Bad Blogger!!!

I apologize to my faithful following of...2 or 3 readers who venture to this site. I fear that I'm now just chronicling a document that will only be read by me and my brother (if I plead for him to revisit the site).

Here's a quick run down of the last 10 days, or is it 11??? OMG!

1. woke up early to do 6, but I was greeted by Shannon in the hallway (what the HECK was she doing up that early?!?!?!?) and she saw that I had on running clothes, which was followed by a much-louder-than-needed plea to go on the run with me. Traditionally this is not an issue, especially since she's MUCH lighter than Reese, but the jogging stroller had a flat. Long story short, after negotiating with Shannon (and losing), then pirating parts from the other jogging stroller we have, inflating the tire and getting everyone strapped in, the time I had for a leisurely (the only pace I can muster) 6 mile jog, had turned into just enough time to sprint out 3.

2. long run. I had myself down to do 12 today, but I only know that I did 2 hours of running. Why? When I took Shannon on the run the other day, I strapped my GPS receiver to the stroller...and never turned it off. I had just enough battery life to make it about a half mile into the run and then I went old school, which is jog out an hour, turn around, and jog back for an hour. Who knows how far I ran.

2. In New Jersey. Working from 7am to 8pm every day didn't give me a lot of time to run. And considering that I forfeited 3 hours to go east, I wasn't about to get up at 2am pst to go for a jog. So I squeezed in a late night run at about 8:30 on Wednesday. It was COLD!!! See-your-breath cold! I used one of those skull caps that you see the NFL guys wearing, and it worked very well. I highly recommend one if you are going to be doing cold weather running. Anyway, I ran for 52 minutes and I swear that I was doing a 7 minute mile or better the last two miles; however, I'll never know. Yet another GPS issue. For some reason it didn't lock onto the satellites out there and it kept going on and off through the entire run.

One final question to y'all: WHY IS NEW JERSEY CALLED "THE GARDEN STATE"?!?!?!?!? I can see it being called "the what-is-that-smell state" or "the concrete state" or the "runners-beware-of-all-cars state", but there ain't no gardens in that state.

3. long run back in AZ. How does someone essentially do an "out and back" run with the out split being 1:26 and the back split being 30? Let's just say that the "out" portion of the run involved being lost and crawling under not one, but two barbed wire fences. After being lost on trails for an hour and a half, I found the road and made a beeline for home. I'll give those trails a try again and we'll see if something better happens.

4. 4 turns into 6. Shannon, yet again, is helping to shape my training schedule. She got up at 4am the other day. I was afraid that she'd not go back to bed, so I curled up next to her (can I tell you how happy I am now that she's out of the toddler bed?) until she zonked about 15 minutes later. At that point, I was awake and had no hope of catching some z's before it was time to run, so I took off at 4:30 for my am run. And with the additional time that Shannon introduced to my schedule, I upped the miles from 4 to 6. I was home before 5:30 and ready to start my day. You should have seen the look on my business partner's face (Kurt was in town for some quarterly work and he's from the east coast, so he got up pretty early), when he saw me before the sun was up and asked if I was going to get out and run soon, only to find that I'd already cranked out the run before the sun, paper boy, wife and kids ever started moving.

Again, I apologize for the mass blog dump and I promise to be a little better in the coming weeks.

Now get back to work.