Clubbing

I finished work last night at 9:30 and walked home. I had no plans whatsoever.

I barbecued some chicken and made myself a salad. I ate in the backyard and had a beer. It was relaxing, yes, but listening to the neighbours didn't make me feel any better about my alone time.

The big plan for the evening was to watch a movie. "Gangs of New York" was on TV and so I thought I might as well watch it while puttering around on the computer. At one point I was interested to see how much money it had made, since I knew it was poorly received when it was released. The budget was an estimated $97 million, and its worldwide haul was $190 million. It's sad to think that that much profit is still considered a failure.

I suppose that I wasn't really pleased with doing nothing. There are a lot of things that I would have much rather have been doing, and a lot of things that I probably should have been doing, but you win some and you lose some.

I planned to go running this morning at 8:30am. I wanted to join the Running Room Club. They run on Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings. I figured that I could learn a little about how to go about training for this marathon, and I thought that it would be a good way to meet some new people.

I headed out at 8:15 and then met the fellow loonies at the store. There were three groups: 9, 10, and 16 km. I decided to join the 16km group. I was scared when they said that one section was for people who ran 3:45. A 3 minute and 45 second kilometre! I'll never do that. Then I realized that it meant three hour and 45 minute marathon. I could handle that.

We started out, and I was amazed at the pace. I found it very difficult, not because it was so fast, but because it was so slow. My hips started to hurt because I was running at way below my natural pace. After the one minute walk in the eleventh minute, I decided that I'd had enough. I told the leaders that I was going to take my map and go ahead. After receiving some good-natured heckling, I was gone.

After about a block, a guy caught up and asked if I minded him joining me. I didn't, of course, and we continued on. We had a good run and from the looks of it, I'm doing fine in my training. I shouldn't be doing nearly as much distance, though. That said, I checked out our run and we ran 19.2 kilometres.

So I'm a little tired, and I'm off to work. I'm not sure about whether or not I'll continue with the running club. I expect I will simply because there are girls there.