Day 4 of Training

Today was Day 4 on my half-marathon training schedule. I was scheduled for Rest/Cross-Training, but since I skipped running yesterday (yep, you read that I right, I was already slacking off three days into my training plan), I decided to do the miles today.

Holy mackerel it was hard! I only had to do 2 miles but it was terrible. This I attribute to three things: my pants, the treadmill, and the heat. By blaming the pants, you see, I can avoid the obvious answer that I struggled because I'm grossly out of shape. It was the pants.

I bought new pants yesterday at TJMaxx. My new guru pants, I call them, because they're made out of dry-fit fabric and are supposed to make me run faster. They're soft and stretchy and I just feel like a runner in them. I decided to wear them running today because it was, like, 45 degrees out and pretty nice pants weather. But then my loving husband very generously agreed to come running with me, and he preferred that we head to the gym rather than brave the cold. Which brings me to blame-worthy item number 2, the treadmill. I think it's harder to run on a treadmill. I never used to think that, because I never used to run more than ten minutes at a time. But when you're jogging there in place for any longer than that you get bored and it's hard and you don't want to slow down because last time you were on the treadmill you were able to go at a 5 pace for twenty minutes and anything less would be psychologically defeating. So you suffer it out. And this treadmill was worse because it was positioned right in front of a window, smack dab in the middle of the sun's heat rays. And in this tiny gym, the windows act like they might in a greenhouse, trapping the heat and reflecting it onto anything moving. So I jogged there in my pants, seconds from heat stroke, until the treadmill mercifully displayed 2:00 miles on the keyboard and I could slow down.

Incidentally, my new years resolution this year is to finish my training. All of it. And when I run my half-marathon in March my 2009 resolution will be fulfilled.

The art of signing up for Blogspot

Tonight, on a whim, I decided to become a blogger. This is the third major commitment I've made this week, though by far the least ambitious. On Monday I decided to train for a half-marathon, after finishing a witty if somewhat irreverent book about a couch-potato-turned-athlete. I felt inspired. Then on Tuesday I stumbled upon some investing websites and decided that I ought to study up on the subject and become an expert, after which I plan to invest $500 and yield a cool million before turning 30. And now this. Blogging. The art of writing whatever I want online so that you fine people can read it.

Becoming a blogger was actually a harder than I expected. To sign up, Blogspot makes you type in the usual: blog title, password, e-mail, etc. All that is pretty simple. But then it employs a ridiculously-difficult captcha. A captcha, for those of you who don't know (and I had to look it up), is that set of random letters or numbers that you have to type in on sign-up pages so the Blogspot people know that you're not actually an animatronic robot trying to spam them. So if you read Fg56uMmK in fancy pink cursive and then type Fg56uMmK in boring Times New Roman they let you create a blog. But Blogspot's captchas are different. Instead of using italics or fancy font or whatever they have chosen to smush all the letters together into one jumbled mess so that you're left guessing as to what the correct password is. Is that an l? An I? There's no way to tell! Blogspot's captchas are so successful at preventing spam that they are able to effectively ward off humans too. I tried twice before clicking on the little wheel chair icon next to the text box, an aid for visually-impaired bloggers that enables them to listen to said captcha rather than reading it. But that was no help. It was a piecemeal of sounds and syllables all garbed together. It reminded me of what old sci-fi films might have used to represent the aliens broadcasting to Americans over radio airwaves.

Then, finally, success! SuImpESse. That was the magic code. It took me three or four times of refreshing until I got a captcha code that was remotely legible. S's are harded to smush, I guess. And with the successful captcha code came the successful creation of a new blog; one of millions, I'm told. It's titled Shiver Now, after a phrase in a poem by A.E. Houseman and the title of a web page I owned for a very brief stint as an html editor during high school. My husband will probably laugh when he reads that and I'm glad because I'd like to think that I'm amusing somebody.

So now, with the click of a button, I will fulfill my third resolution and become a blogger. Y'all are in for a treat.