What NOT to do/I hate Keith Road

I may have mentioned this before, but if you're in decent shape you can wing a half marathon. I must say I have been "winging it" a lot on some of these long Sunday runs as of late. Yeah. So today we were supposed to run 26k, which is 5k more than a half. Expletive. First of all, given that I was running on my own, I decided to go a bit less and run only 23k. Karma had other plans for my running route, as it would seem.
Started out good, if by good I mean within the first twenty minutes I seriously considered turning around and going home. Then I got into the groove a bit, started feeling pretty decent as I started running to West Van to run the seawall there. Right. I had planned on being out for 2 hours, maybe 2 hours and ten minutes. At one and a half hours I was deep into Ambleside and starting to feel the burn. Mild panic set in and I started wolfing down Sharkies as I weaved in and out of all the happy people holding hands on a stellar day that I would normally have appreciated if I hadn't been so committed to berating myself and my dismal eating, sleeping and drinking habits as of late. And, as usual, I was overdressed. I don't mean I looked all pretty with hair and makeup, but rather that I was wearing too much clothing. I saw a guy jogging in shorts, for god's sake. Made it through the dog park without getting drooled on while repeatedly constrasting the increasing time on my watch and my flagging energy levels. At two hours I was under the Lions Gate bridge, quite certain that some crows were looking at me as possible carrion. I said to myself that I would do a walk run home because I was feeling tired and demoralized and then this voice says, "How far are you running? You've got a lot of fuel there." I would've jumped out of my skin, but I was too goddamned tired. Some guy had caught up to me and I snippily replied that I had a lot of fuel because I had been running for two hours. Apparently he had too, and we got to chatting and he re-energized me and we ran for twenty minutes together before he said he needed a break, at which point I continued on. Man, was I grateful that he showed up to motivate me when he did. Come on, it's the karma thing, right? I try and cheat on the kilometres and I end up running the full distance; I start to pack it in and consider calling a friggin' cab and this random guy shows up and gets me running again. It kills me.
I still did a walk run up Keith Road because, well Christ, have you driven up Keith Road? Every time I take the #240 into Vancouver and we go down Keith I feel like standing up and declaring, "You see this bad boy? I run up this thing every week". I get tired looking at that damn hill. So I dragged my ass up the hill and got home after meandering around North and West Van for two hours and twenty-seven minutes. At any rate, I did end up going the 26k distance, but damn if I didn't make it hard on myself. Michael (who did the run at 8am in the morning) had the same feeling. It's time to shape up. Need to start eating right, sleeping more and cutting back on the alcohol. We promised to support each other in this endeavor.
Limped down to Michael's place to watch the Superbowl this afternoon. He made dinner and rubbed my feet for a very enjoyable length of time. We both shifted around in our chairs a lot because our asses hurt. I think it's funny the Giants won given the Patriots' unbeaten streak. It made me laugh in between nodding off and repeatedly refusing Michael's offer of Ibuprofen.
And such rounds out my week. Time to get healthy. Time to actually show up at the clinic on the weekend, because the km's per week are only going up from here on in and it's lonely running for 2+ hours by yourself.
Boring blog, I know. I can hardly expect you to share in my excitement over not having my crotch sniffed by dogs, and my amazing ability to bob and weave through lovebirds, and how I wasn't attacked by crows. It made my day, it really did. I've had run ins with crows before: they don't mess around. Those bastards want a piece of you, and they're quite raucous about it.