Happy St. Patrick's Day!

What was the best part of running the St. Pat's Dash? The delicious, delicious beer that I drank afterwards at Elysian Fields. What was the worst part? Standing in line for the bus for pretty much as long as it took to finish the course. It's too early to get my official time, but the clock was at about 44:45 when I crossed the finish line, and I crossed the start line about two minutes after the official start. I wasn't expecting to run the whole thing (and I didn't), but I'm pretty happy with how I did and that halfway through March I'm still sticking to one of my TCB resolutions. And my Dash Hat held up very well--I was really glad to have it, especially while standing in line for the bus.

The route is about 3.5 miles, and according to my iPod & Nike + I went 3.89 miles. I'm not sure how much of this is a calibration error, but I didn't start and end the workout at the start and end lines. At the beginning, it was too early to think about, and at the end I wandered around for a couple of minutes before thinking about it. The most interesting thing to me about looking at the Nike+ graph is that there isn't a huge speed difference between my walking and running, but it sure feels different!

Frieda and Gretel have no respect for my photographs, by the way:

Moments after I took that photo, Gretel peed within INCHES of my shirt. Yes, it's perfectly normal for her to pee in the backyard, and she didn't pee on the shirt, but it was still a little close for comfort.

A Long Walk With a Short-Legged Dog

Poor Frieda--look at all of the rain on her coat!

Typical Northwest winter weather seems to be back, instead of the crazy weather of the past couple of weeks. It's a nice change (though a little sun would be better), and a good opportunity to clock some Runagogo miles outside instead of schlepping to the Y. I only ran/walked about 5.6 miles last week, a little less than planned, so I took Frieda for a 3.39 mile walk to the Game Farm Park. This was possibly her longest walk ever--she's been to this park before, but we usually drive there because it's down a very steep hill. She was a very good sport, especially considering the rain that started about a mile into the walk. My total to date is 25.64 miles, or basically on track--I need about 8 miles a week in order to get to 100 by April 1.

Nice and Cozy

I finished knitting these at last, and fulled them a little in the dryer. The colors are really pretty, and the pattern was easy to follow, but these took a lot longer to finish than they should have because I kept getting distracted. I might need to full them again--I finished them late yesterday evening and wanted to get them on the lovely blue sock blockers right away. I'm not sure why the toes turned out so pointy, but they don't look pointy when they are on, so keep it to yourself, buster.

My 100 miles by April goal is coming along, I'm at 18.63 miles so far. Most of this has been on the treadmill, because the weather has been bad for outdoor activities--at least for activities that involve small dogs on leashes. It's amazing what a little gadget (and a bunch of other knitters running) will do for my motivation.

Runagogo - 8.27 miles so far

Here's an update from my Nike+ account, it shows my last "run" from Tuesday. Most of the time I was walking, the chart shows speed on the Y axis and distance on the X axis. I'm taking today off, as I am more than a little sore--I strained a muscle (or something) in my heel on my trip to Boston, and now the same heel has a blister from wearing bad socks with new shoes. Boooooo! I plan to be back on the run tomorrow--I'm surprised how fast the distance is adding up.

Runagogo!

Anyone who knows me knows how I feel about running--I really don't like it. Even when I've been in great shape, I'd rather do any number of things for exercise than run, and right now I'm in pretty poor shape. My visits to the gym have been few and far between over the last five or six months, and I'm past due on getting back on track. I've now joined Runagogo, an exercise challenge with a goal of running/walking etc. 100 miles by April 1. It sounds like a lot of miles, but when you break it down it's less than 10 miles a week, and as long as I don't fall too far behind it should be totally manageable. Plus, it gave me an excuse to buy the Nike+ kit, which uses a shoe transponder and a receiver on my Nano that captures stats and then sends them to a website where I can look at them. I loooooooove stats--for instance, sometimes I think that the main reason I have a blog is so I can check my stats regularly. The transponder is meant to go into a special spot in special shoes, underneath the insole. Rather than spend $100 on the special shoes, I made a batik sleeve to tie onto my shoe. It's sort of like one of those shoe wallets. So far (today) this has worked well, at least well enough until I NEED a new pair of shoes. The Nike site is pretty flaky, but hopefully that's a temporary problem.