Trip Tik

This week with the mileage starting to decline, I decided to try and ramp up the pace a little.

I enjoyed Monday off by watching Dancing with the Stars. That darn show has me hooked. I spent the whole night moving back and forth between the computer (bills and blogging) and the TV. I would really love to see Laila make it all the way through. But it is going to be a tough battle between her, Joey, Ian and maybe even Apollo. I never thought I would get hooked on a show like this. I pretty much dismissed it the first year, caught the final few weeks year two and haven't missed much of the action since then. I was really rooting for Emmit last year besides I've secretly got a thing for Cheryl. Cheryl and her star partner have won twice, it would be sweet if she and Ian could go for #3.

At the dam on Tuesday it seemed really odd to be turning around at the 2.5 mile mark. I've been running 6 or 8 there since early February. I pushed a little and ended up with an 8:09 pace over all.

Wednesday I hadn't quite committed to a route yet on the way home. I was thinking about the errands I had to run the next day. It turns out our car insurance was due on Thursday. I'm not super excited most days to pay the bills and there are some bills I just flat out hate to pay. Car insurance is one of those. Some of the others are the newspaper (I don't read it) and the cell phone bill (most of the minutes go to the kids). So as a little protest I pay those bills at the last possible minute. I usually drop of the insurance check at the AAA office on the way to work. This is just one more thing in an already hectic morning. Getting Bryan moving is enough of a battle every morning. So I had this brilliant idea of running the insurance check over tonight.

I quickly pulled up my favorite route mapping tool and determined that the AAA office was 2.5 miles from home. This office is just one block off one of the streets I run often. To finish up the loop, my Bonnie Cove 5 route became the AAA 6. Now I have one less thing to do in the morning. Plus this saves me about a 2 mile car trip. That has to be worth the $0.26 it saved me with gas at $3.25 a gallon and don't forget the $0.39 stamp I saved too.

In the spirit of ramping up the pace, after the 2.5 miles I decided to kick things up a notch and ran at least another 2 miles at a pace nearing 5K. I throttled it back down after that but caught myself ramping back up as I got closer and closer to home. I finished up with a 7:53 pace overall so I must have been cooking along pretty good in the middle there because I know I started off relatively easily.

I plan to take tomorrow back down in the 8:30 range in preparation for the last big one on Saturday. I was planning on going down to Yorba Linda to meet up with the Cruiser's (I haven't seen them since the Brea 8K) but I found out today some of them are racing a 5K that day. I may just head back down to HB, where I've done the last 3 long runs. Either way it will be satisfying to have that one on the books.