Raccoon and Lobster

A word of warning: if Stacy comes to visit you, in addition to looking at mammoth fossils and browsing farmer’s markets, she will encourage you to try on unbelievably shiny gold shoes and drink champagne late into the night. The next morning, you might find yourself suffering from a hangover and reading an email with the tracking information for a pair of awesomely ridiculous shoes that are en route to your house.

I present to you the newest contender for Most Ridiculous Shoe:

Apparently champagne brings out my inner raccoon. My inner tough, spikey raccoon.

This is the way the 5k ends, not with a bang but a slowly increasing boredom that o’erleaps itself and falls on th’other side

I finished Couch to 5k. I don’t even know the exact date, but I’d been doing runs of approximately half an hour for several weeks and it was dull, dull, dull. Did my hatred of running return? This was exactly the kind of slow, plodding, miserable, wish-my-eyeballs-would-explode-just-so-something-exciting-happens wretchedness that I thought running was all about. So much for runner’s high. So much for being one of those people. They were the dreariest runs of the entire program. Bleh.

Before this malaise set in, I had thought about using the earlier podcasts with their alternating slow and fast pacing to start interval training to pick up my running speed. One night, when the thought of doing yet another half hour of continuous jogging almost convinced me to give up running right then and there, I decided to put this plan into action. Oh glee! Oh delight! Oh mirth and merriment! I bounded and sprinted until my heart pounded in my chest and my lungs ached and then I staggered for breath and did it again and again and again. I finished my run absolutely wrecked, but the smile was back on my face. Apparently I don’t do long, slow, and sanely paced.

So to keep having fun with my runs, I declared the couch to 5k program completed by fiat, even though I’m not sure if I technically completed every last one of those vile long, slow, runs. After all, I can easily do the 5k distance, and have been at least 5k a run for several weeks, it’s just so much more fun to do them in interval form. As a temporary stopgap, I’ve started up the Gateway to 8k program at Podrunner Intervals, which offers me the interval workout that I apparently crave. I don’t yet know if I will be following the program to completion because 50 minutes of continuous running at an even pace sounds even more tortuous than 30 minutes, but for right now it buys me time to find a running program I can love. The interval training has also delivered shockingly impressive results in improving my running speed, which is superb for the ego.

As a side perk, all that running has re-sparked my desire to go to the gym, and of course with all the weights and cardio, yoga seems more important than ever to keep things limber. While the hundred push up plan has stalled in truly dramatic fashion after week after week of standoffs, it is responsible for starting this whole cascade of exercise programs, and I can still do more push ups than most of my friends, male or female. I will be revisiting it soon, after a few more weeks of weights have had time to do their magic.

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(prompted by this reader comment)

Yesterday, during a conversation with a friend who was thinking about starting Couch to 5k, I realized how much  my attitude towards running has changed in the last 5 weeks.

Previously, I had never run an entire mile without walking at least some part of it. I loathed running and regarded it as something only to be undertaken when being chased by bears. Even when I was in great cardiovascular shape and biking every day and even bike touring on occasion, I still hated running and still sucked at it. Because running sucks.

I get disappointed now when I miss a run and have now moved up my running schedule from 3 days a week to every other day. If Couch to 5k didn’t forbid it, I would do more. Sometimes I run an extra day anyways. When I bought a new pair of running shoes last week, I bounced around the apartment, just as happy as I was when my ridiculous heels arrived. I’ve crossed the hump and completed my first 20 minute run and I’m pretty sure I could have kept going to the full 30 minutes that is the end goal of the program. I have officially encountered the runner’s high and embraced it.

Somewhere in the last few weeks, I turned from a reluctant person-who-runs into a…runner. One of those people. They don’t really warn you about this when you start the program. It’s too late for me now, but if you want to retain your hatred towards running, please be careful. Before you become one of us.

“Personally I couldn’t stand the thought of a tiny bread-baking Asian woman being able to do more pushups than me, big burly specimen of masculinity that I am.”

- a friend, as his reason for starting the Hundred Push Ups program.

Cirque du Soleil’s traveling show KOOZA came to town! I managed to score discount tickets to the show through Goldstar, and so we headed down to the Santa Monica Pier for an amazing show. There was one ticket available in a front section and I selfishly nabbed it instead of sitting with my cohorts. I ended up 7 rows back from the stage. Kick. Ass!

I don’t think I have to tell you to see it if you can, even if you have to pay full price for tickets. This was the Boyfriend’s first show, and he’s already talking about seeing the permanent shows the next time we’re in Vegas. Next time I might even sit with him.

By the way, if you do happen to get tickets to an acrobatic performance wonderland, you’ll see a lot of extremely fit people on stage. Doing some push ups and going for a run before you go can help stave off a small part of the crippling inadequacy that will overtake you if you compare yourself to these paragons of athleticism. A very, very, small part.

I have completed another week of running and am once again looking ahead to the next week with increasing trepidation. Until now I’ve been remarkably free of soreness and pain, so when I woke up Saturday morning with a mild, diffuse ache in my right calf, I took the time to really milk the pity. The Boyfriend was not amused, not even when I diagnosed my intermittent discomfort as deep vein thrombosis.

Credit and © Society of Interventional Radiology

He’ll be sorry when I end up thromboting. Thrombating. Thrombosizing.

My impending thrombosis is most likely also the reason why I have completed the 6 week hundred push up program but have not managed to come close to doing my minimum of fifty push ups in a row, much less one hundred. That and Steve Speirs is a brutal taskmaster who designed his program for 18 year old boys bursting with testosterone and human growth hormone. The last two weeks have ramped up in a ludicrous manner and I’m currently considering designing my own sane program to get to one hundred push ups without having scavenge for anabolic steroids in the syringes discarded by the Venice Beach bodybuilders.

I just did the first day of Week 3 of Couch to 5k. Boy that’s an awkward sentence. The first two weeks place upon you very reasonable demands. You start off running 60 second intervals, and during Week 2 you increase that to 90 seconds. Completely fair. Surely then, Week 3 would involve 2 minute intervals? No, the cruel, unfeeling bastards demand a full 3 minute run from you. To assuage the pain a smidgen, they alternate it with a 90 second run, but that is cold comfort for the likes of me.

I am not a runner. I hate running. Always have. I will not invite ridicule by telling you at which point in this exercise plan it officially became the longest I have ever stuck to a running schedule, but let’s just say it was in the first week. The Boyfriend used to run cross country. He no longer can because his knees don’t work (not a hearty recommendation for his lifestyle, by the way) but he still has dreams about running several times a week and relates them to me wistfully in the morning. When I have a dream where I run the entire time, it’s called a nightmare and I awake filled with feelings of dread and horror. So I have to say that having just successfully finished my seventh Couch to 5k run, I am feeling mighty proud of myself.

The key to this weeks’ runs are that there are only 4 runs total. One 90 second run, followed by a walk, then a 3 minute run and then another walk. Then you repeat. The 90 second runs were easy because I had done them last week,  so I really just had to concern myself with two runs. Back in Week 1 I realized that in 60 seconds I cover about one block. By the way, the area where I live, a single block runs about a quarter-mile. My mother is a cartographer and my father is a surveyor. I wouldn’t lie about something like that. So during both of my 3 minute runs, I simply counted off the blocks as I waited for my iPod to inform that I could stop running. Since there were only two runs I was worried about, it wasn’t too hard to convince myself to keep running until the end. This plan may actually work.

Congratulations Couch to 5k. I still hate running, but a little bit less now.

This is an official call out! There is nothing worth doing that isn’t worth overdoing. Therefore, in addition to doing the hundred push up challenge, I also just started the Couch to 5k running plan. Any takers? Or are you all chicken?

Addendum: I’ve been meaning to do this for a while but one of the things that spurred me to actually get started was discovering the podcasts made by various people with audio cues on when to run and walk. No more looking at a watch, just listen for the cues and run. I figure I should probably share them if I’m going to throw down a challenge.

Robert Ullrey’s Couch to 5k Podcasts

Podrunner’s First Day to 5k

Chubby Jones

Select restaurants in LA are participating in Restaurant Week with prix fixe menus between October 4-9 and October 11-16. The most expensive restaurants, including those with a Michelin Star, are offering a three course meal for $44. For a full list of particpating restaurants and to see the menu options, click here. It’s going to be a very busy 2 weeks.