Thursday 9/20

I am feeling much better today. I did a “special” exercise this morning and it improved my life outlook tremendously. The exercise – I created a list of my greatest treasures. I am a wealthy man. For each treasure, I spent several minutes contemplating its meaning to me, and how life would be if that treasure were not mine. My list is simple – health, relationship with God, wife, daughter & son, running, my job which provides all of us with food & warmth & shelter, physical comforts that go beyond need and further even way far beyond my want. I could go into detail, but I will just echo the ancient words of that famous dude David – “my cup over flows.” My running has been going ok. Not tremendously great, but ok is fine with me. Early in the week, I still struggled in the dull drums. On Monday I signed up for a bench and run contest that’s scheduled for October 17th. I have rarely done free weight bench workouts. I think I’m in trouble. Since I am an old guy, my bench weight is set at 90% of my body weight. I hope this will be 165lbs at most. On Tuesday there was another middle school XC meet that canceled my track session. After a 24 minute warm-up, I did 2m on the tread mill, and could not keep with a steady tempo run. So I did 4 quarters at about 6:15 sandwiched between 7:30 pace quarters. I did 4x25 sets of push ups and 2x15 bench press of 95lbs before, during and after my runs. I wonder if I could do even one rep of 165lbs. Wednesday I did a spin class. On a scale of 1-10 I put about 8.5 effort into this class which is pretty good for me. I had sweat dripping from my brow by the first 10 minutes. In ½ hour, every stitch of cloths I had on was wet. I had planned a short recover run after the class, but lacked motivation, so I bagged it. During the first part of today’s run, I did the “special” exercise. My run was a loop on mostly bridle trails through North Chagrin park. – Here is a (guesstimated) map: http://www.runningmap.com/?id=23994 I ran fairly hard and it felt good. About ½ way through the run, I went past the front of Squires Castle. This will forever be know in my mind as the “start of BR 100.” I abstained from ibuprofen today, which is unusual for a scheduled hard day. I limit my ibuprofen intake to 3x a week at most, so that my body won’t build a tolerance to it. Sometimes I run with pain. For a non ibuprofen day, the pain was minimal. There was a little tenderness on the bottom of my heels for the first 15 minutes, (plantar fasciitis), and then no pain for the remainder of the run. I have done this loop before, today was my fastest time. I feel happiness.