Creepy Bunnies, Bad Parenting, and A Varsity Track Workout (#runforsteem post)

Something a little different for this week's #runforsteem post. If you are a runner and haven't yet participated, head over to @jumowa's blog and see the rules here: Weekly Run for Steem Challenge Mar 27th - Apr 3rd & Payout For Last Week, but only if you want to get paid to run, and who would want that, so yeah, probably best to just ignore this opportunity :).

Woke up on Saturday to a gorgeous spring day, something we have been lacking a bit lately. Actually, my youngest burst into the bedroom and announced, "It's a beautiful sunny day today!" That has to be one of the very best ways I have ever been woken from sleep. I am tempted to abandon the running post and write a few thousand words about that, but, nope, gotta get paid!

One of my first thoughts was that it would be a great day to run with my track girls at our 10:00am practice. I gave the sprinters off for the weekend, but I knew the distance coach would have some devious plans. The only hiccup was that I had to take my kids to the annual Easter egg hunt at the town pool. My wife is away visiting her sister, and I am usually at an all-day meet on Satruday's in April, so this was my first experience of this infamous event. It started at 9:30, so I figured I'd be late to practice, making it kind of hard to jump in and do a workout with a group of kids. We arrived at the egg hunt to find a very long line. My son informed me this was always the case, and that we should come earlier but mom never wants to. I love how they get these barbs into conversation. So we watch the Easter Bunny arrive on a fire truck, then we watch all the kids in front of us snatch up all the eggs before we even get to the gate. Its like an Easter penance that apparently my kids are forced to endure every year. But eventually we are in and my kids are able to find a suitable number of foil wrapped chocolate eggs, even if they had to dig some out of the mud. I am in luck, because this particular Easter Bunny is more hideous than most. I have to explain that I have a very old, deep-seated fear, no, hate, of the Easter Bunny. My mom had a recurring dream as a small child that the Easter Bunny came into her house and slaughtered her family with a knife. She shared this dream with me so many times that it may as well be mine. The affect is the same. In my damaged mind, anyone who would trust their own kids near that thing has got to be insane. But as if any regular old Easter Bunny ins't enough to strike horror in the heart of any sane adult, This One had a human face, which was infinitely creepier than the kind that peers out of the weird mesh eyeball holes. Here it is. You decide.

It is interesting to note the people running away in horror in the background. I feel kind of bad for people who do this for a living. I mean, this woman obviously puts a lot of thought and energy into being The Easter Bunny, but she has to know that when she arrives everyone will act nice and be happy to see her, but then realize shortly after that they really don't want to see her. Kind of reminds me of my job as a college teacher.

Although I am now stuck with the image of this abomination of nature, I was quite lucky because my children were so terrified that they wouldn't go near it to get their photo taken, which saved us another long line and a good 20 minutes. They couldn't find one of the plastic eggs which would get them a big chocolate bunny (because I am as sucky as my wife at this), but my kids are so experienced and savvy that they knew they just had to find a nice volunteer who would give them one (apparently they do this for the less abled children and those with sucky parents who don't get in line early enough, because, well, it is Easter.)

We were free from the scene and I was actually going to be at the high school track early! But no. As we crossed the street to get back to our car, my son dumped his entire basket of eggs in the epicenter of the intersection. I looked down at the various pastel colors strewn about the road, considered the long term lesson for The World's Most Opportunistic Klutz, but then proceeded to risk my life by gathering them up, occasionally glancing in all four directions half expecting to see a truck barreling at me, because, you know, everyone is looking out for a moron crouched down in the middle of every intersection early on a Saturday morning. I survived, and with some unnecessary meanness that I duly regretted a few minutes later, we were indeed on our way.

Whew. What was this post about?

Oh right, running.

The head coach had a nice menu of options. I decided to go with our top girl, on what I knew sounded easier than it would be. 1x600 at 2:10, 1x400 @ 1:25, 2x300 @ 60, 3x200 at 39.

We were joined by an up and coming girl, and the three of us nailed the 600 together. I knew I would have no problem with the paces, but I haven't been doing workouts like this for a while with jog rests. The 600 jog rest felt good, but I knew this would be tough when we started the 400 and I was still a little, shall we say, breathy. The top girl put some distance on us, but the other one made a great training partner. On the first 300 I noticed she slowed her turnover as soon as we hit the second turn, so on the second one I told her to maintain her velocity by focusing on quick hands. This proved to be a good focus, as the next one was steady throughout and a few seconds faster. On the 200s, she was starting to struggle, so I just stuck on her shoulder and kept pressing her forward -- a step ahead so she could feel me passing her, a another step to piss her off for being beat by an old man, presto! she'd kick a little harder to hold me off. In this way I coaxed her into three fine 200s all under 40. Although it was not exactly a hard workout for me, the shorter rests definitely took a toll, so by the end I was feeling like I did some very productive work. At my age, I have learned that the potential for injury doing faster work can be tricky. The best part of this workout was that I could tell I pushed myself to the brink of what my legs could handle. In the last 20 meters of the last rep I felt my hamstring start to cramp (it had been whispering to me) so I eased up and walked over the line.

I can't imagine carrying my phone on such a workout, so I decided to use human verification for this weeks #runforsteem entry. I understand if you will not accept this @jumowa, but I figured we might want to hold onto the idea that real people still make for reliable verification of truth :).

Here it is:

I actually forgot to add the 400 rep, but you get the idea.

Notice the hat on Coach. It says "conference champions" above the Eagles logo. This is actually a very intriguing artifact that reveals some things about Philadelphia culture. When the Eagles won the conference this year everyone went out and bought these hats, because no Philadelphian could ever believe their football team could actually win a Super Bowl. Poor guy, like thousands of others, probably couldn't afford to buy another one!