Six Days to Go

Having less than a week until my marathon, I’ve been growing increasingly nervous. I’ve run so little and been so worried about my shin lately that I’m feeling skeptical of my ability to even finish. I’m pretty sure I could finish, but if my shin starts hurting very badly it could be a horrible idea. I guess we’ll all find out soon.

On Wednesday I took my first stab at running in a while, and did two miles on the treadmill. It was okay, hurt a little. Tonight I was going to do eight on the treadmill, but at about 4 miles my shin started hurting significantly more, so I stopped there. I did the spin bike for about 2 minutes after that but then got angry and left.

The treadmill actually got pretty exciting tonight. In an attempt to make things more interesting, I decided to count the number of cars that passed in front of the window, going northbound on McLoughlin. I had set my treadmill to a pace of 9:05 minute miles, and it just so happened that this pace coordinated almost perfectly with the number of cars that had passed. At 0.92 miles, exactly 92 cars had passed. At 1.32 miles, 132 cars had passed. After a couple of miles I wanted to speed up, but I wanted to see if this trend would continue. I ended up stopping at 4.22 miles, at which point a total of 427 cars had gone by.

Another exciting thing happened when I was half looking at the tv and half paying attention to counting cars. A kit-kat commercial came on, and then a deodorant commercial. I didn’t notice when it switched over though, so for a long time I thought that the guy in the commercial was rubbing kit-kats in his armpit. It was a pretty wild night at 24.

While I have this marathon looming right in front of me, I’ve also been looking ahead to my exciting running event of late summer – the Hood to Coast. I’ve never done the full Hood to Coast, just 3 Portland to Coasts (which is the high school version of the relay, which is two legs instead of three). If you’re entirely unfamiliar with it, it’s the largest relay in the world, and one of the longest in the country. It has 36 legs, usually run by 12 runners (but less, if you’re super hardcore), so most people run 3 times. It starts out at Mt. Hood and ends at Seaside (with the PTC starting right by the Old Spaghetti Factory off of Macadam).

Last week I got my leg assignment e-mailed to me. Our captain asked us which leg we wanted and I said “I don’t care,” so he gave me the hardest one. At least the website ranks it as the hardest one, I don’t really know. It’s the 9th leg, or the 3rd leg of the 2nd van, depending on how you look at it. When I heard I was doing this leg, it sounded kind of familiar, so I pulled out my old running logs and figured out that I actually did this leg before, during PTC ’01 (except for the first leg, of course). I remember really liking it, so I’m happy to do it again.

For those of you who care, here’s what legs 9, 21, and 33 look like.

In my leg assignment e-mail, I’ve also learned that my team is an new offshoot of a fairly well established team called The Maple Bar Gang. So I’ve also gotten about twenty e-mails from team members discussing what donut related team name our team will have. I’m happy to run with any team that cares that much about donuts, but I am going to miss running with Team Really Really Ridiculously Good Looking.

I just spent a really long time looking for a picture of my old team and then realized that they’re all hard copies. Weird. Instead, enjoy the next closest thing I could find, which isn’t very close at all, but a recent picture of a few of us from the team, from this Christmas. Except Kathayoon wasn’t on the team (but we still love her, as you can tell from all the hearts).

Miles run this week: 4
Miles run in 2010: 395