It's a Lazy Afternoon (or soon to be afternoon)

Welcome to the weekend, folks. I'm sitting here enjoying my Starbucks brand home-brewed coffee, some Irish steel cut oats and I thought maybe I'd holler at y'all for a few minutes.

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Shelby Lee Adams, of No Relation

OK, first things first I found the name of that photographer featured in Berkshire Living magazine. To catch everyone up who isn't Bizarro or Russ-T, I saw this guy's name in the magazine and thought "Wow, if that guy isn't Captain Berkshire County I don't know who is". His name is Shelby Lee Adams, which if you aren't from these parts won't mean much to you, but Lee and Adams are both towns around here, and Shelby could simply be short for Shelburne, home of Russ-T. As I read some of the article I quickly learned that the guy is not from around here at all, but rather hails from Appalachia, Kentucky. I'll be damned.

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A Track Star is Born

This summer you may have noticed a change in my running focus from snowy trails to road races. Granted, you can't run snowy trails in the summer but I really got into the whole racing thing. Many of you may ask why someone would pay perfectly good money to run x.x miles down the road, and to that I say "Cuz that shit is fun". It's not that you expect to win, but it's like a big party where everyone is scantily clad, dripping with sweat, and some people are vomiting in the bushes. It's like college without the alcohol. People show up extra early to talk trash and see how everyone is recovering from this injury or that sickness, then those same people hang around afterwards to talk about how it went. It's a real community affair.

Anyway, I've decided that maybe I'll start coming up with some goals for races other than to finish with a respectable time. I doubt I'll ever come close to winning because the people who do win are still only jogging. They finish and don't even have to shower, the bastards. Last night I went to Taconic HS to do a track workout with MB. Armed with a simple workout from a coach friend (of CRG fame) and our Timex Ironman watches we cranked out a bunch of laps.

I always figured running on a track would be boring as all hell, but when you're trying to time yourself it's a nice way to keep your focus and have real distances. Otherwise I just have to estimate everything, which is a poor way to time yourself when you have to multiply a time by a number of miles (i.e. a 1/4 mile time extrapolated to a 10k or 6.2 miles). If you're off by a few seconds it can become a big difference in your mile time. So I did my workout that was designed to help me get a feel for what a particular pace feels like. The first few laps were a little wild, with my times all over the place but eventually I was hitting them within a couple seconds difference between two laps. NICE. Unfortuntely the times equate to a slower pace than I would have liked, but for my first time I didn't want to hurt myself.

End result, I have a good feel for what a 7 minute/mile feels like. My goal for the upcoming Turkey Trot is more like a 6:30 mile, but in reality I'll be happy with anything under 7:00. With somewhere around 5,000 running that race, it's hard to get going at your desired pace especially when you practically walk the first mile while the crowd spreads out. But man, oh man, is it fun!

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What to Do on a Day of Rest?

With today being a self-prescribed rest day, I'm looking for something to do. I've got a few loads of laundry kicking, I already cleaned the dishes, and once it warms up a little I'm going to get out and give the lawn a good mowing. I had to raise the deck up last time because it had gotten so tall between mowings. I didn't want to risk scalping it this late in the season so I cut it a bit long. Today I wanted to drop the deck back down and give 'er another trim. Plus I cut it at a diagonal last time and I want to go in the reverse direction for that cool diagonal checkerboard look.

I've also got some windows that need to be siliconed up properly. I put the windows in last November and it was too cold to seal them up, and I never got to them this summer. It seems like a lazy Saturday activity plus it'll give me an excuse to go to Home Despot. Hmmm, maybe I'll pick up some lumber to build the skirt around my porch. Hmmm. Let's not get too ambitious here.

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Yum, Breakfast

For all of you out there who don't eat breakfast, you need to get up offa that and start. Not only is breakfast the most important meal of the day, it's also the most delicious. Most of the time when you talk about having inter-meal foods (pie for lunch, pancakes for dinner), you hear about breakfast foods for some other meal. You know why? Because breakfast foods are the bomb.

For example, my breakfast this morning consisted of delicious coffee and Irish Steel Cut oats. The oats are similar to oatmeal in that they're the same thing, but the way they remove the oats from the oat trees is different. You end up with extra parts of the oat intact (don't ask me what) and the individual oat particles are more like little oat kernels instead of the traditional flat oat thing. They take a lot longer to cook but have a delicious nutty flavor. Plus when you add dehydrated fruit - as I do - it is freaking awesome. Today's oats contained cranberries and papaya, each lightly coated in some fancy sugar product. I'd rather they didn't have the sugar, but when cooked into oats you don't need to add brown sugar so I guess it's alright. Between sips of coffee I also had some delicious exotic fruit juice.

Mmmm, mmmm bitch!

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Say You Wanna Rock?

Heey-ohh, listen what I saaay-oh. If you haven't heard the Red Hot Chili Peppers album Stadium Arcadium, drive to your nearest iTunes website and buy that shit immediately. I have a dubbed copy that's getting me by for now, but one of these days I'm going to buy the full thing.

That's right, BUY the full thing. I'm one of a dying breed of people who still buy music. The way I see it, I get my money's worth out of an album. For the amount some people spend on martinis after work on a Tuesday, I can have a legal copy of two albums. And I can enjoy those two albums long after that person's hangover has worn off.

Plus, with lyrics like "Move around like a scientist" how can you go wrong? You know how scientists move around, so how can you not heed my suggestion?

{HOMER}Heeeeed iiiiiittttt{/HOMER}

Over and Out,
Old Coot