Warm out

How is it 86 degrees? Was it supposed to be 86 degrees, and I somehow missed that? This is what happens when you’re not obsessively clicking “refresh” on weather.com to see if your race is going to get rained out. At least today was a gym day, so I wasn’t out running in whatever the heck temperature it was at 6:00 this morning.

Only four miles this morning, so I cranked the average pace up a bit. Did it smarter than I did Tuesday’s four miles, though, when I jacked up the speed way too fast for the first two miles and had to slow down for the second half; today I went slower for the first part and sped up for the last half. Faster running on more tired legs means an improvement in my endurance level; having to slow down, on the other hand, is just plain disheartening.

Then I did some weights. Some mean, mean guy last week tried to be helpful with my pull-up training, and, indeed, showing me how to adjust the bar on the Smith machine so that I could pull myself up partway from a supine position was helpful. What was not was telling me that I looked like “that machine was killing [me]!” and that I’ve “got a long, long way to go to get to a pull-up.” To be fair, he’s not aware of just how determined I can be when I put my mind to something, now, is he? I was able to do a few more of those reps today than I could last week, and it might be getting a little easier to do assisted pull-ups with the assistance set to 70 pounds. Baby steps!

Fitness talk over (Eric).

Sam’s playground program is going some sort of “Crazy Olympics” today, and he needed his hair done wildly. I just spiked the whole thing up into a mohawk, which freaked Gabe out. “OH!” he yelled in horror. “Does Sam’s hair got to look like that?!” He wouldn’t take his eyes off Sam in the car, and he kept repeating, “My hair looks handsome down. Doesn’t my hair look handsome down? Sam looks like a T-Rex.”

And he muchly appreciates the sympathies he received for his head wound. He insists that it’s all better now, despite the bruising that appeared after the picture was taken (hate to see what it would have looked like without the arnica). When he was talking to my mom about it on the phone last night, though, his main concern was clarity. “Sam did not fall down and get hurt. I did. Bye!”