Monday, September 21, 2009

Weekend Report: Meh.


I feel obliged to tell you that I raced this weekend. It was…meh. Nothing disastrous occurred, it just wasn’t anything exciting. The race started at 8am – which means that I had to wake up at way-too-early o’clock on Sunday morning. And it was cold outside! (Yay for fall!!!) 

Unfortunately, I did not realize this until I arrived at the race…just wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Freezing! (Ok, ok, it was like 50 degrees, but that’s pretty cold, right?)
 
So anywho, maybe I didn’t warm up enough for the early hour and cold temps (probably)…maybe I hadn’t recovered properly from my race last weekend and workouts this past week (doubtful)…bottom line was that my legs just were not moving the way they should.
I came through the mile moderately slow…and it felt really hard. Not out-of-breath tired, but my-legs-won’t-go-any-faster tired. They just weren’t moving. It was as if I needed to coax forward motion out of my body –
Me: Come on legs, that 40-year-old is beating us!
My Legs: Meh.
Me: You can do this – we can run faster than this!
My Legs: Let’s just stop here.
Me: No no. We cannot stop yet!

And so it went. Obviously I finished. And my time was actually about the same as the race I ran last weekend. I was just hoping for something faster. Last weekend I went out way too fast (because my legs were all happy and excited). 

This weekend, the good news is that I ran exactly the same pace the entire time. The bad news is, that pace wasn’t particularly fast…meh.
(Um, so I just realized that I sound like quite the Debbie-Downer right now. If you have doubts about my running love, read this post about a great run.)

On a happier note, I have gotten in the habit of including something cultural in my Weekend Reports. So here you go:

On Saturday afternoon, I went and watched polo on the National Mall. Yes that’s right, polo – like with horses. I definitely went through the I-love-horses phase when I was in elementary school. As in, I have read every single Marguerite Henry book ever written, as well as this ridiculous series called Thoroughbred by Joanna Campbell. But now, horses to me are kind of meh. They seem like a lot of work...I'd rather just run places...

Anyway, Fun Fact about polo: the game is divided into 7-minute periods of play called Chukkas (pronounced like chucker). It is played on a golf-green type of lawn, 4 players per team.
From my minimal experience with the sport (as in about an hour on Saturday), I can tell you that it kind of looks like a bunch of 5-year-olds chasing after a soccer ball – “bunchball” I think we used to call that. But much more dangerous because it’s adults, on horses, swinging sticks.

I also went to the Ballet this weekend. (Little known Mollie-fact: I was seriously into ballet for like nine years. As in, every day, multiple hours per day. But my feet suck. And my hips don’t turn out. So Sugarplum Fairy I will never be. Sigh.)
The Kennedy Center has free shows every day at 6pm. This was the Suzanne Farrell Ballet Preview, and it was crowded! We arrived an hour before the performance started, waited in a huge line, and then didn’t get in!!! Bummer to the max! So they set up a big screen in a side theater, and luckily we were front-row for that. We watched the four excerpts from their ballets on the screen, and comforted ourselves with the fact that had we made it into the theater, we probably would have been in the very back and totally unable to see…

Ballet Fun Fact:
George Balanchine, born in Russia to Georgian parents, co-founded the New York City Ballet, and basically created modern ballet. He was a dancer, and then a choreographer. Some of his most well known ballets include Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and Sleeping Beauty