3 days, 2 sleeves, 1 long run

I made all kinds of progress on my I'm-too-good-for-the-Olympics Olympic sweater over the weekend--I'd swatched Thursday night (I think I mentioned that last time?), so after dinner on Friday I cast on and knit as fast as I could all weekend. By Monday morning, I'd finished the upper back/yoke and both sleeves (Summer Solstice is worked from the center back out to the sleeves to make a kind of shrug, then from the shrug down to whatever length you want).



Things have slowed down since then--I have that pesky job for one thing, and besides, now that I've picked up the body stitches, there are about a million stitches per row. That's how it looked this morning. I've knit about 6 inches of the body, although it's still mostly made of sleeve.

We're not training for the Boston marathon (you need to qualify, and my fastest marathon time isn't be fast enough to qualify unless I can run that time again when I'm 55), but Kevin and I been doing a series of races intended as a buildup for Boston. I've been doing pretty well for me, for my general runner-ish-ness and the amount of training I've been doing (especially the amount of speedwork: none), but since I'm not actually training for a marathon, each of the longer races is the furthest I've run since 2008.

The races get 5K (3.1 miles) longer each time, and in non-race weeks I've been making Kevin run an intermediate distance with me so I feel more ready. Since this coming weekend is 25K (15.5 miles), last weekend Kevin and I set out to run 14 miles. I'm hoping it was the bad run of the season (there's always one--and hopefully only one), because it went kind of terribly. We didn't really decide where to go ahead of time, so we ended up running over East Rock, down to meet up with the canal trail, then along the trail till we got to 7 miles.

Kevin was planning to go home the same way, till I announced that there was absolutely no way I had enough hoppity to run back up the hills we'd just run down (although I may have phrased it more crankily than that--not enough hoppity makes one think of bunnies, doesn't it? I sounded like a bunny whose treats were threatened). So we tried to run back along the trail to campus, then home, but parts of the trial were covered with icy snow (and there's construction on the campus end anyway), so we detoured onto the roads. Kevin thought that had made the run too long, but it turned out to be exactly right--fortunately, because only under the best of circumstances do I have enough hoppity to run further than I'd planned.