Week 7, Day 1: Cat Stevens, are you mocking me?

I felt good going into Week 7. I actually thought about the week and how I would attack it. I made two small adjustments. First, I cleared all the songs from my ipod and then made a 45 minute mix of songs that I wanted to hear on my run. I even put them in a logical order to try to match my psychotic moodiness. The order of the songs ended up being perfect, for reasons I'll explain later.

The second adjustment I made involves the timing of my runs. I decided that I would do the 5-minute warmup walk as a separate part of my loop, and then start my watch again when I started the run. I basically walk 2.5 minutes away from my house, then turn around and come back. The new route I've been running is exactly 2 miles from the top of my driveway, so doing the walk separately lets me actually RUN for 2 miles, and it allows me to time myself just on the running so I can compare my pace from day to day. The week 7 workout is the same every day: run 2.5 miles or 25 minutes. (Really? How many Couch to 5Kers are running a 10-minute mile?!) So I'm a 1/2 mile short on my runs, but that's pretty consistent with the whole program up until this point so I'm not sweating it. Today's 2-mile time was 28:40, which is a 14:20 pace. I'm resisting the urge to make a comparison here (thanks for the advice, Gift of Isis) so instead I'll just say that 14:20 sounds like a great starting pace upon which I can improve.

As my cousin Lisa says, I'm not afraid to talk about the good, the bad, and the poop. Brace yourself people, because it's time for another poop story. So the new 2-mile loop that I'm running is all residential. There are only 2 tiny wooded areas on the run, which are within 1/2 mile of each other. These are my only bathroom options, and neither of them are very appealing. I think one is a swamp, and the other one, I found out today, is a thicket of thorns. I passed the first bathroom option, willing my body to keep it together until I got home, but when I approached the second bathroom option, I knew it was now or never. There was one tall pine tree, and it was surrounded by a tall thicket of thorns, which I didn't realize until I got really close. My only option was to crawl underneath the branches of the pine tree to get behind it and hopefully out of sight of passing cars, kids waiting at the bus stop, people walking their dogs, etc. I was literally on my hands & knees scooching under branches. At one point, my headphones got snagged on a branch and got pulled off my head and then when I turned around to retrieve them, my shirt got caught on another branch. I'm lucky to have gotten out of there alive, people. Let me tell you, the suburbs are a very scary place. So anyway, I got far enough in to do my business, then had to crawl back out. LUCKILY, I'm fairly certain no one saw this 240-pound woman wearing sweatpants and lopsided headphones crawling out from underneath the pine tree. If they did, I'm dying to read the blog post they are writing right now. But wait! I have to tell you the best part! While all of this crawling and pooping was going on, the song on my ipod was Christina Aguilera's "Dirrty", which apparently is so dirty you need to spell it with 2 r's because that's the sound you make when you're doing dirty things, like crawling underneath a pine tree to take a dump. So that's pretty funny, right? Well it GETS BETTER. The very next song on my ipod that starts playing is Cat Stevens' "Can't keep it in", whose lyrics go, "Oh, I can't keep it in! I can't keep it in, I gotta let it out." How perfect is that? And more importantly, how did I not see the irony in these lyrics before? I've never made the connection in the hundreds of times I've listened to the song, but today, I swear I could see Yusuf Islam sitting on his prayer rug laughing his ass off.

Here's to hoping for a sub-14:00 pace and no bathroom emergencies on the next run.