The Law of Inertia

I saw a nerdy-cute T-shirt one time that read, "PHYSICS: It's the LAW."

The only law of physics I was ever able to wrap my pea science brain around was the law of inertia: an object in motion tends to stay in motion; an object at rest tends to stay at rest. Lately (and for much of my adult life) I have been the very essence of the immovable object, but I've always dreamed of being the irresistible force...or, actually, of being just plain irresistible. Sorry for mixing my scientific metaphors, but I was in mid-reverie.

The excitement, stress, frustration, anticipation and vindication that personified June 2010 for me has segued rather excrutiatingly into a hot, humid, energy-sucking, motivation-killing July. The biggest mistake I made was registering for only one 5k in July, the Silks and Satins 5k in Saratoga Springs this coming Saturday. Cycling and running are my Prozac, my Paxil, my Effexor and my Valium, all rolled into one. Adding a few dashes of momentum-annihilating work-related travel that impaled my desperately-relied-upon daily routine like a Pamplona bull into a drunken clumsy amok-running twenty-something tourist was the last thing I needed on top of the veritably tropical weather of this Upstate New York summer.

Sleeping well, for me, requires comfortable temperatures, low humidity, near-blackout lighting conditions and very little noise. As much as a window air conditioner would help with the first two requirements, it would obliterate the last. Central a/c in my WWII-era plaster-and-lath house is a prohibitively expensive proposition. The best time to run in this weather is very early in the morning ("very early" being 5:30am at the latest, since by 6:30am my closest decent running location starts to pick up too much traffic, and my stubborn runner's-rage defiance toward rude drivers is no match for 2,000-pound vehicles hurtling toward me at a minimum of 40mph), but with poor sleeping, it's been all I can do to get up by 6am. Post-work runs have habitually been in humid, mid-80 to mid-90 degree heat. When people tell me I'm insane for running in that kind of heat and humidity (which is pretty much always), I am hard-pressed to disagree with their assessment. When it's cooler and less humid in freakin' ATLANTA than it is in Albany, New York, something is seriously effed up, meteorologically speaking.

As a result, I have far too few miles on my running shoes this month, and the overwhelming majority of those have been pure junk. My first (and only) 5k race this month in on July 24th...less than one week away. I am not even remotely prepared. I managed to walk the route a few days ago and discovered two things that I hope will prove beneficial to this weekend's run: no hills and lots of turns. The frequency of turns and block-by-block city running will help alleviate boredom-induced fatigue. The lack of hills are a mixed blessing: on the plus side, that means no laboring up hill; but the trade-off involves losing all that time-gaining free velocity increase courtesy of the downhill sections. At this point, I'm praying for some good sleep so I can manage at least one decent training run before Saturday, and I'm desperately hoping that the raceday adrenaline rush takes care of the rest.

In the meantime, I've been coping without my all-natural anti-depressant; the results have not been promising. And nobody likes Blue Ginger...except for Ming Tsai (or as I always referred to him, "Ming <sigh>".

Hoping for better things down the road...