We're moving on the first of August.  We've been here for several years now, and I'm a little bummed about moving away from my familiar running routes.  It seems a little ridiculous to miss them, but I think I will.

One good thing about being unemployed is that I was the one who had time to scout out a new pad.  We'll be renting a nice little house, and it looks like an ideal place to run.  Is it silly that this was one of my major criteria?  

We won't be living out in the country anymore, so I'm not going to run past cows (or elephants) on my new routes.  I suppose I'll get used to it.

This morning I startled a herd of deer.   They bounded away from me, although I consider myself an implausible threat.  It would be nice to think of myself as running with the deer in some sort of kinship, but my imagination just won't stretch that far as I labor uphill.  Still, it was a pretty sight, watching the deer bound off into a misty field.  

I'm going to miss them.

In my intro class, I teach students about conspicuous consumption and how it drives the leisure industry in the U.S.  I think about this a lot when it comes to my own leisure, particularly running.  You have to understand that I love running gear.  When I get my running magazine each month, I spend a goodly amount of time looking at the ads and going, "Ooo.  Shiny."  

I'm a gearhead in other realms, too.  I like backpacking gear and techie gadgets.  When it comes right down to it, it's probably more about nerdy consumption than conspicuous consumption with me.  

Nevertheless, I do try to be reasonable.  Except in the most extreme weather, I don't have a problem with going for a run in an old race t-shirt. Over the years, I have tried to sort out for myself which gear is necessary, which gear is optional, and what's downright silly.  

I was completely surprised recently to find that race number belts are in the optional and not the silly category.  Here's a picture:

The whole point of this item is that you can put your race number on it.  This seemed a somewhat ridiculous item for someone who does not run triathlons.  There's no quick change for me.  Why would I need this?  

Well, Brother Metronome seemed to feel that I was lacking in this area, so I am now the proud owner of a Fuel Belt race number belt.  In spite of myself, I came to appreciate my belt when I was at the Race for the Cure.  

It's not the putting-your-number-on piece that's nice about it. I generally have plenty of time to put on my number.  It's the taking-your-number-off part, where presto change-o you now (except for being sweaty) look like a normal person when, say, you go to a restaurant for breakfast after the race.  I liked this much better than I expected.  It's quite handy.

So, there you go.  Race number belts aren't silly.  Who knew?  

I still think running socks are utterly useless.

Today I was running a little 3 1/4 mile route that I run pretty regularly.  Like many of my running routes, it is quite pretty with a rural flavor. One field in particular has some horses that pasture there.  I always like watching them as I go by.  This is an out-and-back route, so I see them twice.  

On the way out, there was a deer near the road.  I scared her, and she scampered off, tail flagging.  The horses were mildly alarmed as she sped past them.  

On the way back, I noticed the elephant.

That's right.  There's a life-sized statue of an elephant at the far edge of the field.  It may even be larger than an actual elephant.

This prompts many questions.  How is it that I failed to notice an elephant?  How long has it been there?  At a minimum, I know that it was there when I ran past it on my way out. Has it been there for the three years that I've been running this route?  I don't know.  

I also can't imagine why there's an elephant statue at the edge of some random farmer's field.  It's a little quirky.

Clearly, I need to pay more attention when I run.

 Sometimes it's more important to look fast than to be fast.  Or at least, that's what I tell myself.  This is from the Race for the Cure.  I ran a 30:05 race, but you can't tell from the picture.

While I'm busy grading papers, why not waste spend your time watching this entertaining video?

Today, the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, which banned same sex marriage in California.  At the same time, the court upheld the marriage licenses that had been issued before prop 8 passed but after the original court ruling that allowed same sex marriage.

What this means is that I'm married, but anyone else who wants to get their hands on a same sex marriage license in California is out of luck.

So I guess that gives me some sort of special access to the privileges of marriage.  Or something.  I was reminded today of certain friends of mine over the years who said that they refused to marry until same sex couples had the same right.  I've always appreciated the thought, but was somewhat dubious about this strategy as a way to stand in solidarity with me.  Now I guess I'm in the same spot, of having access to something that other people don't.  It's... strange.

Let's be clear about this.  My marriage license does absolutely nothing for me in North Carolina.  All of this talk about privilege is entirely theoretical.  Still, I wish it wasn't just limited to the 18,000 of us who happened to get hitched in California at just the right time.  I'm glad that things seem to be looking up for same-sex marriage rights all over the country.  There are five states now where same sex couples can get hitched.  This really has been a banner year.  

Becky and I had a moment today where we looked at each other and realized that we were really married.  If we want to get divorced, that's going to be a major undertaking.  The laws are a mess.

I like it.  It's kind of nice.

This morning when I was out walking the dogs, I found a four leaf clover.  This isn't unusual for me.  For whatever reason, I find four leaf clovers all the time.

Still, I started thinking about it after I dropped the dogs off back at the house and went on my run.  

The weather was perfect.  I wore my running shorts but needed my long sleeved technical shirt because it was a bit cool.  The birds were chirping their heads off.  I freaked out some poor bunny rabbit who would frantically run ahead of me alongside the road, crouch down and then hop off again as I got closer and flushed it out of hiding.  There were horses out to pasture.  Instead of doing my walk/run thing, I ran the whole way.  It really was a lovely run.

None of us gets through life unscathed.  I had a brain anuerysm while out on a run more than five years ago.  A good friend of mine also had an aneurysm about a year before I had mine.  We share the same doctor, and he told me recently that our aneurysms were in the exact same locations in our brains.  They fixed me up in a couple of weeks, and I had headaches for six months afterwards.  

Several surgeries later, she is still living with constant pain.  We sing in a chorus together, and I don't think she's managed to stay for an entire rehearsal all year.  She has to bail when the pain gets too bad.  I don't know if she was ever a runner, but I do know that there's no way that she could take it up now even if she wanted to.

I finished my run today feeling strong.  A good run makes me feel alive in ways that few other things can match.  I like being able to push myself to new limits.  

Bodies are fragile things.  I know exactly how lucky I am.

 Mother's Day is something of an ordeal for me ever since I lost my mom to lung cancer, back in 1998.  When I saw that the current Take it and Run Thursday topic was a salute to running moms, I was surprised and pleased to note that I have something to contribute on the topic.

First, my own mom.  As I knew her, mom wasn't terribly athletic.  She liked going on long nature walks, but that's probably the extent of any physical activity I ever witnessed from mom.  She always talked about the good old days when she raced on ice skates, played softball and was otherwise occupied in various sports at the local park district.  She never mentioned running, and I was surprised when these pictures turned up after her death.  Mom was the one furthest on the left.  She would have been a freshman or sophomore in high school in those pictures.

  

But that's not the mom I want to talk about today.

I'm a runner and a grad student.  It can be difficult sometimes to prioritize my running over, say, writing my dissertation.  (This is probably not nearly as difficult as it should be.)  Still, I may be busy but my time is highly flexible.  This makes it much easier for me to run.  We also don't have any kids yet.  Just dogs.  No matter how cute they are, being a dog mom doesn't really constrain my ability to head out the door for a run.  I have a very real sense of just how lucky I am.

We know, for instance, that parents engage in less physical activity than non-parents.  When children are younger, the effect is more pronounced, and it affects women more than it does men.  The research that supports this statement couldn't possibly come as a surprise to any busy parent.

We also know that when you add other factors, like having a child who is developmentally delayed, that can only further complicate yourlife and your schedule.  In a 2005 study in Occupational Therapy International,  Wayne and Krishnagiri found that "Raising a child with Down syndrome had an impact on parents' leisure occupations in many ways. These include limiting the amount of time available for leisure, changes in types of daily leisure from more active to more passive occupations, increasing the need to plan leisure more systematically,

As it turned out, my running nemesis wasn't at the little race on campus today. I did two miles in 20:36. I threw a couple of walks in there, since I'm still doing the walk/run thing. They had sort of a hodge podge in the gift bags. I swapped a travel mug (Good grief, I don't need another travel mug in my life) for a t-shirt for the new Star Trek movie.


I also won a pizza in their raffle.  I didn't get my beat down, although I clearly would have if my advisor had been there.  So I guess that makes it a good race.  

My next race is a 5K on May 9.  I can walk to the start line from our house, so I'm pretty excited about it.

My advisor is 20 years older than I am.  The last time I was in a little two mile race on campus, she beat me soundly.  There's another little fun run tomorrow, and if she runs it, I guess I'm going to get hosed again.

I hope she's busy or something...

Mostly because of my endless bitching, readers of this blog know that I'm somewhat injury prone. Frequently, this is unrelated to running, such as when I recently fell off of the bottom step and sprained my ankle. However, I also have a truly terrible habit of ramping up my mileage and speed too quickly and hurting myself that way.

I can't do much about clumsy, but you would think I could lick this other issue. The solution is really simple - just don't run as much.

I have something of a routine for this bad habit. I start out with great intentions. Most frequently, I'll start using the Couch to 5K plan, at least partly because it's one of the most conservative "beginner" plans out there.

I'm out on my run. I'm feeling good. I decide to run an extra 30 seconds more than it calls for during my walk/runs. I look at my mileage and start edging that up. I push it too much and then I'm back here on my blog, griping about my injury.

Nobody wants that.

One of my besetting sins involves distance. There's this rule of thumb that says that you should only increase your mileage by 10% each week. Let's just say that I interpret this rule somewhat loosely. I know full well, for instance, that if you take six miles and you add 1/10th of that distance on to the next week, you will be running 6.6 miles the next week. When I apply this rule to myself, I round it up. Do the math, and that actually works out to a 17% increase. Do this kind of thing consistently, and I do, and the research says that you're more likely to injure yourself. And I do.

So. I have added a handy little worksheet into my running log. It starts with my mileage from last week (6.3 miles), then for each week it increases my mileage by 10%. Another column divides that number by three (four for later weeks) to give me the mileage I should be running each day. Then I added in a column for me to enter the mileage I actually ran, with a final column to tell me how closely I matched the magical 10% increase.

I can already predict that this is going to annoy the hell out of me. I can predict this because I don't get a six mile run (at least if I divide my mileage evenly) until the week of June 28.

I'm going to try and stick to this. I am. Really. Careful. LY.

 Today, I was watching the end of the Boston Marathon.  The women were two miles away from the finish line, and Kara Goucher was in front.  The pack was right with her, so I knew she didn't have a lock on it.  

Just at this critical moment (dont' they know I have things to do?), a student came in to meet with me.  The student left just in time for me to catch the crazy final moments of the race.  Salina Kosgei and Dire Tune swapped leads back and forth until finally Kosgei beat Tune by ONE SECOND.  That's crazy.  Dire Tune took two steps over the finish line and collapsed.  She's okay, evidently, but she certainly gave her all.  It's amazing that you can run for two hours and thirty-two minutes, and then have it all come down to a one second difference.

Eight seconds later, Kara Goucher finished her race in third place.  With Ryan Hall also finishing second, this made it a relatively good day for the Americans.  Kara was leading the pack for several miles at the end.  It would drive me nuts to do that and then end up in third.

I don't know that I will ever run a marathon.  I liked the half-marathon distance, and I would like to do another one of those.  If I do a marathon at all, it might be in 2014, when the days fall such that  I can do it on my birthday.  I'll be 43 that year.  I have a few years to think about it.

I wrote about running and technology for a recent Take it and Run Thursday.  In spite of its siren call, for the most part I don't really need a lot of technology to enjoy running.

Prepare yourself for some cognitive dissonance, because I'm about to rant about some technology I wish I had.

I'm a big sci-fi junky, and somewhat frequently I come across fictional references to some kind of "rain shield."  Characters walk about with a little doohickey on their belt that creates an energy field that keeps out the rain. They often do other things, but let's stay with rain, shall we?

I simply cannot stand running in the rain.  I will go to silly lengths to avoid it.  If I must run on a rainy day, I will study radar maps and try to schedule the rest of my day around an anticipated gap in the cloud cover.  This works, but only sometimes.

Today, I managed to squeeze my run in between thunderstorms.  It looked gloomy, but not a rain drop fell on me.

I came back from my run completely soaked.  A bus came up behind me, plowed through a puddle and drenched me.  This is when I decided that technology had failed me.  It's 2009.  I am living in the post-millennium future that science fiction writers used to dream about.  Why on earth can't I have my rain shield?  I could live in a running nirvana, but no.

I thought about this throughout the rest of my run.  There's a whole list of things that don't exist yet, but somehow should.

• Weather satellites that control the weather
• Flying cars 
• Household robots that do more than vacuum.
• Paperless offices - Ask JoyMama about this one.  Good grief.  We have the technology, but not the will, to do this right now.
• Intelligent computers

Sure, the Internet is cool and all.  Segways are kind of nifty.  Still, I want a bigger piece of the future.  I want my rain shield so that the only reason I'm coming back damp is because of running up that last hill.

That sounds like it should be an oxymoron.  One of the appeals of running is supposed to be that you can do it with nothing more than a pair of shoes.  Or without them, for that matter.  

Yet, it didn't take a marketing genius to figure out that we runners want to run faster.  We've seen the Six Million Dollar Man.  We know that technology can help us.  Stronger.  Faster.

Then again, maybe not.  Did I run/walk at a 13:41 pace today instead of my 13:48 pace on Monday because of technology?  No!  And yet, that doesn't stop me.

I will say that I like the convenience afforded by my Garmin.  Living somewhere rural makes it more of a pain in the ass to figure out distances, and I'm quite happy that my Garmin can do that for me.  I prefer wicking shirts to cotton, on the whole.  I am CERTAINLY glad that my shoes have helped keep my knee injury at bay (*knock wood*).  Plus, I completely love my running log on Excel.  If you're looking for a handy log that you can keep on your 'puter, go grab this one.  It's got tons of nifty features.  It's awesome.

If I were going to advise someone to invest in any one piece of technology, it would be a good pair of shoes.  It helped me more than I expected when I finally got a digital watch that I could use to time my runs.  It's nothing fancy, but it's quite handy.  I'm not running barefoot, but I think of everything else as being optional.

I finally went for a run. My last run (so sayeth my running log) was on Groundhog Day. I pulled a hamstring during that run, then I screwed up my back, then I sprained an ankle.

I'm glad to be back.

It's been long enough, and my ankle is iffy enough, that I did a walk/run. That meant 1.45 miles in 20 minutes, which is a 13:48 pace. I'll take it.

Today was one of those days that remind me why I do this. The weather was perfect. It was just cool enough this morning. The birds were chirping their heads off. Dogwoods are blooming here, and the leaves are just coming out on the trees. There was a black vulture circling over my head, but I don't think I was THAT slow. If we move somewhere urban, I'm going to miss this.

I'm going to end this post with a gratuitous dog picture. I let myself be convinced that Murphy needed another dog. Our new dog had been living with 17 other dogs. She didn't even have a real name. They just called her "little white dog." So now she lives with us, and we've christened her "Annie." She's got to be the sweetest dog I've ever met. She really is just love with fur around it.

She does not, however, play with Murphy at all. They're both people-focused dogs, and they completely ignore each other. Oh, well.

My birthday was on Monday.  Last year I celebrated by running a half marathon.  I wasn't able to manage that this year, since my ankle was still kind of mad at me from when I fell down.  I'm hoping to go out for a run tomorrow.

I've made it something of a tradition to get out and run on my birthday.  Maybe I'm in denial, but it really is nice to get out and do something on my birthday that I simply couldn't do when I was eighteen.  I will admit that since I was a pretty slothful eighteen year-old, that doesn't take much.

I couldn't run on Monday, but I could lift weights if I kept it to exercises that didn't involve standing.  I came up with the crazy idea that since I was turning 38, I should do 38 reps of everything.

Ow.

You would think I would be old enough to know better by now.

I sprained my ankle yesterday while doing something dangerous.  I fell off of the bottom step as I was going down the stairs.

My ankle is nicely swollen.  It hurts like hell if I try to put any weight on it.  Fortunately, I have crutches from the last time I sprained my ankle.  What I was I doing the last time I screwed up my ankle?  That's right.  Bottom step.  I'm not sure why I seem to find going down stairs to be such a treacherous activity.  

If it hasn't improved significantly by Monday, I'll be headed to Student Health. 

But really.  Who sprains their ankle by falling off the bottom step?  Twice?

Over at the Runner's Lounge, they throw out questions every Thursday.  Bloggers can then respond on their blog and then get some link happiness over at the Lounge.  Today, they've announced a reverse TIaRT.  They proposed that we ask our own burning question and get some feedback from it.

So, here's my question:

Do running blogs (reading or writing them) make you run more, less, or do they make no difference?  Are blogs facilitating your physical activity?  If they're not making a difference in how much you run, do they make a difference in how you do it?  How would you be different as a runner without blogs?

Okay, that's a bunch of questions, but I'd love to hear your comments anyhow.

It's hard to believe, but five years ago I got hitched in San Francisco's City Hall.  (Five years ago, Monday.  I'm a day late with this post.  Shoot me.)

I frequently come up short when I try to explain what it was like that day.  They had been marrying same sex couples for only ten days.  The atmosphere was celebratory.  It wasn't just the couples, either.  I've never seen so many smiling civil servants. It was amazing.

Paying my money and getting a marriage license was an incredible experience.  I came out at sixteen in 1987.  As an adult, I have never had the expectation that I would ever be able to accomplish this simple act.  Mind you, I always knew that the piece of paper doesn't make the marriage.  I knew that you could have a happy, lifelong relationship without it and a crappy 48 hour marriage with it.  Yet marrying, the kind of marrying where you get an actual license, was for other people and not for me.  I had no idea how important the piece of paper would be to me, just as I did not expect to be so devastated when they annulled my marriage six months later.  

San Francisco's City Hall is a beautiful building.  It is a wonderful place to get married.  I should know.  I've done this twice, now.  We went back last July when they started handing out licenses again.  We're still waiting to hear whether this license will be affirmed or denied.

When Becky and I got married, we had a real sense that we were part of history.  Still, we appreciated it when the officiant took a moment before our ceremony and asked us to take a breath.

"I want you to tune out all of the hullabaloo.  Take a moment to think about your relationship.  Ignore everything else, because that's the real reason that you're here."

The last five years have been extraordinarily happy ones.  I have had good relationships in the past, but I never expected to feel so deeply content in my marriage.  I feel grounded and secure, and yet the woman is a force to be reckoned with.  With Becky, I know that I will never be bored.  Becky is beautiful, smart, wickedly funny, and curious about the world.  I am lucky to have her.

We have had more "sickness" in our lives than we might prefer, although we've been blessed with health, too.  We're really familiar with "poorer," and I could do with more "richer" than we've seen so far.  Some day I'm going to stop going to school and get one of those job things I hear about.  That should help.

It's hard to believe that so much could happen in five short years.  Five years ago, I wasn't even a runner yet.  Who knows what's next?