Happy 28th to... me!

What’s slower than me running up the final hill in the St. Malachi 5-miler? Rush-hour traffic on OH-8 South. No joke.

And that’s why I’ve been blogo-absent for the past month: traffic. When I wasn’t pulling out my hair and creating new expletives on Monday evening, I was laughing to myself that I could have run home faster than I was driving.

My speed: seven miles in two hours. That’s 3.5 mph; that’s sad. I ran 13.1 miles in 1:54:10. What gives?

Needless to say, I came home and thought about packing my boxes to move that very night. Thankfully my post-work/traffic malaise makes me too groggy to really execute any of my rash ideas. Besides, I didn’t have anywhere to move. Yet.

Worse still, the traffic-grog mixed with icy nights has made my running schedule a little less consistent than I prefer, which also gives me much less to write about. Ah, the double-edged sword.

But I’ve had plenty of motivation for hitting the road: St. Malachi is a little more than a month away and I ate seven Main Street Cupcakes for my birthday!

They were, in no particular order, canary creme (vanilla cake filled with vanilla creme); chocolate lava (chocolate cake filled with molten chocolate); MSC Fluff (chocolate cake filled with white fluff and topped with ganache); lavish lemon (vanilla cake filled with vanilla cream and frosted with vanilla buttercream); You Had me at Nutella (vanilla cake filled with nutella and frosted with milk chocolate buttercream); red velvet with vanilla buttercream; and wedding white (white almond cake frosted with vanilla buttercream).

At least I tried to counterbalance the excessive caloric intake: on Saturday I ran five miles at the Kent State rec at a steady 10:00/mile pace. My plan over the next several weeks is to build up my mileage again (not too quickly) and hope for the best at Malachi. I won’t be blowing away last year’s time, but I hope to just do better than my first race ever.

I have been quite good on the aerobic exercise and yoga fronts, so all is not lost on this wannabe triathlete. While I haven’t even seen a pool or touched a bike in way too long, I’m hopeful that I’ll learn to better deal with this schedule—and this weather—before I become obsessed with a new activity.

Eating cupcakes might be a formidable replacement, but I’ve given up all dessert foods as a non-religious Lenton sacrifice. And I thought the half-marathon was rough. Geez!

Finally: the new ‘do. Only a few photos exist from my 28th birthday, but here’s my new haircut. You can check out the rest on Flickr (OK, enough pictures of me on my site; I'm freaking myself out!). But as Kelsalynn pointed out, it's quite the pickle trying to figure out what this mop wants to do when I'm running. It certainly isn't intent on behaving.

before

after