Monday, May 23, 2011

Long Run At Last

It's 5:45 and the holiday weekend is winding down.  After a rainy, cold day (high of 9C) the sun is now out and it could be a beautiful evening.  The beagle is on the couch, whining because he is hungry.  He has slept for the last hour while I finished the run we started together.
I have struggled with getting my long run in this week.  Today, after a conversation Jim and I had last night about the difficulties of balancing all the responsibilities of being an adult with trying to train and be an athlete, I realized that if I was going to get that long run in, I was going to have to approach it differently.


I only needed to do 10 km, so I decided to integrate it with other things I needed to do today, and since this is my holiday Monday, I decided it also needed to be a fun and enjoyable as possible.


I threw away the idea of trying to do a specific pace, loaded the ipod with some good 'slow run' tunes and some new psychology lectures, grabbed the beagle and my Garmin and headed out the door in the cold, rainy weather.  I did 2.5 km with Basso, letting him track a rabbit near the 1.2 km mark, letting him pull me in all directions so he could hunt, and stopping to talk with some neighbours.  It was relaxing, but slow.  


I dropped Basso back at the house, grabbed some good drinks, changed into something cooler and headed out to finish the final 7.5 km.
One of my pet peeves!

The psychology lecture was really interesting - out of Yale - on diagnosing mental illness.  One in four women will have major depression during their lifetime.  The biggest age group for depression is 18 to 24, and while bipolar is hereditary, major depression is not always hereditary.  There is some interesting research showing that two abnormal alleles on the gene for seratonin uptake can lead to depression after a major stressful event.


The other interesting piece is the definition of mental illness.  In short, a condition that causes distress (in self or others), dysfunction and deviance.


So not a bad run.  I cheated a few times and turned off the timer while taking a drink, so that skewed the results somewhat, but I easily kept the pace under 8 km/hr when the beagle was missing.


I paid for it though.  I had to run part of my last kilometre over again when I forgot to turn the timer back on after my drink.  I was too busy pondering how cool it was that after listening to a lecture on depression for 8 km, the song on my iPod was "If it Makes You Happy" by Sheryl Crow.  Timely, too, with all the Lance allegations in the news again today.


I do have to admit, though, that I was pretty happy to get back home to this gorgeous tree in our front garden!




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