Pack Review, Long Run

Love, love, love it! It's light, it's comfortable and easy to get to stuff. There wasn't anything I didn't like about it. In 1970, Chess & Thomas described nine identifiable personality characteristics - one of which is sensitivity. I have this characteristic in abundance - I am easily irritated by tags in clothing, by seams in socks, by clothes that are too tight, or the wrong texture. Little things can drive me nuts. In fact, this sensitivity is part of the reason I'm vegetarian - the texture and taste of meat is too much. It probably is the reason I prefer quiet to music and find shopping so hateful - too much stimuli. Eric refers to me as the princess, as in The Princess and the Pea. So, you ask, what does this have to do with the pack? I had two difficulties - both of which were solvable. The first was all the little hanging straps - the fly-away ends were bugging me. I solved that by tucking them around or tying them up. The second was the stuff in the front pockets pressing on my ribs - that one took a few strap adjustments, a little shifting of stuff, then I was okay. My conclusion is this: if I can wear this pack, anyone can.

As a side note, the whole personality thing can be very interesting when looking at the relationships between parent and child. An example would be the sensitivity issue. If a parent is low on the scale, where nothing really bothers them and they have a child like me - one who can barely wear a pair of socks, they would probably find themselves very frustrated with their child. They might even find themselves in daily battles over clothing that is "scratchy" or "too tight" or "too stiff". Understanding that this is truly an irritant to those who score high on sensitivity could help them to understand and work with their child. When parents and children are on the opposite ends of the spectrum on any of the nine characteristics, it can be very challenging. Sometimes when they are both on the high end - like if both score high in persistence - it can result in power struggles. Okay, enough of the Parent Ed and back to the morning's run.

Rick, Michelle and I took off from Orting at 5:45. We met Melissa on the trail about 2.5 miles out. We had a perfect morning for running, and for the first half had most of the trail to ourselves. There was this one guy on a bike who really startled me though. We were running side-by-side, taking up the whole trail and I was on the end. All of a sudden, this biker flies past me - he zipped onto the grassy, weedy shoulder and cut back in front of me. Most bikers on the trail call out as they approach and we drop to single or double file to get out of their way. This guy had on headphones and way too short of shorts and gave no warning at all. Trail traffic picked up on the way back - we saw a lot of Team in Training runners and walkers heading out, plus plenty of bikers.

We totaled 16.22 miles in 3:11:15, for an average pace of 11:47. I did not stop my watch at either of the potty stops, so our pace was probably a bit better than that. Once again, I'm thrilled to pull off 16 miles at that pace! I keep thinking I won't be able to sustain it, but once I'm running I don't notice it. I started feeling that old, familiar achy legs feeling about mile 13. I'm hoping that will eventually go away with all the training I'm doing. Of course, that feeling my be a result of this:

week ending today: 52.58 miles
week ending 8/11: 33.62
week ending 8/04: 37.20
week ending 7/08: 32.97
week ending 7/01: 30.67

(Clarification: last week's long run got shifted to Sunday, and this week's long run was on Saturday - resulting in a high mileage week. In terms of the long run, it was only two miles longer than last weeks. If I hadn't swapped them out, last week would have been 41 and this week's 43. If you average it, I didn't really have that gigantic leap in mileage).

The month of June I was trying to recover from the spring marathon fling - my mileage for the month was pretty low - around 18 miles/week average. In retrospect, it was exactly what I needed to recover, though at the time it felt like I was slacking. Next week I'll drop down to the mid 30s again - our long run will only be 10 miles because we've got something more important to be doing on Saturday than running...crewing for Eric at CCC!