Friday, June 24, 2011

Salt Licks and Oblivious Caterpillars

Milo lives next door.  He's a cute, mid-sized dog that I'm going to call a mutt because I don't know enough to recognize whether or not he's a specific breed. 

He's light brown.  Does that help?? 

Milo is cute and full of energy but he tends to limit our interactions to him barking at me as I wave to him.  We are acquaintances at best.

Yesterday, our relationship was taken to a whole new level. When I came home from my run, he was sitting on the front porch.  He ran over, barked and then proceeded to lick my legs with complete abandon. 

Summer running makes for tasty runners apparently.

After an hour in the humidity I was one big salty snack and he was more than happy to put aside our differences to take advantage.  I'm thinking he had some pretty nice dreams last night about the 5'9" potato chip that walking into his life.

I've decided to embrace the sweat.

Last summer, and the summer before that, I was training for half marathons.  Half marathon training still involves a lot of running but it's a little more forgiving.  If I missed a run...or a week of running...I could catch up again.  So I'd skip runs or cut them short when it was really hot.  I tolerated the heat and humidity but just barely.

This summer, I'm trying a different approach.  I need to find the positives in order to not want to throw in the towel every time it feels too humid. I'm going to embrace the heat.  Luxuriate in it.  Be proud of the fact that my clothes are soaked through and that sweat is running down into my shoes as I run.  This is my first summer running with long hair and it's shocking how quickly it can become a dripping mass of salt water. 

I'm just going with it.

Apparently we can get used to anything.  Run enough in the heat and humidity and it begins to feel less oppressive.  So here goes nothing. 

On a completely unrelated note, I did my 90 second plank again last night.  I'm proud to announce that the first thirty seconds went very well and I was feeling much stronger.  Things quickly deteriorated from there and I was a shaking mess by about 50 seconds.  Still, I'm sure it's getting better.

And I almost killed a caterpillar.  The little fluorescent green guy dropped from the tree above onto my mat just as I started my plank.  I watched in horror as he inched his way down the mat, directly under my stomach.  I still do not end planks gracefully.  I collapse in a heap.  He had about 15 shaky seconds to move or there were going to be serious problems for the caterpillar. 

He didn't move. 

I collapsed into a very ungraceful sweaty heap but managed to at least collapse off to the side a bit.  He's still alive and probably telling all his friends and family about the crazy adventure he had on the mysterious purple mat with the floating pink lady.

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