Honor thy off day

Today is my off day.

Given the fact that my long run kicked my butt across town yesterday, you'd think I'd be overjoyed about this. But I'm a runner, so time off fills me with a strange mix of guilt, impatience and anxiety rather than relief.

At regular intervals throughout the day, I found myself plotting quick running getaways: During lunch? After my 3 p.m. phone interview?

I repeated to myself the advice of Jacksonville, Fla., running coach Keith Brantly, a 1996 Olympian marathoner and former University of Florida cross country runner who I spoke with about training plans for Gainesville's Five Points of Life Marathon: "Repeat after me: Rest is training, rest is training." Check out more of Brantly's very good advice about resting and tapering here.

Also check out Rest Easy, a Runner's World story about the benefits of taking at least one day off – no squats, no push-ups, no nothing — each week.

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch bad movies and fall asleep. Let's hope my eagerness to run continues into tomorrow morning, when it's time to hit the road again.

Tough love from Bono on a tough run

All week, I've planned to squeeze in my long run during my lunch break today. All week, I've been excited about exploring Montgomery County further by trying a new route.

The piles of slush on every street corner thanks to this week's snow storm, coupled with a major work deadline that's been looming, left me thinking today wasn't the best day to make this happen. I idly wished I could find a new route that left from my front door and that promised a reprieve from the patches of ice, and started thinking about running later this week, instead.

Then, I got an e-mail from the leader of our running group at Pacers, outlining tonight's route, which she said "seems to be salted and well-lit." It goes right by my front door. We'll miss the group run tonight because of a scheduling conflict, but that left me pretty much out of excuses for lunchtime. I left around noon to tackle the 5.1-mile out-and-back course twice.

Let's just say that this wasn't my finest long run. The route was unbelievably slush-free, but that didn't stop my shoes from soaking through after the first mile. And I realized mid-run that I'm in desperate need of some new tunes. There are some serious hills on this route, and as I cycled through my iPod looking for a good pump-up song, I felt like I was looking through my closet before a night out: Tons of choices, but somehow, nothing that quite fits my needs.

Whatever the reason, the tunes or my shoes, I ran around Silver Spring ... OK, I'll leave the Whos out of this. I was just tired today, no two ways about it. My ankle, which I twisted a month ago running in Rock Creek Park, throbbed. The hills just about killed my lungs and thighs — I actually stopped to catch my breath on two of them. And I just felt fatigued in a way that made me want to talk back to the singers on my iPod (To Ice Cube: Life is neither a track meet nor a marathon, but a stupid hill loop I don't want to finish. To Eminem: Maybe YOU can go 'til you collapse, but I need to stretch.)

But in running, as in life, sometimes you get a break just when you really need one. The route goes right by Rock Creek Park, and after staring straight at the ground for five minutes or so while shuffling up one particularly taxing hill, I looked up to find myself on top, with a wide swath of snowy woods beside me. At the same time, U2's "Beautiful Day" came on my iPod. It's one thing to talk back to Eminem and Ice Cube. But Bono? I quit my whining, did the route twice despite going right by my house at the halfway point, and remembered that it was, in fact, a beautiful (if slushy) day.

Anyone have tunes to suggest? I'd be forever indebted if you'd post suggestions below.

Learning that less is more

I've long appreciated that the three-day-a-week training plan by the Furman Institute of Running and Scientific Training I'm following to train for the half marathon in March will prevent me from injuring myself while training for the half marathon in March. Until today, I didn't really appreciate that the plan prevents me from burnout, too.

I take an all-or-nothing mentality in training and in life — once I've committed myself to some task, I'm in 100 percent. This is great, until it's not. I'm the type of person who plays a new song on repeat til it makes me want to scream, eat a new recipe meal after meal until I can no longer stomach any of the ingredients and run as many miles as my body can take. Note to self: Just because there's a plan that says I should run 50 to 60 miles a week leading up to a marathon doesn't mean that's what I NEED to do to train effectively.

Having a plan that limits me to three running days, with intensive cross-training the other days, gives me built-in motivation to kick butt on my running days, and leaves me excited to run again when I'm cross-training. If I'd been following a traditional training plan, I'd be a little bit dreading my run today after what felt like a super-human effort in my treadmill speed workout yesterday.

Instead, I had an awesome swim with Steve today, and I'm already looking forward to running tomorrow.

Running some errands

I woke up this morning with conflicting desires: to run outside in the falling snow and to accomplish a long to-do list of quick little errands.

To satisfy both needs, I employed one of my favorite strategies: I literally ran errands.

I grabbed my backpack and set out to mail a package, return a movie to Blockbuster, pick up pizza dough for tomorrow's dinner from Whole Foods and grab some other groceries from Giant. Seeing everyone bundled up and smiling at the first real accumulation of the year put me in a great mood, and I burned through my first two stops.

It was nearly lunchtime when I hit Whole Foods. Even when I'm not hungry, this store is a black hole of temptation for me. I could spend hours -- and entire paychecks -- shopping for yummy little dips and fresh, tastefully arranged produce. Today's stop was especially dangerous, as I was tempted to use my run to justify impulse purchases ("But I deserve the roasted chipotle salsa! I ran here!"). I'm proud to report that I left with nothing more than pizza dough and some frozen vegetables to try a recipe posted by my friend Chris on his foodie blog, where you can find all sorts of yummy, healthy post-run treats.

I clocked a total of 25 minutes running -- OK, plodding -- through the snow while erranding, which was a little less than I'd hoped for. I decided to squeeze in my speed workout for the week on the treadmill when I got back.

I'm delighted to report that I actually walked away from the prospect of spiced Indian-style vegetables and went downstairs to the little gym instead, knocking out three 1-mile repeats at somewhere between 7 and 7:30-minute mile pace. It just about killed me (both the pace and the restraint in holding off on lunch), but man! Did those veggies ever taste good after a hard workout! Check out the recipe here.

Think snow ... and agility workouts

If you read this blog regularly, you're familiar with my efforts to cross-train to avoid overtraining injuries from running. During the week, this mostly means swimming and some cycling on the stationary bike.

Every other weekend, Steve and I partake in an activity that blows biking and swimming out of the water.

We volunteer at Whitetail Mountain Resort as Mountain Safety Team members, which we've determined to be the best deal in the history of deals. We help open and close the mountain, offer assistance to people who fall or otherwise need help and do what we can to make ski patrollers' jobs easier. We also investigate and document crashes for the resort.

But, as our fellow safety teamer, Dave, put it when we first started: "Mostly, we just sort of ski around." In exchange, we get a season pass, making this the best job either Steve or I have ever had.

This weekend, we had a surprise from an old friend: moguls, which hadn't made an appearance at Whitetail two weeks ago but are now out in force on Exhibition, an expert run right under the lift (hence the name).

Like anything that kicks my ass, I love moguls and I hate them. It's a Tina-Ike relationship in which I'm always, always Tina. For a run or two, the bumps will be so sweet, lulling me into complacency with an easy line or forgiving snow. Then, the temperature will drop, causing the snow to harden, or I'll ski down a different portion of the run, and bam! I'm getting beat up again.

Suffice it to say that at the end of the day today, watching me ski the bumps was less like watching someone ski and more like watching someone try to ride a mechanical bull at a bar while very, very drunk. I didn't so much stumble as I got bucked off.

But I've resolved to get back on the bull. My plan is to work on my agility. My quads are plenty strong, but my legs don't move so quickly or smoothly.

I haven't found a good ski-specific agility workout, but I'll post it here as soon as I do. In the meantime, any suggestions? Post 'em below if so.

Floridiots on the run

Anyone who's run road races on a regular basis and seen the same names weekend after weekend knows the running community is very small indeed.

Tonight, I was struck by just what a small world it is while running with a few new friends at Pacers.

Steve and I headed out in our own pace group (regular blog readers will know that this might be for the best), but ended up running with a nice dude named Pete who claimed to be just as bad at pacing as we are and a girl who wore headphones. I chatted with Pete for a while before realizing we'd both recently moved back to the area. He'd spent time in Colorado (so did we!), and in Florida (no ... freaking ... way!), so we spent a good portion of the run touting the benefits of living in a cultural mecca that has seasons after a few years in the tropics. We talked about how nice it is to be living in what feels like the center of the world these days, and about how crappy it is readjusting to winter weather (though it was a downright balmy 40-odd degrees today ... how quickly we Floridiots forget what real winter weather is like!).

Our headphoned friend got into the conversation near the end of the run. She was relatively new to Pacers, she said, and just moved back to the area.

"Where from?" Pete asked.

"Fort Myers," she said. "How about you?"

A small world indeed.

Getting over my fear of commitment

I've got serious commitment issues.

I choose which races I'll run months ahead of time, circling race ads in the back of Runner's World like a normal woman might earmark wish-list items from a J. Crew catalog. I print out training schedules and follow them to the letter. This time, I'm even blogging about my training for the National Half Marathon on March 21.

The one thing I don't do: actually sign up for the race.

This is a thing with me. Unless I have reason to fear that the race will fill up quickly, I postpone, and postpone, and postpone, often waiting until race day to officially throw my hat in the ring. Sometimes, I even wait so long I miss the race entirely, which happened with the Philadelphia Half Marathon in November. This was especially rough, as I'd done most of my long runs for the race by the time I realized registration had closed.

I tell myself waiting to sign up is a smart move to avoid losing a bunch of money on a race that I may injure myself before, or that I may ... you know ... be unable to run for some other reason. I know it's actually more of a stupid defense mechanism to avoid committing myself wholly to a race.

Not this time. I'm proud to announce that I've finally signed up for the race I've been publicly training for and blogging about for weeks.

This is a big step for me. Maybe it's just because I'm usually too tired to sprint at the end of a race, but I like to think of the simple act of committing myself to a race as gutsy, if we're using George Sheehan's definition: "Some think guts is sprinting at the end of a race. But guts is what got you there to begin with. Guts start in the back hills with six miles to go and you're thinking of how you can get out of this race without anyone noticing."

Looking for motivation? Read about Sheehan, a cardiologist, runner and writer from my home county in New Jersey.