While I haven't stuck to my plan to avoid beer and potato chips, I did run ten fairly hilly miles last Sunday. Because I am going bald I had to coat the top of my head in sun tan lotion. After an hour of running in more or less direct sunlight, I took off my shirt and tied it to my head like a turban just to be on the safe side.

A couple of weeks ago I got a blister on the ball of my left foot while playing basketball. At first I left the skin and its little lake of fluid intact but eventually it got punctured somehow, so I removed the dead skin with toenail clippers. This eliminated the weird feeling I'd get while walking of the dead layer of skin moving around and tugging at where its perimeter attached to the living part of me; however, the skin underneath, red as a screaming baby's face, was not yet ready for full-time duty, so I'd cover it with a big rectangular Band-Aid before work and then change it before my runs. For some reason, probably because I was running in the morning rather than after work, I forgot to put anything on it before my long run. About four miles into the run I started to feel the ball of my foot burning and considered turning around, before asking myself rhetorically, what's the worst that could happen? I'll get another blister? But then I started thinking about what, literally, was the worst that could happen. While your own conclusion might be different, here's what my wandering mind came up with: I could get a staph infection which would go undiagnosed because I would relate its intial symptoms to the blister and, thus, miss a crucial chance to halt the infection. Then it would spread to my bloodstream and migrate to my heart where it would eventually weaken me to the point that I would have to be hospitalized. Unfortunately, I would be in a delirium from the now-widespread infection in my body and would be unable to relate my life-saving explanation for my condition. The doctors would determine the cause of my illness too late, coming in to my room to explain that they had pieced it all together, only to find my EEG displaying a flat green line and emitting that familiar (if only to most of us through TV and movies) high-pitched tone which, for some reason, indicates death so perfectly.

Just to let you know, this didn't happen. The ball of my foot was just a little sore afterward.

My run took me out Brush Mountain road, which cuts through the woods on the side of a mountain with the interstate a couple of hundred yards to my left and the top the mountain about a quarter mile to my right and becomes a dead end after almost exactly two miles. It rises maybe a couple hundred (based upon my rudimentary topographical map reading skills) feet or so over that distance through a series of long grades followed by shorter downhills. Although my paranoia about bears is improving, I still jerk my head in the direction of anything that sounds like an animal moving through the undergrowth even though it almost always turns out to be something small and harmless like a squirrel.

It's a good road to cover on your first long run in a while. Its hills aren't the kind that leave you gasping at the top and then pummel your quads on the way down, but it does contain just enough of those aspects to be useful preparation for the hills that, when you reach their base you have to tilt your head back a few degrees in order to see the top and whose descent can leave you with battered quads miles from home and which can turn an otherwise relaxed run into a death march.

It was also reassuring to be able to finish that run without much struggle given that in a couple of months I intend to three times that distance at the height of summer.

Line in the mud.

As I mentioned in my last post, I plan on running 30 miles on my birthday this year. This feat of pointless challenge will be attempted here.

Shh! Don't tell my body!

I have about fifteen weeks to prepare, which is plenty, or at least that's what I tell myself. Today I'll run eight miles on the treadmill since the weather here is lousy and quickly getting worse, a Nor'easter supposedly bearing down on us at this very moment (although I'm not sure how a storm that has stalked its way toward Central PA from the west qualifies as a Nor'easter, unless that big storm from the west will somehow set one off -- and who cares, really? The overexplanation on local TV of how weather works is a pet peeve of mine. The sportscasters don't explain the rules of basketball when reporting the scores do they?). Next week I'll run ten miles on Sunday. I'll probably increase it by a mile or so every two weeks from there. Even at that rate, when I step out onto the trail on July 26th, thirty miles is going to be a hell of a lot further than I will have run to that point. That doesn't worry me too much though because I once ran twenty-two miles on that same trail on a whim and without feeling like I was anywhere near spent.

In order for this to work, though, I think I'm also going to need to lighten up (which is hopefully a by-product of my soon-to-be-explained method). If I'm going to drag my ass over thirty miles of Rails to Trails pushing a jogging stroller full of water and Gatorade, I'd like that ass to be considerably smaller and lighter than it is now. My method for accomplishing this is quite simple, though not easy: run a lot, don't drink beer, don't eat potato chips. I'm a man of lofty tastes, I know.

With a friend's wedding in June set in an idyllic locale which practically screams "You're on vacation! Have a drink!" and day after day of soul-sucking stress and boredom at work between now and July 26th, getting there without soaking my liver to the point that it needs swimming trunks and a snorkel is going to be more complicated than the act (if not doing something can be called an act) of maintaining my abstinence sounds.

To keep myself motivated, I'm going to keep a running (pun not intended, but I'll leave it) tally of how many days I've gone without consuming the forbidden items and how much wiggily-jiggly I've managed to jettison as a result.

I'm starting out at 175lbs and 0 days of beer-stinence and chip-stinence. Here's hoping the the former goes down and the latter goes up.

Precipes Approached.

As my age creeps ever upward, so does my weight. In July I'll turn thirty for the first time, and if I'm not careful, soon I will weigh 180lbs, which -- if you believe those guys down at the National Institutes of Health -- is in the high end of overweight for a 5'7" male.

Granted, I come from stocky stock, but I once weighed 130lbs at this height. However, after years of adhering to the aphorism "Eat, drink and be merry," particularly the eating and drinking part, I now weigh what a normal 6ft tall male should. Further conceding that I have the legs of an NFL running back (albeit white, slow ones) and a broad back on which I grow vast fields of harvestable hair that would make Yoakim Noah jealous, I still need to shed a few pounds.

Last year, when I started this blog, it was with the hope that it would motivate me to lose weight so that I could run quickly at a 15k in my hometown this year. Now I don't really care about being fast; I just want to be in good enough shape that I'm always ready to step out the door and run as far as I like -- be it 10 miles or 20 -- without a problem. I also plan on running 30 miles on my thirtieth birthday and a marathon this fall and I have a hunch that would be easier to do if I was carrying around twenty or thirty pounds less adipose baggage.

You'd think that I'd have learned that you can't rely on a blog to motivate you to do anything; not even update said blog.