And suddenly there was blood and I saw stars

It's been an interesting last few days to say the least.

I feel as though I've crossed a couple of major thresholds on a couple of different fronts.

On Sunday I ventured into uncharted waters with a 12.5 mile run.  Overall I felt great, despite the fact that the plan called for a 10 miler until a wrong turn added 25 percent to that.  Whoops.  It was a great confidence boost however as I was fairly confident that with a couple more gel packs and some water I might be able to comfortably knock out 5 or 6 more.  Monday's rest day was really the first time that I have felt any kind of real soreness that I had to pay attention to.  The other issue was the hot spot that I developed on my left toe; I'm pretty sure this is a result of my feet spreading due to all of the minimal running I've been doing.  The feet feel great in general, but they are definitely getting larger and fit much more snugly inside my flats.  I ended up with a good size blister that has needed some TLC ever since.

Today I went for a 6 mile Frappe run (defined as a pace I could do while sipping one) which I admittedly applied a healthy dose of over-exuberance to.  The result was this gore-fest :)

I suppose the good news was that I actually thought I had stepped in something when I finally looked down at the end of the run.  I really never even noticed the slight pain.  Sure does look cool though.  Rah.  I also got my new Nike XC Streak flats in the mail today (see left) and I'm jazzed to take these out for a spin.  Almost no padding or heal rise here.  Marshmallow shoes make my knees hurt.

The other milestone has been the progress in my Urdu class.  I absolutely love being able to read the Arabic script and focus on learning a language for the majority of my day.  I think the average person would be shocked at how much they can learn if that is all they have to focus on; I feel exceptionally lucky to be able to do just that.  I'm even more excited to be able to watch actual Bollywood movies in Hindi without subtitles.  I know it's geeky but it is what it is.  I make no apologies.

My teacher, Meneza, felt as though we needed a little extra encouragement to get out of "nursery school" and into Kindergarten, so she made us write our names on a piece of paper, and then started adding stars for effort. 

All of my instructors are awesome and really committed to our success.  No training to time standards here and big boy rules apply.  It's awesome.  To say nothing of the brand new laptop and Ipod Touch I was issued.  ISSUED I say.

By Marcus with No comments