Somebody stop me

Since I vented about the authorities who I will avoid in Chicago I did some decent 3x1600 repeats on Tuesday then spent the rest of the day dreaming about seeing Julie for a massage at 4 p.m. She did for me everything I needed, especially when she announced with a few meaningful pressure moves that my left side had "issues."

We're talking from the left hip to the ankle, including the calf and shin. The knee is fine. Something was going on with a couple of muscles down above the ankle that work better when separated. They weren't. Needless to say Julie worked me over expertly and sent me on my way with a bottle of water and helpful instructions to drink a lot of it and take the first run easily after the massage.

I took ibuprofen to help with inflammation and drank; mostly beer (baseball play-off games) but beer is mostly water, right? I blew off running Wednesday morning because my legs were stiff and sore when I got up. I figured a rest day was in order. Thursday was much the same so I delayed all running until today.

I am off work as I accompany Mrs. T as the spousal unit/trophy hubby to some museum professionals' conference in St. Augustine for the weekend. I expect to be reminded how much I despise 4th grader field trips when we tour the city.

So I went out this morning for the easy four-miler I was to have done Wednesday. Tomorrow I'll try the eight-miler I was to have done yesterday and Sunday I'll do the 10-miler on the books for that day. There. I'll be all caught up and maybe three to four pounds lighter.

Somebody stop me from eating! Since doing 20 miles two weeks ago the body still wants to eat but the mileage has diminished and the taper madness has begun. At least I had some quality runs racing last weekend and on Sunday.

Politics. I was invited to a viewing party for the VP Debate last night. The price of admission was to bring Mrs. T since it was (a) a party for women and (b) required a few more red state women than were likely to be there. The party was designed to be a bipartisan crowd complete with yard signs and hand-made signs supporting both sides.

In these very partisan times, it was a rare occasion for a bipartisan party, hence the presence of a local daily newspaper reporter, an NBC affiliate's cameraman and a team of three reporters from the Guardian in London that flew in from Washington to cover the curiosity of American electioneering and partisan politics here in a battleground state. They found it curious that a bipartisan crowd could be assembled for such a high intensity debate.

I stayed away from the reporters as much as possible but Mrs. T was quotable. She dropped a line about Palin being a diamond in the rough that ended up in the local paper. Next I expect to read about her in the Guardian because that crew had her in a corner for quite awhile.

There were two viewing rooms, the Peanut Gallery and the Silence is Golden room. The yackers and hecklers were in the Peanut Gallery. I retreated to the quiet room so I could here them go at it. Most of my roommates wore blue name tags and were not very kind to the good governor of Alaska. Women can be quite nasty, I found. Both of the VP candidates did way better than I expected but I expected much less of Palin. The CNN undecided Ohio voter opinion meter was the hit of the night for me. I wonder in the handlers will tell Sarah to drop the "maverick" references now.