Eclipse! + Far too many time zones for one week (Eugene Half Week 6 of 8)

OK, so. Last weekend, I had to give a paper at a conference in Philadelphia, and being two weeks out from Eugene and really wanting one more chance to get on a starting line before then, I'd planned to Amtrak into Brooklyn on Sunday morning to run this 10 miler in Prospect Park.

Buttttt then the talk was changed from Saturday to Sunday at 1:15pm, and there was just no feasible way to run a 9:15am 10 mile race and get back to Philly in time for this talk. So.

What do we do?

We turn to the internet to see what else is around. And what do we find?

This cheeky little 15K race (that's ~9.3 miles according to The King's Mathematics) in central Pennsylvania on Saturday morning. 

Is it glamorous? No. But did I care about that? Also no! I really just needed to run a *sorta* long-ish tune-up race where I could practice HM effort and using all the mental stuff I've been working on in a situation that feels more formal than weekend long runs on my own in Golden Gate Park.

Race report coming soon!

In case you missed it:

Eugene Half Week 1
Eugene Half Week 2
Eugene Half Week 3
Eugene Half Week 4
Eugene Half Week 5

 ~*~*~ 🦆🦆 Eugene Half Marathon Week 6 of 8 🦆🦆 ~*~*~

Grand Total: 30.85 miles

🐌 Easy: 20.35 miles
🏃🏻‍♀️ Moderate: 9.3 miles
🐎 Fast: 1.2 miles

⚖️ Easy miles vs. fast/moderate miles: 66% vs. 34%. 

Blue = daily strain, red/yellow/green = daily recovery

Monday 4/8: 6 easy. After a long travel day on Saturday & taking a day off Sunday due to some disconcerting pain in my right leg, I gave 6 easy miles a shot and everything felt fine. (Though, running in that TX heat and humidity is....something else.)

Also, we did the thing! Since Don & I both have family in the DFW we'd planned over a year ago to make this trip & see the total eclipse. I had gone into it with low expectations because that's how you end up not disappointed, but honestly it was one of the coolest things I've ever seen and I would 100% make a special trip to see another one. I've seen several partial eclipses in my life and they are really just nothing compared to totality. (See: This xkcd comic that sums it up perfectly. 🤣)

10/10, would eclipse again.

I honestly didn't think there would be any point in trying to take pictures of totality with just a regular phone, but it actually worked shockingly well? Like obviously none of us got professional-quality photos but I kind of loved how they turned out. 

Tuesday 4/9: 8 easy. Honestly this was just one of those days that I was feeling lazy and tired and we were hanging out with family and it was pouring rain and our flight home was at a weird hour, and....I could have hustled and gotten the run done but I didn't. I sat around eating pizza and watching The Matrix with my family instead and I regret nothing. OK I regret it a little bit.

Wednesday 4/10: 2.3 warm up, 8 x (1:00 fast / 1:00 easy), 2.3 cool down = 6.6 total. Just trying to get fired up a little bit & get the legs reaccustomed to moving before Saturday's 15K. I did not not NOT feel good in this run and was honestly surprised the pace wasn't slower. It made me really reflect on that Sweat Elite podcast from a couple of weeks back where if you take a couple days off (or a couple days followed by a short easy day and another day off), you don't lose fitness but running fast is still going to feel kind of bad because you're a bit out of practice with the shock of breathing hard, moving your legs fast, etc. And that actually made me feel kind of better about it.

Thursday 4/11: Travel day. #roadwarrioring this week in Philadelphia for a conference, and you know how those west-to-east-coast flights eat up your entire day. 🙄

Friday 4/12: 4.25 easy w/ 4 x 0:30 strides. Shakin' it out for Saturday's workout/race. The strides did not feel super peppy & I felt like I really had to cajole them to get going, but otherwise I felt pretty good on this run. 

Saturday 4/13: Ninja 15K! 1.5 warm up, 9.3 race, 3.2 cool down = 14 total. Race report here!

Sunday 4/14: 8 easy. Alas when I got out of the car after driving three hours back to Philly after the race, my knee was swollen and painful to walk on, so the absolute last thing I was going to try to do was run on it. Which honestly was okay because I was freaking *exhausted* and really needed to focus on my talk that day, i.e., the whole reason I was in Philly to begin with.

🎧In my ears this week:🎧

• The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton. In 1634, the legendary detective Samuel Pipps has been accused of a crime for which he is being transported from Batavia back to Amsterdam for trial and (likely) execution on an Indiaman sailing ship. But the voyage seems cursed from the beginning, and with Pipps in chains, it's up to his loyal bodyguard Arent to solve the mystery of zombie lepers and mysteriously appearing symbols before some terrible fate befalls the ship and its denizens. Same author as The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, but a very different style of book.
• Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg. I would say there was little in this book that was truly new to me (given what I do for work re: facilitation & working with groups) but I still found it neat the way he organized all of it into one book around a particular theme. Worth reading especially if you are less familiar with the literature around group facilitation, building interpersonal relationships, and the sometimes surprisingly outsized role that socio-emotional interaction plays in getting stuff done in teams.
• The Night Swim by Megan Goldin. When true crime podcaster and household name Rachel Krall travels to a small New England town, to cover the trial of a champion college swimmer accused of raping a local high school girl, she begins receiving strange letters from a woman calling herself Hannah, who claims that the accidental drowning of her sister Jenny in the same town decades ago was actually a murder. Hannah feels that Rachel is her sister's last chance for justice and begs her to investigate the case. Rachel is intrigued and begins asking around to learn more about the drowned girl. The more she investigates, the more she starts to feel there may be a sinister connection between Jenny's death and the present-day rape case Rachel is covering now.