Idiot Move of the Decade

This post is comin’ at you from the great state of Colorado, where I’m visiting my sister Sarah and her family, and, tomorrow, running the BolderBOULDER 10K race. I arrived the other day, and getting here was a hassle. And I have no one to blame but myself. Because I pulled the idiot move of the decade.

On the Road Again

I hit the streets earlier today.  There was lots of pavement that I pounded.  It was because I went jogging!  It’s been over two weeks since I’ve gone a-runnin’ – since October 16th (read about it here) – and over a month since I’ve gone during the day – since September 27th (a jog that was very eye-opening – read about it here).

One of my closest friends, Kristy (a fantastic musician – check her out here), came up to go jogging with me, and we had a great day together.  This is the second time we’ve gone jogging together, and the first time marked a major milestone in my jogging progress (read about it… you guessed it… here).  I promise I’ll stop with all the links.

We decided to jog to the Burbank airport.  There’s a great spot that’s only 2 miles from my place that puts you right at the end of one of the runways, so you can watch planes land literally right over your head.  Next time I go I’ll try to capture the sensation on video (we’ll see how that goes – both my camera and my phone have video camera features, but I’ve never really used them before) – but for right now, believe me when I say that it’s very loud, and pretty awesome.  Kristy will vouch.  You can see the planes approach, getting lower and lower, and when they fly right over head, they’re only a couple hundred feet off the ground.  Then, a few seconds later, they’re on the ground, a few hundred yards behind you, and you can feel the rush of wind that they create, and hear the resistance that their flaps generate as they roar to a stop.  They’re so close you can make out the airline (today we saw two Southwest jets, one American jet, and a private plane land), and thanks to some internet research after the fact, I can say with some certainty that those Southwest jets came in from Phoenix and Las Vegas, and the American flight came in from Dallas.

Kristy and I walked a few blocks at the beginning to warm up, but we ended up running 1.9 miles to get to the airport, in 22 minutes.  We watched planes land for about 20 minutes, while doing other exercises right there on the sidewalk, like jumping jacks, lunges, these twists that work your oblique abs, and something that I’m forgetting.  Our roadside exercising garnered honks from two passing cars and one passing school bus, which I’ll accept as compliments, thank you very much.  Then we started jogging back, but because I was tired and hot (the tempurature was in the high 70s), we walked the final .8 mile.  We completed the 1.2 miles we did jog in 14 minutes.

Time to number crunch.  If you add up both parts of the jog, we went a total of 3.1 miles in 36 minutes, for an average MPH of 5.16!   WHOA!  That’s my fastest pace yet!  I’m sure it’s inflated due to the 20 minute break in the middle, but I’ll take it!  Time to update my jog chart, which I haven’t done in a while:

• 9/21/10: Distance: 3.1 miles.  Time: 41 minutes.  MPH: 4.53
• 9/27/10: Distance: 3.3 miles.  Time: 45 minutes.  MPH: 4.4
• 10/5/10: Distance: 3.2 miles.  Time: 40 minutes.  MPH: 4.8
• 10/12/10: Distance: 3.8 miles.  Forgot to note time and MPH
• 10/16/10: Distance: 2.9 miles.  Forgot to note time and MPH
• 11/1/10: Distance: 3.1 miles.  Time: 36 minutes.  MPH: 5.16

Regular blog readers know that my big jogging goal is to run past all 6 strip clubs in my neighborhood without stopping (new readers can read about that here – I’m seriously done with the links now), so I think for my next jog, I’ll try to up my distance and go 4 miles for the first time ever.  That attempt may not happen until next week, but be sure to come back to the blog and check it out!

After we finished the workout, Kristy and I caught up on the final two episodes of Thintervention, the Jackie Warner weight-loss show on Bravo that had its finale last week.  Jackie’s assistant trainer on the show, Craig, has been training Kristy and her hubby Mike for some time now, and it’s always fun to see people you know on TV (I haven’t met him yet, but I hope to at some point).

I also made us a quick, easy, and healthy lunch, and since it was a salad, I took some photos.  I know y’all love my salads!

There’s the Dole romaine salad mix I picked up yesterday, 1 roma tomato, cucumber, radish, scallion, garbanzo beans (also purchased yesterday), and a special addition: seasoned bamboo shoots.

Yeah, I can’t read the label either.  It’s in Japanese.  I picked up the jar in Little Tokyo about a month ago.  I know it’s seasoned bamboo shoots because tiny print on the back said so.  They’re tasty!  It’s basically bamboo marinating in a soy sauce blend, so they were a little salty, but I kept it to about 1 serving size for each of us, and that equaled 10 calories, 0 fat, and 220mg of sodium (9% of your daily value).  We topped it off with Sesame Soy Ginger dressing from Trader Joe’s – which is also fat-free.

Keep it up, David!