no but wine, music, & realtors are basically the same as running right?

This week was going pretty well until the weekend. Which is not to say the weekend was not awesome; just that I completely failed to think ahead & plan my running around the awesome, so 18 weekday miles + 17 weekend miles turned into 18 miles total & that was all she wrote.

At least the week day miles were good ones. I now have four weeks of base training down (er....sort of. Not sure these last two really count, but hey, you do what you can do), eight more to go. Right now I'm planning on two more weeks of all super easy running, & then beginning to add in some goal marathon pace miles (although early-on I suspect it may be more marathon effort than goal pace) on Tuesdays.

I will now recount for you the Things I Learned This (zero-mileage) Weekend.

• Wine tasting in Napa is hard, even when you pre-plan. This is part of why we never go there & instead stick to Sonoma & Paso Robles. Yes, there are places you can drive right up to without an appointment, but most of them suck and/or are full of dumbass bachelorette parties in monogrammed sequin tank tops & penis hats (which...I suppose still technically sounds as sucking).
  
  One of the only normal-looking pictures we would take all day. We did not take it because we were super excited about taking pictures in the barrel room. We did it because the guy pouring assumed that we *obviously* wanted to take pictures in the barrel room & we did not want to hurt his feelings. (It seemed to make him really happy.)

• Even at the good wineries where you have to make appointments, some jackasses will still do their tasting & then light up a ciggy twenty feet from where the rest of us are just starting. (Don, sarcastically, as we sniffed a lovely merlot: "Hmm...I get hints of smoke & some tobacco notes..." Me: "I mean I know it's French but it's not THAT French." Lovely woman doing our tasting: "Excuse me while I go regulate up in hurrr." Bitches, man.)
• If you're making an appointment at a Napa winery & you don't want the wine n00b song/dance/tour/FiveDimensionalExperience, you should tell them in advance; otherwise they might spend an entire hour explaining to you how wine is made & what it means to be in a wine club & try to impress you with aspects of their winemaking & club that are entirely par for the course.
  
  Charter Oak. They also have some gorgeous art here.

  
  Good wine here but I could have done with less talking / more drinking.

  
  This is my "They-just-made-me-punch-down-the-fermentation-tanks-because-it's-authentic" look.

• Go to The Terraces. You have to make an appointment. They are cool as hell there & won't care if you start taking punchy selfies because you haven't eaten in six hours. Oh, and the wine is excellent as well.
  
  We weren't even drunk. Just punchy as hell.

• Remember that everything takes longer than it's supposed to at fancy appointment-only-Napa wineries & work this into your food planning ahead of time. Originally we'd planned to hit two wineries, stop for lunch, hit the second two, then head home around five, leaving me enough time in the evening to get my run in. As it was, we spent the day sprinting from one appointment after another, inevitably running late, so by the time we left our last stop, we were all desperate for food & just ended up having dinner in Napa.
  
  Dinner time. Still punchy.
• Everything about buying a house is scary & complicated. We officially started interviewing realtors this week, & the Sunday meeting that I assumed would take maybe an hour actually took two. At that point it was only about an hour & a half until the piano fundraiser we were going to, which isn't even enough time for half a long run once you factor in shower / travel time.
• There is this awesome organization in San Francisco called The Center for New Music, founded & run by a musician friend of Don's from college (and whose wife, coincidentally, is a teacher that I worked with a couple of times before I even knew she was connected to Don). You may remember that in a past life, I was a composer/singer/musician, so discovering this place was a huge treat.
  
  Less talking more piano.

  

• Plan your eating plan your eating plan your eating. By the time we left the concert, we were starving again, & after stopping for food, we didn't get home until nine. Weekend running thwarted again.

When I have an imminent race I'm pretty darn good at mercilessly putting a fence around my running time, and God help the man/woman/child/natural disaster that tries to get in my way. I think what I'm finding now is that I've got to start being a little more ruthless in that way, even though I'm not *really* training for anything right now.

WEEK OF 10/13-10/19

* 18 miles, all easy
* 2 x 45:00 strength workouts

Monday: afternoon 5 easy / p.m. karate

Normally Monday is my post-long run rest day, but since there was no long run on Sunday and the intensity of karate workouts has been less reliably lately depending on who is there, I decided to get a few easy miles in before class, just for the sake getting in SOME physical activity. And then, surprise! A pretty decent workout at karate as well.

Tuesday: a.m. strength work / p.m. 7 easy

I love you, fog. Our love is meant to be. I hear that Chicago song in my head every time you're near.

Wednesday: a.m. strength work / p.m. karate

Thursday: a.m. massage / p.m. 6 easy

Friday: Rest

Friday was one of those bizarre days where I flew to LA at 8:30am & then back 12 hours later, so not really much time for anything except work.

Saturday: Napa

Sunday: Realtors/concert/near-starvation

I SWEAR I AM ALMOST DONE WITH THE RUNSAFE POST. It's getting posted this week if it kills me.