Today was a race day for me. The Zumikerlauf is part of the local 10km race circuit and starts and finishes in the village next to mine. It’s a pretty run, 11.2km long and much of it through the woods that I train in regularly and know well – but funnily enough run in the opposite direction from which I normally run the trails. I’m somewhere in the photos above – thankfully you can’t see me. I don’t think I was a very pretty sight! (Sorry about the Zurcher Kantonalbank advertising by the way, but I can’t get the photos without it – and it really is nice that they sponsor the whole race series – thank you ZKB 🙂 )

Today it was super hot! I know I shouldn’t complain as we’ve been waiting for the sun to shine again since the beginning of May, but it was 27 degrees as we set off this afternoon (I think that’s something horrible in the 80s for Fahrenheit people out there). I’m a cold runner – happy way below freezing and I have huge difficulty in heat. So it was a bit of a grind today – I’ve certainly had better runs. The sweat was just running off me and by the time I was through, my face was so red that it would have stopped traffic. My time was OK : 1 hour 1 minute and I came 21st out of 49 women in my (middle-aged) age group and well in the first half of all women running. So I can’t complain.

Unfortunately I think the only way that I’m going to get faster is by dropping a few kilos in weight….which I know I should do, but I do love my food 🙂 With my 31km mountain run less than two months away I guess I’m going to have to bite the bullet though and really try to cut down. So watch out, I might be pretty grouchy for a while 🙂

Before I went out, I took a management decision on the ‘simplifying and clearing out the junk’ side of my life. A while ago I started knitting a short boxy cardigan with a cowl collar in seed stitch in a cream-coloured rather scratchy pure wool. I had nearly finished the back, but it hadn’t gone anywhere for a good while. So this morning I took a long hard look at it and asked myself whether  I really needed a short boxy (not very fashionable) scratchy cardigan in my life? Was this a cardigan that I would wear a lot (to justify the labour involved in finishing it) and would it improve my life?

Sadly a ‘no’ on all counts, so I unravelled the whole thing and will keep the wool to make something scratchy another day.

It was a surprisingly exhilarating experience. All in all quite liberating and to be recommended. It was also a very quick way to reduce the UFO numbers by one….

I think that’s about it from me today – I’m off to put my slightly blistered feet up and read a good book!

Have a nice weekend 🙂

Helen

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 5th, 2010 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Knitting, Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.