Summer has arrived in Da Lou. This week, it’s mid-90s for highs, with mornings starting in the mid-70s. With that kinda heat, I’m left with morning runs, which puts me into “weekends only” mode until this weather breaks, and cooler temperatures return.
Last night, I decided that I would get the Jedi Challenge virtual race checked off the list today — it seemed like my only chance this week to pull it off. Do you know how hard it is to get up at 5:15am to get ready to run at 6am? 🙂
That’s one of the cool things about this quest of mine, though. While I’m not a fan of getting up early like that, it’s an awesome feeling to get home and cleaned up, realizing that the day is just starting, and I’ve already got miles under my feet. That’s a great feeling, and worth every lost wink of sleep.
It was definitely hot this morning, and I started working up a pretty good sweat pretty quickly. However, I had one new thing on my side.
Two weeks ago, I put a new Garmin running watch on my wrist (a 920XT — more on that another time) that will sync through my iPhone. However, carrying my iPhone isn’t always convenient. I have a SpiBelt to help with that, but it’s a little constricting, and I’d rather have my phone in my pocket Of course, that means securing the phone so it won’t fall out, and that means zippered pockets.
Enter Zippy Sports.
I found these guys on Amazon, and started looking at them pretty closely. Looking at their blog, I see that their shorts are American-made, and that they’re runners. It seems like there are a bunch of running products out there, with some zoomie-zoom runner behind it. These guys are faster than me, but are just normal folks out running, and I dig that.
I wound up with a pair of gray shorts from them, and took them out for a test run this morning. They were light, didn’t soak up a bunch of heat, and have two wonderful zippered pockets. The pockets extend toward the front, so my phone stayed on the front of thigh, and didn’t move around. Perfect!
The other thing I liked about these new shorts was how they fit across my belly. I carry a little extra weight — something I’m working on! — but beyond that, I have a little bulging belly scar tissue from my surgeries when I was fighting colon cancer. These shorts don’t stretch too tight across my lower belly, and frankly, sorta give my belly some support as I’m chugging down the trail. These are winners, and I will have more!
I was telling Darla this weekend that I’ve done fifteen races in the last nine weeks or so. That’s just amazing to me. A little over three years ago, I was still on the mend from colon cancer, and just barely decided to do a little running. I’ve already run more races this year than I ran all of 2012, 2013 and 2014. I think I’m hooked.
And I get why I do it. This crazy race to run races plays right into my obsessive nature. It’s measurable, has a collecting aspect to it, and the only person I’m competing with is me. It doesn’t hurt that I’m seeing other benefits. For example, I’m down about twenty pounds over the last two months. Part of that is paying attention to my diet, but I know that putting 6-10 miles a week under my feet certainly doesn’t hurt!
My next scheduled race is the Wheels and Heels 5K in Washington MO on Saturday. See ya then!
(This race was managed by Virtual Nerd Runs, and benefits the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.)
Race Course
