Addicted to Time

Your lights are on, but you're not home
Your mind is not your own
Your heart sweats, your body shakes
Another look is what it takes

You can't sleep, you can't eat
Theres no doubt, you're in deep
Your throat is tight, you can't breathe
Another glance is all you need

Whoa, you like to think that you're immune to the garmin,

oh Yeah

It's closer to the truth to say you can't get enough,
you know you're

Gonna have to face it, you're addicted to time*

Are you, dear friends, addicted to time? To timing your splits? To keeping track of every single minute of every single run?

I can relate. I used to be one of you.

Until Number One Daughter's BF—you know, the future Olympian rower—suggested I toss the watch. He gave me some mumbo jumbo about how checking the watch was messing with my psychological functions. (How could he tell?)

His theory is that when I see how long I've run, it makes me more tired and I lose my will.

Plus, he pointed out that it's not like I'm an elite athlete who needs to know every detail of every run.

And FINALLY, he said he thought my addiction to the watch was interfering with me ever having any fun while running.

My trusty $35 Ironman quit on me shortly after this speech. So I didn't replace it. Hence, I've been running sans watch for several weeks.

And I have this to say: I love it.

I KNOW this is purely psychological, but curiously, without a watch, I haven't had to walk once. Not even on my LONG 6 mile run. I have no idea how slow I am but my goal at the moment is just to finish without walking and without plodding.

I think I'm doing both.

Now I'm lucky enough to run on a trail with mile markers, so I can at least track my distance. And I don't own a garmin and wouldn't know what to do with one if I did have one. And one day —soon, like really, really soon, I promise!—I'm going to need to hit the track. And there I'll probably need a watch. Maybe.

But based on my experiment of one, I'm claiming that running without timing miles is a success!

The proof, of course, will be in the Blue-Gray Half on December 10, when I drag my sad and sorry butt over the finish line. But until then, I'm addicted to running NEKKED.

Now for your viewing pleasure, let's all take a trip on the wayback machine:

I bet those girls are really good musicians!

*Apologies to Robert Palmer, R.I.P.

We Got Bike

Susie says goodbye. She might look happy but she's crying on the inside.

Yours truly has no mixed emotions whatsoever.

BIKE is now safely ensconced at my office, which is craftily located right next to a bike shop.

I'm jazzed.

In other running news:

Eight miles this morning, and two of them were straight uphill on the Custis Trail. I hemmed and hawed about whether or not to take the watch, but decided at the last minute to wear it in case I needed to run by time instead of distance, since we were coach-less.

I headed out with my friend K., who is faster than me and has a Garmin. She kept me at 10:40 min miles for the first 3 miles. Then she took off. I am proud to say I DID NOT walk for those four miles, not even on the endless, freakin' totally endless uphill. I did slow down, but don't know my pace because we switched trails and the mile markers had all changed. So I ran a total of 48 minutes, which I'm sure was at least four miles.

On the way back, I ran with another strong runner, E. I took two walk/water breaks, but they were on purpose, not at all the kind of thing I've been experiencing, the just-give-up-and-start-walking-for-no-reason thing. Has the SPELL BEEN BROKEN?

My last mile took 11:40, which is fine by me.

But, curiously, I accidentally erased all my splits and my final time once I got back to the car. I guess I secretly didn't really want to know, because, as a famous German father of psychiatry once said: There are no accidents in life.


I did it. A good long hard run, with no iPod either.