Well, I was having a lazy morning, catching up on some blogs... but then, reading about all y'all getting up at insane times to beat the heat, I looked out my window at the marine layer, still nice and thick at nearly 10, and thought, I really ought to take advantage of this. So, I threw on some running clothes (including my good old running shorts from middle school cross country!) and headed out the door.
Only to make the mistake of heading inland. Ten minutes into the run, the marine layer disappeared, and I was in bright sunshine and significantly greater heat, dodging a gaggle of high schoolers and many more lizards (though the lizards weren't all gathered together). I ran around a local university, and through a sort of wilderness area before heading home, where it's just now (twenty minutes after I got home) that the marine layer is burning off. Had I thought to run toward the ocean, the entire run would have likely been gloriously cool.
As it was, it was a nice run anyway, though I was wishing I'd remembered some sunscreen. I didn't have too high of hopes, since weightlifting yesterday morning left me pretty tuckered out--enough so that by the end of a relatively mild race around the harbor last night, I was tired from trimming the sheets. Regardless, I was irritated at the stoplights that I hit--I'd planned my route to avoid a couple of them, but the ones that I did hit, were perfectly wrong, so I had to wait through the whole cycle of left-turn lights, etc., adding at least six minutes to my total time. So while it felt like a strong run, the kitchen timer I'd left on the front step had a pretty lousy time on it by the time I got back.
I've always been torn on the issue of stoplights, even back when I was in high school track and had a watch. Do you stop the watch for the time that you're just standing there? Do you let the watch go? Neither one seems like a good option to me, and unless I want to drive somewhere, I will encounter at least one stoplight in every run. Not just a rinky-dink two-lane road stoplight, either: all the main streets around here have speed limits of upwards of 40 mph (meaning, longer yellow lights), at least two lanes of traffic going in each direction, plus extra left-turn lights. So, hitting one light might mean two extra minutes, but hitting multiple lights, like today, starts to make my time and my pace mismatched. California drivers being what they are, I only jaywalk when there's no chance at all that anyone will be coming. So what's a good strategy?
Only to make the mistake of heading inland. Ten minutes into the run, the marine layer disappeared, and I was in bright sunshine and significantly greater heat, dodging a gaggle of high schoolers and many more lizards (though the lizards weren't all gathered together). I ran around a local university, and through a sort of wilderness area before heading home, where it's just now (twenty minutes after I got home) that the marine layer is burning off. Had I thought to run toward the ocean, the entire run would have likely been gloriously cool.
As it was, it was a nice run anyway, though I was wishing I'd remembered some sunscreen. I didn't have too high of hopes, since weightlifting yesterday morning left me pretty tuckered out--enough so that by the end of a relatively mild race around the harbor last night, I was tired from trimming the sheets. Regardless, I was irritated at the stoplights that I hit--I'd planned my route to avoid a couple of them, but the ones that I did hit, were perfectly wrong, so I had to wait through the whole cycle of left-turn lights, etc., adding at least six minutes to my total time. So while it felt like a strong run, the kitchen timer I'd left on the front step had a pretty lousy time on it by the time I got back.
I've always been torn on the issue of stoplights, even back when I was in high school track and had a watch. Do you stop the watch for the time that you're just standing there? Do you let the watch go? Neither one seems like a good option to me, and unless I want to drive somewhere, I will encounter at least one stoplight in every run. Not just a rinky-dink two-lane road stoplight, either: all the main streets around here have speed limits of upwards of 40 mph (meaning, longer yellow lights), at least two lanes of traffic going in each direction, plus extra left-turn lights. So, hitting one light might mean two extra minutes, but hitting multiple lights, like today, starts to make my time and my pace mismatched. California drivers being what they are, I only jaywalk when there's no chance at all that anyone will be coming. So what's a good strategy?
posted by R at 1:13 pm
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