Yesterday, I did a strength training class in the evening. I thought about running after it, but then I called my dad, because it was his birthday, and when I got off the phone it was getting close to sunset and I didn’t feel like probably finishing my run in the dark. Plus, “Wheel of Fortune” was coming on soon haha.
This morning, Clark had to leave very early for a day trip to a work site (he’ll be back late tonight) so Pepper had to go to his sitter’s if I was going to get in a run today.
I ran a little farther than usual for a weekday run, partly since I’d skipped yesterday’s run and partly because I knew how far I had to go to make this month’s mileage total a nice round number. My legs felt like lead because of something we did in that class yesterday, but I got in 7.3 at an 8:53/mile average.
And I saw the moon setting over the ocean at dawn again.
That finished off March, so it’s time to sum up the month.
Mileage:
Week 1 (March 1-6): 15.5 miles
Week 2 (March 7-13): 37.2
Week 3 (March 14-20): 31
Week 4 (March 21-27): 26.8
Week 5 (March 28-31): 19.5
Total: 130 miles
There was no Shamrock, or any racing at all for that matter. Also, the April 50K I’d been training for got canceled about halfway through the month, right after I ran a 16-miler. I pretty much just put in a bunch of easy miles, some hillier than others.
April looks like more of the same. No racing and nothing to train for yet.
Friday afternoon, when Clark got home from work, I went out and ran 5 miles at an 8:48/mile average.
Saturday morning, we both did the Weekend Warriors workout, but I didn’t run right after it because we wanted to get to Pearson’s Gardens & Herb Farm in Vista as soon as it opened, to buy stuff to plant in the garden boxes in the front yard.
They had a ton of fruit, veggie and herb plants to choose from. We got two varieties of tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, two varieties of peppers, two varieties of broccoli, asparagus, squash, zucchini, cucumbers, spinach, rosemary and thyme. There was still mint, chives and some kind of lettuce growing from what the previous owners had planted here. I thought there was still some basil growing too, but I was mistaken on that, so we want to plant some of that.
We also got some more top soil, veggie food and azomite to mix into the existing soil — basically everything the employees recommended.
We got to work as soon as we got home.
Here’s the before:
And here’s the after:
Pepper wasn’t much help.
I think the finished product looks pretty good. Hopefully in a couple months we’ll have some very expensive salads haha.
That afternoon, I ran my hilly 6.5-mile loop. It’d gotten pretty warm by then and I wasn’t feeling very peppy. I think the 10:24/mile average I ran was my slowest yet on that route.
Sunday morning, Clark didn’t meet the training group from the gym, so I went out for a long run in the morning.
The Flower Fields in Carlsbad are in bloom. I ran a route that took me down a road that ran along the back side of the fields. They are so pretty!
Last year, they opened for the season right before the pandemic shut everything down, so we didn’t get a chance to go. This year, they’re allowing a limited number of people in. I think my sister and I might get tickets when she visits next month.
I got back on the 101 along the coast for the rest of the run and made it to the RV campground before turning around to head home.
I miscalculated how far I should’ve run before I turned around (I wasn’t taking the detour past the flower fields on the way back) so I didn’t quite get in the 13 miles I’d had in mind. I wound up running 12.2 at a 9:33/mile average.
When I got back, I joined Clark and Pepper on the chaise lounges in the back yard.
We made our weekly calls to our families. I was planning to watch the dirt race at Bristol, but it’d already been postponed to today because of all the rain there.
Yesterday, I did the last strength training class of the day. I was going to go for a short run after it, but Clark had gone into the village and by the time he got back, I didn’t feel like running after all. So I just took a shower and called it a night.
Today, I haven’t done much of anything yet, but I would like to get in a run when he gets home.
I got some more good news — I will be eligible to get vaccinated April 15! Who knows when it will actually happen though. Clark has been eligible for a few weeks now, because of the industry he works in, and has had no luck getting an appointment so far. April 15 is the date everyone 16 and older can get vaccinated here. Oh well, it’s nice to have a date that it could happen.
As far as this weekend goes, we would like to get some things planted in those little raised garden boxes in the front yard, and I’d like to do the Weekend Warriors workout and a shorter run tomorrow, and a longer run Sunday. I don’t have anything to train for but I’d like to try to maintain a base so I’m ready to go when I do.
Yesterday after work, I ran 6 miles at a 9:08/mile average. The actual running part was a little faster but I kept slowing to a walk to text one of my friends — one of the hazards of carrying my phone with me since my AirPods work consistently. Cleaning them off with rubbing alcohol after every single run seems to finally be doing the trick, as this third case is still charging them.
Today, I got some good news. The only downside to the vaccinations rolling out was the imminent end of working from home. Well, it turns out it’s not ending after all. Not entirely, anyway.
The office my company currently rents is in a building that’s on schedule to be torn down and replaced by a Chick-fil-A soon. Thanks to the fact everything has gotten done on time for the last year, with all of us working from home, my bosses are looking for a significantly smaller office to move to and allowing us all to move to a hybrid in-office/at-home schedule.
My boss called me today and asked how I felt about continuing to work from home most of the time, and maybe coming into the office a couple days a week. The only thing I’d like better is to work from home five days a week!
If it weren’t for Pepper, I wouldn’t really care either way — the new office they’re probably getting is right across the street from the current one and therefore a five-minute drive away for me — but it really sucks paying someone else to sit on her couch with him, when I could be doing it just as easily, for free. I figured out I’ve saved $7,400 over the past year, not having to pay for dog sitting.
Nothing is set in stone yet, but it’s looking good. Knock on wood!
I love that it’s light out later now! Now I have time to get in a run between the last strength training class of the day and sunset, so that’s what I did yesterday.
After strength training, I ran 4 miles at an 8:46/mile average.
Also yesterday, I got an email from the Shamrock race organizers to officially register for 2022. I’d chosen to defer when they announced they couldn’t hold the normal big in-person race this year. Next year will be the race’s 50th anniversary so I suspect they’ll do some pretty cool swag for it. I still have the finisher’s sweatshirt they gave us for the 40th anniversary edition in 2012.
Hopefully we’ll all actually get to go run it again next year!
We are now the proud owners of a vintage German-made SABA 3000 Automatic record player!
Rocking out to Jimi Hendrix after Clark got it set up around 11:30 p.m. last night.
We had a nice little road trip this weekend to pick it up from Boulder Creek, a small town southwest of San Jose, about an eight-hour drive each way.
We rented another extended SUV for this trip like the one we drove out here, this time a GMC Yukon Denali. Clark picked up it up first thing Saturday morning and we were on the road around 8:30 a.m.
I’ve never been anywhere between Los Angeles and San Jose, so once we got past the sign for Malibu Creek State Park on the 101, it was all new to me.
Our first stop Saturday was in Santa Barbara, where we got lunch at a gastropub, Finney’s Crafthouse, and walked out to the end of Stearn’s Wharf.
Looking back toward the town from the end of the wharf.
Not long after we left Santa Barbara, the 101 turned a little inland, and we drove through a lot of farmland and huge rolling hills dotted with grazing cattle. I’ve never seen that part of California before! It was really pretty.
We drove all the way to Monterey, where we stayed Saturday night.
Our first stop there was a trip around 17-Mile Drive, a scenic, self-guided tour of the Pebble Beach area.
Boardwalk on Spanish Bay Beach.
Restless Sea, one of the most turbulent sections of coastline in Pebble Beach. Nearby was Point Joe, the site of many shipwrecks in the early 1900s when sailors mistook it for the entry to Monterey Bay.
Bird Rock. There were a ton of birds and barking sea lions out there.
The sign says this is Crocker Grove, home of the largest and oldest Monterey Cypress trees in existence.
The Lone Cypress. Golf fans probably recognize it as the logo for the Pebble Beach Pro-Am Golf Tournament.
It was about dinnertime when we were done with that, so we went to downtown Monterey and got something to eat at Alvarado Street Brewery & Grill.
It’d gotten chilly by then so we put Pepper’s jacket on him. Most of the other dogs we saw also had jackets on, but they were all about 7 lbs. tops haha.
It was pretty expensive to stay in Monterey, so we got a cheap motel room in Seaside, just a couple miles north. It was nothing fancy but it served its purpose.
It was also less than a half-mile from Monterey State Beach and a nice paved walking/biking trail, which is where I went for a run Sunday morning.
Started with a little climb up some dunes.
I walked out toward the edge of that dune. It was huge! Those are people standing there on the top, to the right.
Looking down toward the ocean.
Never seen so much sea glass in one place. I took a couple shards.
I guess it was too dangerous for hang gliding on that dune, but I saw a paraglider there later.
I followed that paved trail away from the beach. It connected with another former road, now used solely for biking or walking/running, through a state park that used to be the site of Fort Ord.
About where I was going to turn around, there was a little road heading out toward the ocean, so I ran down it to see what was there. It was just those former storage bunkers dug into the dune (you can see them in the picture above, left of center), but I got a nice view of everything blooming between the old road and the dunes.
It must get pretty windy there. There wasn’t so much as a breeze yesterday but every tree was permanently blown back like that one.
I wound up running 5.3 miles at an 8:54/mile average.
Later that morning, it was time to head to Boulder Creek, about another hour north. We had to make a detour to a Home Depot in Salinas to pick up some ramps Clark throught we’d need to unload the stereo when we got home. After we left there, the route took us through Castroville, the artichoke center of the world.
There were tons of little roadside produce stands selling avocados, kiwis and artichokes, six or seven for a buck.
Then we started climbing, and then we were in Boulder Creek, in a redwood forest about 4,100 feet above sea level.
Central Avenue.
Clark got his record player from SWAG, “the eclectic collective,” a little thrift/consignment shop in a house that in 1883 became Boulder Creek’s first library.
The old Ford van on the left there was a company vehicle with the store’s logo on the side.
The guy who owns the place restores a lot of vintage stereos like the one Clark got. He said SABAs are pretty rare to come across in the U.S., because they were never sold here; he assumes this one was shipped over here by someone who’d lived in Germany, probably a service member. This is only the third one he’s ever seen. He also said he’d have kept the one he sold Clark, but they’re not funky-looking enough for his house haha.
Showing Clark all the controls and settings.
We also bought those two lamps on top of it. We got everything loaded up in the SUV and headed back south.
First stop was another Home Depot in Santa Cruz to return those ramps. Clark said the stereo was smaller and quite a bit lighter than he’d expected and I’d be able to help him get it out of the SUV and into the house without the ramps. I’ll just say he had a lot more faith in my upper body strength than I did haha.
Pepper in the back with the stereo. You can’t see it well in this picture but his snout is bloody, from when he leapt out of the back seat, apparently forgetting he is old, his front legs buckled as soon as they hit the sidewalk and he face planted!
Then we stopped at Discretion Brewing right across the street for lunch.
Hot chicken sandwich, mushroom tacos and a couple delicious beers.
And then we were headed home!
We took a slightly more direct route home, getting back on the 5 farther north. The last rest stop we stopped at, I finally got a picture of one of the hundreds of bells we’d passed in both directions, marking El Camino Real, a 600-mile road connecting all 21 Spanish missions in California between San Diego and Sonoma, north of San Francisco.
Between the 101 and the 5, we saw the intersection of Routes 46 and 41, near Cholame, where James Dean died in a car accident. There was just a little state highway sign there that said “James Dean Memorial Intersection” that you would’ve missed if you weren’t looking for it.
We drove through a lot more wide open spaces full of farmland — so many almond trees! — and rolling hills. Then we were back in the L.A. area. We stopped for a late dinner at In N Out.
We got home a little before 11 p.m. and got the record player successfully unloaded and into the living room. I didn’t drop it. Phew!
Clark got it set up and we were listening to vinyl on vacuum tube amps. It sounds amazing!
Clark was so happy with it, he stayed up way later than he meant to. We missed the trash pickup this morning and he had to pay an extra day on the rental because it was way past the 6 a.m. return time when he got it there haha.
So that was our weekend. Today it’s back to business as usual. I would like to get in a short run this evening.
I haven’t run yet today. Pepper’s sitter had a work call scheduled even earlier than the one yesterday, and I thought Clark was going to be home by mid-afternoon today, so I slept in. It turns out he won’t be back until a little later, but there will still be a couple hours of daylight then, so I might still go for a short run. We’ll see.
So it’s the weekend closest to St. Patrick’s Day, which means I should be in Virginia Beach right now, getting ready to run the Whale Challenge tomorrow and Sunday, but of course, I’m not. We’re also not going to our friend Mike’s wedding tomorrow, all because of COVID.
But we do get to do something fun this weekend. A couple months ago, Clark put down a deposit on a vintage record player console, with a guy who restores them. The guy just got done with it, so we’re going on a road trip so Clark can pay him the other half and bring it home. It’s in central California, about an eight-hour drive from here.
We’ve rented a large SUV and have a dog-friendly hotel room reserved for tomorrow night. We’ll drive back Sunday after we pick it up.
Normally I don’t think anyone would be that excited to drive 16 hours round trip just to pick up a piece of furniture, but I’ve only been outside this county once since the pandemic started, so yeah, I’m pretty pumped to get out of here for the weekend.
I probably won’t run tomorrow, since we’re going to try to get on the road early, but I might run Sunday morning. It looks like we’ll be staying near a nice paved biking/walking trail near the coast.
This morning, Pepper’s dog sitter had an early work call she had to be on — apparently sometimes the people she works with forget she’s on the West Coast when they’re scheduling those things ha — so I got Pepper to her place early so she could walk him and her dog before it.
So it was still pretty dark out when I started my run, but the sun had started to come up by the time I got to the halfway point and turned around.
I ran 6 miles at an 8:58/mile average.
I did a strength training class yesterday, and I’ll most likely do another one after work this evening.
Yesterday, I went out around lunchtime and ran a few easy miles while Clark was packing for another work trip. I did 4 miles at an 8:53/mile average.
This morning, I got Pepper up early and took him to his sitter’s so I could run before work.
I decided to do a 5-miler to Oceanside and back. Somewhere in the second mile, the leftover extremely hot curry I’d had for dinner last night decided to make its presence known. It was about the worst point on that route for that to happen — I really wasn’t anywhere close to a bathroom! I wound up having to walk about a mile to the next available public facility. But I made it!
Not far past that bathroom was the turnaround point anyway. I stopped to look at the ocean.
Sunrise.
The way back was quicker, since I didn’t have any more digestive issues and could run the whole way. I wound up running 5 miles at just under a 10:00/mile average.
I think this evening I’ll do a strength training class.
I did my long run yesterday, but it looks like that’s the last one I’ll do for a while, because the Calgonquin 50K is officially canceled. Boooooooooo COVID.
The race directors sent the email last night but I didn’t see it until this morning. Happy Monday! Yet another race is canceled.
Well anyway, here’s a recap of this weekend.
Friday, after Clark got home, I ran 3.7 miles at a 9:03/mile average, and then picked up Clark’s bike, which he’d left in the village the night before. I rode it a mile back to our house. My first brick workout in ages haha.
Saturday morning, I did the virtual Weekend Warriors workout at home, while Clark went to the gym and did the in-person one. When he got home, I ran my hilly 6.5-mile loop. I didn’t feel as peppy as the last time I ran that loop a week earlier and was a bit slower, averaging 9:53/mile.
I did see a lot of pretty things blooming in people’s yards though!
Clark had gotten a new lightbulb for a floor lamp I bought a few weeks ago. He just wanted one that could be dimmed, but this thing can also be switched from warm to cool light, or to one of eight colors. It even came with its own remote!
It was $10 at Lowe’s and works in any lamp or fixture.
Clark went into his office for a few hours in the afternoon. I stayed home with Pepper.
It always makes me laugh when he makes a nest out of every pillow and blanket he can reach.
Sunday morning, Clark got up early and met another guy from our gym for a 40-mile bike ride. When he got home from that, I went out for my long run.
I finally ordered a 24-pack of Huma gels last week (I’d just been buying a few before every long run at RoadRunner Sports before that) but they still haven’t been delivered. And I hadn’t gone to RoadRunner. So I just had some GU Roctane Energy Drink mix in my water bottle, which is not enough for a run that long, but oh well. I figured I could power through.
I ran south toward Leucadia, as usual, but before I got that far, I turned off the 101 and headed inland, to run a trail along the Batiquitos Lagoon.
The trail was really pretty, but there were a ton of other people on it. Most of them were in large groups and a lot of them had dogs (I saw another Weimaraner!) or small children on scooters swerving all over the place. It was annoying having to swerve around or squeeze past so many other people. Guess I shouldn’t run that trail unless I can get there earlier in the morning.
But it was almost exactly eight miles to the other end of the trail, which made it a great pick for a 16-miler.
At the far end of the trail where I turned around.
I slowed down on the way back. I really wished I had a gel or three!
Wildflowers blooming on a cliff overlooking the ocean.
I made it home, finishing off 16 miles at a 9:54/mile average.
So it looks like I have absolutely nothing to train for again for a while. I’m hoping some fall marathons happen, but training for those won’t start until June at the earliest. Until then, guess I’m just winging it again.
A Simple Running Log 