. This was the 30th annual race, and I don't expect them to stop having it any time soon, so I'm going to run in this race every year that I'm able. Next year I'll run the full marathon. I've already begun training to get my pace under 10 minutes per mile. Here's to next year!

8 miles

Running is getting harder. I don't know if I'm just running out of steam, or if it's the weather warming up or what's going on, but it seems like running is a lot harder now than it was two weeks ago. I ran 8 miles on Saturday (It's now Friday night, I'm looking forward to tomorrow's 9) and it was probably the most interesting run I've had to date. It started out hard, like all of my runs do, and after a mile I was telling myself to turn around after two miles and just do half. So I pushed on through the second mile and by the time it was done I was thinking I may as well go three. So I did that, and about halfway through the third mile it started to rain pretty hard, so I told myself I'd turn around at three miles and head back. By the time I go to the end of the third mile it had stopped raining mostly, and I was feeling really good by then so I just kept going. By this point I felt like I could do the half marathon right then. Right before the fourth mile it started to rain again, and this time it was coming down quite hard. Running in the cool rain felt great, just really great. It rained most of the way back and only let up for the last mile or so, and by the end of the run I was tired but feeling pretty refreshed from the rain. Then my iPod chimed in that I had finished the run, and when I ended the work out it informed me that my pace was under 11 minutes per mile, which is my goal for March. So then I felt really good about myself. April is almost here, and the April goal is to get my time under 10 minutes per mile for the Lincoln Marathon, which is the first weekend of May. MacPractice, the company I work for, is paying the registration for the four of us who are entering the half marathon and getting us some running jerseys. Exciting stuff! My midweek run was really tough, but I realised after looking at the run data when I got back that I started off way too fast and it made more sense that I was really tired. Now I'm tired because it's getting late and Sam is sleeping on my chest, which always makes me want to zonk out too. I think I'll do that now...

Small Epiphanies

I was running this afternoon when it occurred to me that my running is a lot like my attempts at using emacs. Both start, go for a while, then stop. I think I’m over the hump with running though. I ran five miles today and didn’t feel like I had to quit at any point during the run. It took me three weeks and a lot of pushing through the little pains to get there though. First I had side splits, because my lungs were out of shape and I never really ran long enough to get past it before. Then my shins begged me to stop, but after running through the shin pain for a week and a half they seem to be ok with my milage now. All in all it wasn’t a terribly painful run, and it was the longest yet in my training for the Lincoln Marathon. What does it have to do with Emacs? I think learning to use Emacs as my editor will be the same way. One of the things that holds me back now is that I’m so used to the difference function in TextWrangler that whenever I need to compare files I just use that. What I need to do is work through the pain of figuring out the functions I need, I know they’re there after all. Another pain with Emacs is remembering how do cut and paste, which I still have to look up half the time (as well as doing regex searches). I imagine there will be a hump that I’ll cross at some point (and not know it) where I’ll know those things and it won’t feel so painful. I’m also aware that there are other pains I’m going to want to work through with Emacs like making the Windows key (at home) or the option key (at work) be the Meta-Key when I hold it down (instead of having to hit esc all the time!)... but I’ll work through that one in time too. I guess the key is to just keep at it.