Good news afoot in my world today. My wife and I celebrated our 3rd wedding anniversary last night. We went to an expensive italian restaurant last night and spent lots of money on food we normally wouldn't spend that much money on. Then we went next door and spent money on dessert I wouldn't normally spend money on. I had a caesar salad, and then the Filleto di Manzo, which is a beef tenderloin with a portobello mushroom, goat cheese, potatoes, asparagus a slice of tomato and shallots. It was all artfully designed so that the steak was on top of the goat cheese, mushroom and tomato with 4 stalks of asparagus around that, and then 4 wedges of potatoes around that, and then the shallots around that. On top of the whole thing was green onions fried like onion rings, with this fantastic breading. My wife had the Insalate Calaprese for a salad, which is slices of mozzarella with hunks of tomato, and basil and balsamic vinaigrette. For the main course, she had Spignola con Panzanilla, which is Grilled Atlantic wild striped bass with a classic Tuscan summer panzanilla; with tomato, cucumber, olives and wine vinegar; topped with rosemary infused olive oil. The steak was delightful, but the there may have been too much rosemary with the fish, and so it wasn't that great. It wasn't completely filling despite the price, so we went next door (from Gratzi to La Dolce Vita) for dessert. There, we had a pair of desserts, a chocolate crepe with white chocolate mousse and raspberry sauce, and a chocolate fudge cake with chocolate covered raspberries and raspberry sauce. The crepe with mousse was extremely satisfying, though we could barely finish the fudge because it was incredibly, incredibly rich. Woo! We thought the chocolate with raspberries theme would be nice, since we had had that for our wedding cake 3 years ago. ;-) All in all, a long and delightful evening with my wife. I thoroughly enjoyed her company the entire evening.

So my running is going well, though it is in the phase where it kinda dominates things. I just completed my first 50 mile week since I was 17. After I did my first 19 mile run on Sunday, I was super hungry, I think my body is in high powered metabolism mode. It is ready to eat everything in sight. And it's not gaining any weight, despite my eating all sorts of slightly unhealthy things. My wife and I had a short discussion about how this particular training period has already been hard for her, since I don't get moving on weekends until somewhat later, and with 90 minute runs on Saturday and 180 minute runs on Sunday, its hard to get anything done. Though I felt really attacked at first, she wasn't telling me too much that I hadn't thought about tangentially myself. We haven't done much with the house lately, since we last painted the last bedroom 2 months ago. We still have one room left to paint, and as I reminded myself this morning, we have some trim to paint in the master bedroom yet. And we have to do the deck, and there are a bunch of little things that should be done. So it's time to start doing them before the summer ends and it really starts getting cold and wet.

So, what are my goals for October 5th? Well, they keep on morphing. First, before June 1st, it was simply to finish. That was it. After June 1st, I ran my half marathon time through a few calculators, and they said, accounting for pace differences in running twice as far, you should be able to finsh in about 4 hours. Fine. That is 9 minutes a mile, which is fair. Well, I just pushed out 19 miles in 8:54 pace, and felt pretty good about it. So, perhaps 4 hours is a bit slow. As much as I want to, I'm still not going to make any firm goals beyond finishing, and under 4 hours yet. I don't feel I've hit the wall yet, which is something that I really should understand before setting a faster goal yet. Its so exciting, though! I'm almost to my goal! I'm gonna party when this is all done! And then after that, I'll keep on running, just not so much! Maybe in a couple of years I'll try again, but right now, just to complete my goal is enough, and next summer I'd like to run in a few more 10Ks, 10 milers and half marathons. It's a good distance for me. Will have to run that by my wife, though two hours is the max time for the long runs in that scheme, not 3.

What else is going on? Not much. Prog Power is coming up, though I'll save that for a later post, I have to get back to work now.
posted by Jeremy at 9:30 AM