Made Famous by the Beach Boys

Thursday, 1 August 2013

Happy Birthday Ruth Ann Walker.  Almost every week I drive down this one particular road in Pasadena going to the gym.  It’s gorgeously green, lined with big, old trees and amazingly expensive homes.  This evening I took pictures as I drove along.  I really love Pasadena (and South Pas), but it’s so expensive, so smoggy in the summer, and so far from the beach all the time that it was never on the list of places to consider living.  Which isn’t to say it’s not swell.  It is.  It’s just not the beach.

The tree in the middle of this front yard is my most favorite tree in all of Pasadena.  Or maybe this is the house of my most favorite tree decorators in all of Pasadena.  That’s closer to the truth.  There is a stop sign in front of this house (I’m stopped at it, taking the picture).  In the winter, when it’s pitch black at 5 PM, at Christmas, the people in the house wrap little white lights around this tree all the way out to the tippy tip of each branch. It’s fabulous.  It’s not as fabulous in the middle of the summer — but I hold that memory with me all year.

Today, again, I sat at my desk and pounded out contract language all day until I left for Pasadena.  I don’t have to do it hour after hour very often, so I’m not complaining.  But it’s hard to do ALL day. 

I did take a short break today to put my coffee ruined ergonomic keyboard through the dish washer.  There’s a video on u-tube that tells you how to do it — after it goes through the dish washer you pop off the keys and let it dry for a week.  Then you put the keys back on.  I cannot imagine this will work, but what the hell.  I was throwing it away, anyway.

And I had a surprize from the Coach.  Although pleased with the pace of yesterday’s run, he said I should have rested another day … so I’m resting tomorrow some more.

When I was training for my first marathon, I ran a bad half marathon 11 weeks before the big race.  The time was bad and my performance was bad.  I spent the better part of a week telling people about poor, poor pitiful me.  (I probably wanted somebody to day, “well if you did your best…”).  Nobody said that to me — not even my mother.  And the Coach looked at my, as I told my said story, and said (famously), “Train harder”.  Ugh.  So I redoubled my efforts for 10 weeks and then completed a marathon.  Fast forward 5 years.  I’m not training nearly as hard (it seems to me) or as far, but I’m running faster and easier than ever before.   I’m telling this story because of being told to train harder, I’m being told to take another day off tomorrow.  I guess the lesson is that if you train harder for 5 years, you don’t have to train even harder for a big race, you’re already training hard.  This is good to know, because I have big goals over the next 5 years.  Maybe it will be so natural that it won’t seem harder.  (And maybe not.)

Food:  recorded, I think

Food tomorrow:  shakes

Training Today:  Spinning