Long May You Run

Today starts my Thanksgiving "break."  My professor re-arranged our schedule to cancel class on Tuesday, so to save myself a trip to campus, I cancelled the class I teach and gave them an additional assignment instead.  This means I have 11 days at home to work on grading, final lesson planning, and most importantly, on my end-of-semester papers.  I hope there will be at least a little time for relaxing, but we'll see.

I told my friend Katie that the professor who cancelled class is like a marathon trainer.  Her class was really intense at the start and pretty rigorous throughout, but the way she arranged the end of the syllabus indicates that she knows about "the taper."  In order to produce our best work at the end of the semester, we need a little break to gear up for that assignment, she seems to know.  I could hug her.

Speaking of running, I went for a 9 mile run on Sunday, thus confirming that if you can run 5 miles comfortably you can run 9.  After the results came in from my most recent race, I realized that if I don't run in the December 15k race that ends the Championship Series, I will likely lose my 3rd place spot to the girl behind me.  She doesn't seem to run very fast, so if I can run a fairly decent time, I can beat her... but if I don't run at all, she'll move up enough in the points to surpass me, I think.  I won't really have time to train my way up from 5 miles to 9 miles, so I figured I'd see if I could get through 9 miles without training.  I ran about a minute slower than my regular pace but didn't have any trouble finishing the distance, so I think I'll just keep my regular workout schedule between now and then and hope for the best when that race day comes.  It always makes me laugh a little when it's my legs that get tired before my lungs do-- when I first started running in 2003, and when I first started running again last year, the burning I experienced in my lungs made it seem like running until my legs hurt would never be possible.

Anyhow, after "sleeping in" until almost 8 and then wasting some time online, I must get started on today's grading.  I'll leave you with the photos of the last race that the club photographer shared last week.  It was chilly!

(Long May You Run is actually a book I'd never heard of until I searched Amazon for "run," but I like the Neil Young song and I don't have any better ideas for a title, so we'll go with it.)