Freaky Friday

My morning workout went haywire today.  It went so far off the rails that even Amtrak would be like, "Damn!" It started innocently enough when my Garmin watch ran out of juice on the first lap of what was supposed to be my first track workout.  No problem. I'll work out later, I thought.  I went to go pick up the water bottle I stashed on the bleacher's at VNSO park...it was gone!  After one lap around the track!  Less than five minutes into my run.  Seriously?  Who steals a water bottle?  I looked around incredulously when I saw a parks and recreation golf cart riding away with the driver mimicking my "what in the world?!" gesture with my arms.  Wow. Whatever.

Then, on the way home, I turned right on Van Nuys near Ventura onto a street with a "no right turn on red" sign.  The light had turned green.  I got pulled over anyways...by a friggin' bike cop!  Seriously?  Is this really happening? I couldn't hide my contempt, shouting "You've got to be kidding me!" when the cop told me to pull to the right.  I gave this guy a ton of crap, until he pointed out that the sign was actually no right turns at all from 7 to 9 a.m.

Oh.

Still though, with the California budget crisis, the police department has clearly turned to chickenshit tickets as a way to pay the bills.  Fortunately, after a raging outburst that evoked the scene in Shawshank Redemption with Morgan Freeman and the parole board, the cop let me go without a ticket.

Who said fighting against The Man doesn't pay off every once in a while?

I finally did get my workout in tonight at 5:30 p.m.  The session called for six, 400m sprints with 200m recovery intervals.  I held steady between 1:32-1:38 and 170-177 bpm.  I don't know if this is considered "good" since it was my first time out.  What I do know is that if I were to hold that pace for a mile I'd be able to roughly run a 6-minute mile. That would rock!  We'll see what Coach Gerardo says.

That wasn't even the highlight of the workout though.  The final 10 minutes called for running barefoot slowly in the grass.  It's amazing what a sensation can do to spark a hidden sense of nostalgia.  Almost immediately upon feeling the grass on my feet and toes, I was taken back to childhood and running in my front yard, playing in the sprinklers with my mom watching.  I couldn't stop thinking about childhood the entire time I was running barefoot.  It was nice to go back to that place. I didn't realize how easy it was to get there.

All in all, it was a great day. It just started off on very shaky ground.

195 days and counting.