Sweetness and Light has been in New Jersey visiting family, while I have been taking care of the cats and nurturing the final stages of the half-marathon prep. Tomorrow’s run will be 13 miles; I have it all mapped out.
I went for a four mile walk yesterday in a direction I don’t normally go. Here’s a thrilling sight:
I should probably crop and zoom so you can see what I’m so excited about:
On the left, a whole bank of solar panels. I’ve been idly wondering what it would take to go off the grid here. Probably a ton. (Our three panels only help out with our hot water – they don’t generate electricity.)
A variety of dogs, unused to pedestrians in this rural area, barked their fool heads off as I went by, causing me to wonder if walking in this direction is such a good idea.
We’re entering the era of crickets and grasshoppers and interesting flowering grasses, including this cool variety.
Little entangled spike-balls. How’s that for an amateur naturalist? Alas, I do not have a field guide for such things.
False Solomon’s Seal is in the not-yet-ripe-berries stage.
Sorry for the blurriness – this is our buddy, the baneberry along our shared driveway. Coming along! When they’re ripe they’ll be white.
I would dearly love to show you a picture of all the jack-in-the-pulpits flowering, but by now they’re buried under a mass of as-yet-unidentified random green stuff, and taking the time to find any which may have flowered involves getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. No thanks. Let’s cheat and run a google search.
So here is tomorrow’s run:
The numbers are the mile markers. The plan involves doing the loop on the left side in a counterclockwise direction, then heading down to the other loop, and then coming back and doing the original loop in the other direction.
It will involve hills both up and down. One thing I’m kind of looking forward to about the actual half-marathon itself is that it is allegedly a flat course.
On my shorter runs, I’ve been doing some improvisational speed work. I’ve done some stretches at a 7:45 pace, but I can’t keep that up for very long. For tomorrow’s run, I’ll hopefully average 11 minute miles (including all the micro-walking breaks). But with those hills…it could be slower. And it depends on how hot it is, too. Ideally, I’ll hit the road by 7 am. HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH! Excuse me while I choke on my own spittle. Seriously, I would sooner sell my grandmother’s soul than get up earlier than I have to. No offense, Vivian.
While Kevin’s been away, I indulged myself in watching “Time Traveler’s Wife”. Not nearly as good as the book, but hey, my downstairs-college-neighbor Ron Livingston played Gomez, which occasioned much impromptu hollering. I’m hip-deep in Michael Chabon’s most excellent “Yiddish Policeman’s Union”, a whodunit/ sad sack redemption (I hope – I ain’t done yet) story set in an alternative world in which Israel didn’t quite work out: the world’s Jews have largely settled in Sitka. Wow. I love everything I’ve ever read by Chabon. And, I think I liked the movie of “Wonder Boys” about as much as the book, which is saying something.
Me, circa 1985, backstage as Puck.
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