Why My Run This Morning Was Totally Awesome

1. I forgot my heart rate monitor at home.
At first, I was pretty bummed. No HR monitor means no stopwatch to track my 3 minutes on/30 seconds off intervals. There’s no way to know when I’m supposed to do a pick-up or to know how long the 3-mile loop took.

Ha! I got to play. I ran until I felt like I wanted a break — which was about half as often as when I watch the time. I played catch-up with random people on the trail and even had a little running duel with a man in his 60s — I’d pass him, he’d pass me, repeat. He eventually sped up so much I couldn’t hang with him anymore.

Cool.

2. The air.
Crisp, cool, fresh. Completely, utterly, fantastically not hot and humid. I ran on a cloud.

3. My new superhero shirt.
A week ago, I went to Academy and splurged on cool weather workout clothes. My new shirt is a sleek, long-sleeved crewneck with reflective diagonal stripes on the front. They stripes serve a nifty duel purpose of making me look like I have a waist and ensure that I won’t get run over by a truck or a pack of pre-teen boys out for their morning run.

4. My iPod Shuffle gave me Leif Garrett.
The song “I Was Made For Dancing” is so god-awful, it’s awesome. Smooth and glossy, with no hard edges. There’s a nice little high-hat rhythm that’s very circular so the drive is forward, forward, forward. There are punctuating horns! Female backups singers cooing and oohing! And a bridge that’s practically twinkly. It all melds together to be amusing and awesome and horrible.

See?

I have no idea how long my run took, but I don’t really care.

Then I did 50 burpees, thought about all the ways I could climb on the pedestrian bridge by the CrossFit UTB spot, and practiced scrambling up and over the retaining wall a few times. Still haven’t gotten that whole momentum thing yet, but I will.

“I… was made for vaulting… all, all, all, all day long…”