Tour de 24 Hour Fitness

On Tuesday I promised you all that I was going to get up Wednesday and do 20 miles. I totally didn’t. Luckily writing about it did make at least one of you hold me accountable for it, and so I felt super guilty for not doing it (thanks Eric). I decided that the thought of going back to Leif and doing 20 there was what was bringing me down; I couldn’t stand the thought of doing that this week. It’s nice enough out there, but it can get really fucking boring.

So instead I decided to do a way more awesome run this morning. Just yesterday I became a member of the McGloughlin 24-hour supersport club (it’s exactly the same as the other 24 hour clubs, except it costs $26/month more, unless you get hooked up with the $10/month extra deal, which I did. This meant I had access to four 24 hour fitness clubs, all relatively close together. Wanting to take full advantage of this, I planned a route starting at my place, and went to all four clubs.

The route looked like this. Except when I mapped it originally I did it on livestrong, and it said it was 13.80 miles, not 13.73 (crucial difference, I know). This meant I had to run 6.2 miles total on treadmills at the gyms, which I did.

Highlights:

• The McGloughlin 24 I just joined has treadmills right in front, you don’t have to mess around wandering every which way to get to them. Going into the gyms and getting to the treadmills made this run take a lot longer, which can be annoying on a 20 mile run, so I appreciated this.
• The nice weather meant that the panhandlers were out in full force. I love running because it’s the only time they don’t bother me for money, and I can just enjoy their presence without being hassled.
• I haven’t gone to the downtown 24 for a long time, but I used to, and there’s this lady there that loves towels. She’s always doing the elliptical like her life depends on it, and has towels lining the handle bars, a towel over her shoulder, a towel tucked in her waistband, several towels on the ground around her, and an entire duffel bag of towels waiting to be used. I may have mentioned her before, I can’t remember, but she always makes me curious. Excessive sweat disorder? OCD? Towel fetish?
• Also at the downtown 24, I found myself treadmilling behind the stairmasters, and these two dudes were stairmastering together. One of them had a mohawk and skinny legs, but the other guy had no mohawk and the most sculpted calves I’ve ever seen. They were cut, like from marble (anyone?). I felt bad for the mohawk/skinny legs because the other guy probably gets all the girlfriends.
• At the pearl 24, I went into the locker room to use the bathroom. Usually there’s the random naked lady, but this one woman would not put her clothes on, and kept walking around doing all these things totally naked, and having a long conversation with a completely clothed lady. Mostly this was a notable thing because she had the grossest tan ever, which was extremely evident due to her nudity.
• Right across the Broadway Bridge there was this huge group of people walking down the sidewalk, all wearing matching shirts. They looked like part of some organized walk, but clearly not a real one because the streets weren’t closed and it was Saturday late morning, which is no time for that sort of thing. I think it had to do with breast cancer. Anyway, I was glad when I realized it wasn’t an organized thing because I always laugh at people who are accidentally running on my route when I’m in an organized race and they’re caught in the middle of it. I didn’t want to be that person being laughed at.
• And the biggest highlight of all: I didn’t have to poop the entire time. Not even a little bit. This leads me to believe that it’s been happening before because I get dehydrated, which can cause diarrhea. Also I talked to this guy I know who does marathons a lot and apparently “runner’s gut” is a thing. I forget the details, but basically it has to do with the fact that your body doesn’t focus on digestion when you’re doing things like running, so when you go on really long runs, you aren’t engaging in any digestion-like activities for several hours, and that can kind of screw things up. I think that’s partly my problem, but probably mostly that I never bring water on my long runs, and today I was able to have water breaks at all of the gyms.

More exciting things happened, but I have to wrap things up in a minute here. I tried to get both Chris and Laura to do my gym running with me at different locations to make the run even more exciting, but it didn’t work out. I’ll give more notice next time, and you can all meet me at the 24s during my run. Although next time if it’s this nice of weather, I might do a loop that involves going to different tracks around Portland. It kept being a downer every time I had to go into the gym when it was so good outside.

If you were extra lucky today, you caught me on twitter, which I usually don’t promote because the intelligence-level of my tweets is relatively low most of the time, but you can see the play-by-play of my run today.

One last highlight I forgot to mention – I finally accomplished my goal of five runs in one week. I feel awesome on so many levels today.

Miles run this week: 37.5
Miles run in 2010: 373.5