I’ve been to Hemingway’s house in Havana. The commies confiscated it from him when they took over the island in 1959 and turned it into a museum. It was an interesting and pretty place despite the fact that I was never really a fan of his writing. However, a line from his book “The Sun Also Rises” comes to mind here:
"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."
I started running in April last year (2024), and I watched a lot of videos. They would say to train to run faster that you should run and keep your heartrate in zone 2 and I was like “how?!?” I can’t run without it being in zone 4 or 5. I also couldn’t run without stopping to walk every few feet. And then suddenly, about two weeks ago - all at once - I can run without stopping. I’m not very fast - but it’s a running pace. And my heartrate now takes about twenty minutes before it winds up in zone 4.
I ran a 15k this morning. I did a little over 2 hours, and my run time was an hour 52 minutes with 14 minutes and some change of walk time. I was amazed.
The run was very nice, the weather was great, the temperature perfect for me. The people at the run remembered me from the last one I did with them and were great. The only negative was that it was very foggy for about the first thirty minutes and my glasses fogged up, so I had to stop to clean them off. There was a nice little area that I thought looked like a good place to hunt, and a red-tailed hawk must have thought the same thing, because just a minute or so after thinking what a good hunting ground it appeared to be, there was a red-tailed hawk perched on a power line over-looking the field.
The next run I’ve signed up for is a half marathon in March. So, we’ll be working towards that. My plan is to take a break every day at lunch (until it gets warm here, then I’ll do it in the morning before work) from my shitty-ass-work-you-into-the-ground public accounting job and run at least 2 miles every day and do a long run on the weekend. I did quite well today despite the fact that I had to drive five hours back from a client yesterday.
I want to get some long runs in because the main problem I had this morning was that my legs started cramping slightly after the 7-mile mark. I had to slow down a little and walk a little more because I was afraid that they might start cramping bad and I’d be crawling into the finish line instead LOL
I had brought one of those Ketone-IQ drinks with me, and I’m glad I did because that helped the cramping some - but hot damn, those things must be an acquired taste. They’re not terrible, but they're not very good either. We will for sure be bringing some on our rim-to-rim hike and choke them down if we have to because they do help, but the taste - meh!
BTW, I’d been meaning to update this Substack for two weeks, but it seems that “busy season” is all year at my job. I am going to try to do a few more updates before the half marathon and let y’all know how my training is going.
