hot night, wind was blowin

I must say, I’m quite proud of my run this morning. It was a 45 min run: 5 blue, 35 green, 5 blue, but I ran a longer loop so my run lasted just at an hour. This is the fastest I’ve run this 5.2 mile loop! I know for some people (ok, most people) this is a mediocre to moderate pace at best, but for me to maintain <12:00 pace for 5 miles is awesome! In fact, for a good bit of it, I was maintaining <10:00 pace! Knowing that the heart rate monitor requires me to slow down going up hills, I’ve been taking advantage of the down slopes and booked it at nearly a 7:00 pace a few times. That’s flying for me!

Instead of just wetting the heart rate sensors like I’ve done up until now, I decided to put some gel on it and it seemed to work fine today.

I felt pretty good today, despite the heat. I left the house before 7:20 and it was already over 80* when I got home. In fact, the hardest part of the run was coming up the 3 flights of stairs to get to our place.

The other day, I enjoyed reading out on the balcony. That wasn’t an option today. I know I’m the fajillionth person to talk about it, but dang. It got smokin’ hot today.

I got my hair done this morning, which meant showering and blow-drying my hair before I went to the salon. So basically I didn’t stop sweating for a couple of hours.

After lunch, I started feeling rather yucky. I had made sure to stretch well after my run and rehydrated like a champ. I feel like most days, after I’ve run more than 4 miles, I just feel yucky. I was even wondering if it was my blood sugar so I had healthy snacks throughout the afternoon. Perhaps it’s a combination of the heat, running, and someone putting a spell on me.

No, not really. But I am enjoying Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. It’s just so creative, the way Rowlings interweaves magical twists into the ordinary.

let’s do this

Every time I press ‘start’ in my micoach app, Reggie Bush says, “Let’s do this.” So now I find myself thinking it at the most random times. Getting ready to cook dinner, changing the sheets on the bed, trying something new…

This week I picked up some coconut water in attempt to try other ways of hydrating after a run rather than Gatorade. (No hate-or-ade here, just wanted to mix it up.) It was meh. I didn’t love coconut water the two times I tried it straight from the nut. [TWSS] So I shouldn’t be surprised that I didn’t want more than a few sips. But I heard there is a dark chocolate flavor so… I’ll be trying that.

Today’s “Let’s do this” moment came when I finally decided to buy the first Harry Potter book and start the wild ride, contributing to Rowling’s $10/second earnings. That’s right, I managed to make it this far in life without reading anything by J.K. Rowling. But I’ve seen the first couple of movies and played through Lego Harry Potter on the Wii, so I kind of know what to expect. Kind of.

I’m already over 50% through it and I’m wishing I hadn’t seen the movies. You know how you might picture things a certain way as you’re reading, but then you see a movie and those faces and buildings and scenery are stuck in your mind’s eye? Yeah. Not my fave.

I think I was expecting more adventure from the get-go, so I was a little surprised that I was nearly half-way through the book before Harry even got to Hogwarts.

I decided to read the series on my Kindle rather than borrowing or purchasing hard copies because I have a few trips coming up and the Kin-kin is way easier to travel with. Another reason I chose the Kindle is for the dictionary feature. Yes, I still have to look up words in a young-adults fiction book, but I also like to look up the names of various characters. I started doing this while reading The Hunger Games trilogy and Suzanne Collins’ other series, Gregor the Overlander. Collins is brilliant. It was like finding Easter eggs as I went on these adventures with Gregor and Katniss! E.g. in The Mockingjay, Katniss meets a pair of twins named Castor and Pollux, the names of the twin stars in the Gemini constellation. Side note, twins in Spanish is gemelos, in French is jumeaux, and in Portuguese is gêmeos. Bam. A little classical education for you.

Today, I had a few chuckles as I read some of the characters’ names in the Sorcerer’s Stone. Some were obvious like Emeric Switch who authored A Beginner’s Guide to Transfiguration and Phyllida Spore who authored One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi. With the help of the dictionary I saw the humor in the name Sirius Black: Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky.

And now I’m rambling. Anyway, if you have a Kindle and are reading a fictional novel (other than the Bourne series), check out the names of some of the characters. If the author is worth her weight, there’s probably a story behind those names.