"Umm...no. What was the question?"

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Never…and I mean never…should you pull onto Chagrin Blvd. in the vicinity of I271 near the hour of 5 p.m. if you are hoping to go anywhere in a timely fashion. I was over there and hoping to make it home for a bike ride. It’s 15 minutes from my house under normal circumstances, but this was anything but normal. I couldn’t get out of the parking lot, so I went out the rear entrance and snaked my way around to South Green with the intention of taking Harvard to the freeway. To my dismay, it was closed for construction. I turned around and headed north on Green and…ran into construction. It seems that whenever work is being done on a major artery, it also becomes imperative that all access roads be torn up as well. I sat for 30 minutes before deciding that I wouldn’t have time for a ride and should run instead.

I was driving to the Metropark and decided to call Jack and suggest the thing he’d wanted for dinner the night before…pizza. “That’s okay,” he said and to my understanding of the language we both commonly use, we were going to have pizza. When I told him I’d call after my run and he could order it so that I could pick it up on the ride home he said, “I meant I don’t want any. I’ll make myself something.” So…’that’s okay’ can mean ‘yes’ but it can mean ‘no’ as well. English is a tough language.

I decided to run my Clear Creek course to test my fitness again and shoot for the course pr. I blasted through the first half 2 minutes faster than I ever had, but came to a point where I’d forgotten which way I normally went. I elected to take the longer of the two trails. When I reached my steep decline above Squires Castle, I made my way down cautiously because of the sloppiness of the trail, but when I reached the bottom, I remembered that I normally stopped my watch for the descent since I couldn’t really run down it and didn’t want to log it as such. These two moves added more than two minutes to my run time, but I thought I could still get the record. I didn’t…missing it by 55 seconds. I’ll keep one of the changes in the course since I like it better, but I’ll have to remember to stop the watch on the steep, non-running downhill. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I have no knee pain even though I have run to 50-minute runs in four days.

Jack had called and texted while I was running and left messages explaining that he was half asleep when I called and that he did, in fact, want pizza. When I got home, I spoke to him about his fail-safe tendency to answer ‘no’ to any question I ask him. “What do you mean?” He’s smart enough to understand the concept, but I broke it down for him anyway. “I ask you if you want to go to a movie and you say no. I ask you to watch a show with me and you say no. I ask you to go anywhere and you’re saying no before I’ve finished telling you where I want to go. You say no automatically without listening to what I’m saying.” He kind of smirked during my monologue but denied none of it. Sometimes…even though he’s seventeen…he knows I’m right.

Run workout: 54 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 150 bpm.
Calories burned during workout: 800.