One Hot mess after another

Saturday's Long Run was a hot sweaty mess. One of the many things that suck about being tethered to a training schedule is that you pretty much have to get the LR in if possible. You can get away with skipping your Thursday 3 miler fairly often without impact but once you start the marathon training process, you need to run long distance consistently during the 18 week season. Even though I’m not training for a marathon, I’m going to have to run the majority of these LRs just to keep up with the group. 

The run made me feel like these salmon



That means even if the training run is canceled due to inclement weather -- like the kind that the radar was hinting at as last as Friday afternoon – you still have those miles hovering over you and when the weather breaks, it might be later in the day when the temperature is much higher.

What sucks even more is because the decision is made at the last possible minute – in order to improve the chances of completing that LR -- there is no mechanism in place to cancel the run before everyone wakes up and arrives at the site.

Fortunately, the storms didn’t arrive and the run went on as scheduled, if not planned. I don’t want to go into all the details because to set it up I have to explain so much to my non-marathoner readers (both of them). Let’s just say that egos trumph sensibility and my group made the usual early season rookie error of going out too fast in the heat.

Most are young and don't realize the effects heat has on you at mile 7 when you run mile 2 at sub 8:30 pace. The point is most of the group was gassed a lot sooner than they had to be and this week’s goal will be to convince everyone it’s perfectly legal to start out slower on the way out and make up some of the time on the way back.

SHB can be annoying, especially when she is being competitive. A mutual friend’s wife had posted some cryptic status updates on FB. Given that her last significant pre-cryptic post stated that she was 12 weeks pregnant, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what happened.

After the run, I asked SHB if she had heard and she had to point out how she solved the Mystery of the Vague Posts before our friend actually came out and used the word miscarriage in some later post.

The thing is, I know she wasn’t trying to be boastful, it’s just the way she is. Sometimes, I think the girl just needs a hug.

We didn't do much else on Saturday except finally got the passport photo for Nightingale squared away. We also purchased pool passes for Chicago Public Pools lap swims.



Had to modify this recipe



Sunday we went for a swim at Portage Park Pool. I had to double back because while I packed a change of cothes, I forgot to pack my actual swimsuit. We then hit the farmers market and then had brunch at Sutherland’s.

Then we looked at some more houses. I'm not gonna do a separate post on those. Instead I’ll just say that we are getting discouraged. If we can afford it, it needs more work than we want to deal with. There have been two places that were almost-runs. They would be good choices if we could get them for significantly less than the asking price. However, the owners overpaid and do not have any wiggle room to bring their price down even if they wanted to.

I did get to try a recipe I found on the blog of a friend of a friend.  His recipe is for broiling and I wanted to grill, but it still came out tasting good.