Vintage Kathy Griffin

Great news!  I once again accomplished a week of 30 miles!  That makes two out of four weeks so far this year.  Not too bad, but since my goal is to average 30 miles, I still have a lot of work to put in before I can consider myself on track.

What I learned this week, is that while I may be in shape to run 30 miles a week, I’m not really in shape to do 26 miles in three days.  As of Thursday this week, I had only done 4 miles, so 26 miles is what I was facing through Saturday.  I did a hard 7 on Thursday, and then 13 on Leif Erickson on Friday.  I set off for this long run at around 2:30PM, and was extremely proud of myself for remembering to bring water and a GU pack for the run.  So prepared!  Except I wasn’t, because I only ate a little cereal, a bite of mashed potatoes, and a few jelly beans, during that day, before my long run.  My 100 calorie GU pack helped a little, but at mile 11 I felt completely depleted.  Oops.  At least I remembered to take Pascal with me also.  Here’s a picture of him at mile 5.

The most exciting part of this run was that I noticed that the 5 1/4 and the 5 1/2 mile posts had been repainted and now show the correct mileage.  They used to be switched.  They probably fixed this a while ago, but it’s been a long time sine I ran more than ten miles on Leif.

When I got home, I opened up my new Runner’s World magazine, and saw this ad:

I might be wrong, but I think this ad is stupid.  What I understand, is that Lululemon is trying to show you that they sell running clothes.  But they don’t show any of their running gear in the picture.  I also know for a fact that they sell yoga clothes, but here they’re pretending they don’t even know what yoga is.  Why would I want to go to a store that doesn’t even know what yoga is, when they primarily sell things to use while you do yoga?  I know that’s an overly literal way to look at the ad, but I still think it’s dumb.  I would hope that they would take one of their hundred dollar bills they get every single time they sell a single pair of pants, and use it to hire someone better at marketing.

By Saturday morning I had finally calmed down about how stupid that ad is, and tried to mentally prepare myself for the remaining 6 miles of my 30 mile week.  I went to the Nike Campus with my running buddy, and as soon as I started running, I knew it was going to be difficult.  And it was – I had to walk for a minute or two every mile, but I made it!

I found this silly creature near a pond on campus, and he helped me have a lot more fun when I ran.  I tried to call it a beaver, but then was told that it’s definitely not a beaver.  I tried to look up what kind of animals are on the Nike campus, and just got a bunch of results for animal rights protests against Nike.  Does anyone know what this is?  Besides super cute?

When I got tired of running around the trails, I went over to run on the track.  Their track is a good happy-medium between track and trail, since it has a bunch of trees in the middle.  I didn’t find any cute creatures here though, unless you count the guy power-washing the track.

Miles run in 2012: 99
Average miles/week in 2012: 24.75