Always a lawyer to me....

You may have noticed I've been conspiculously absent from the bloggie world the last several days...I've had no time to even think about posting, much less think about reading any of your posts. I am a bad blogger. But as Inigo Montoya says "Let me explain.....no, there is too much. Let me sum up." For the last few weeks, my job has been all-consuming. More than all-consuming, really. If I'm not actually doing work, I'm thinking about work. In the last three weeks I've lost track of how many evenings I've brought work home with me, and I'm fairly certain I've spent the last three Sunday afternoons in a row working at home. I'm not complaining - in my line of work, being busy is a good thing. In this economy, I realize that any of us are lucky to have a job, even the lawyers. But the last few weeks I've definitely had to push some other things to the side and realize that my job and my obligation to my clients comes first, before my running, before my blogging, before my social life.

This hasn't stopped me from keeping myself busy with a few non-work activities, though. On September 20 I ran the Johnston's Wichita Half Marathon. It was my first experience with this particular race, but the nice thing about it was that most of the course was very familiar because a good number of the local Wichita races follow the trails along the river. I'll spare you the mile-by-mile race report, because truth be told - it just wasn't all that interesting. The first eight miles went great, and then it was totally downhill (and I mean this solely in a figurative sense) to the end. Here's the breakdown:

Mistake 1: Went out way too hard at the beginning in typical Running Lawyer fashion. You would have thought that I learned something about this after having great success controlling my pace at the Disneyland half two weeks prior, but apparently I'm a slow learner. Lesson learned: put the brakes on at the beginning of the race, unless I really want to hit the wall at the 3/4 mark.

Mistake 2: Running alone. No running buddies, no family or friends in the cheering section. Now, I was planning on doing this as a "fun" race and not so much worrying about my time, so I deliberately did not ask anyone to come watch. And I signed up for the race knowing I'd be without my Fair Weather Runner. This all seemed like a good idea at the time, until mile 8 when I was on pace to PR but lost all mental motivation. Had I been with a buddy who could have pushed me or knew that I only had to run another mile or two to see my cheering section, I think it would have helped tremendously. Lesson learned: never take your cheering section for granted.

Mistake 3: Coming home to work. Yes, I had work to do when I got home from the half marathon, it was just inevitable. And it totally killed any motivation I had left to push myself in the last few miles of the race. All I could think was "I have to go home and work, and then I have to get up early tomorrow and work, and if I keep running this hard I'm just going to be exhausted and sore in the morning." Honestly, if someone had given me a donut and a glass of chocolate milk around mile 12 I think I would have just called it a day. That is just NOT my running personality. At least I really, really hope it's not. Lesson learned: if life is getting in the way, maybe it's a better idea to just sit that race out.

At any rate, the last week was an extremely light running week. I had every intention of running five miles for RunningLaur's Fall Five Miler. We all know what they say about intentions...umm, yeah. The five miles just didn't happen on the 22nd, I was exhausted and sore and fighting off a cold. And then they didn't happen on the 23rd or 24th or the 25th, either. Ugh. So I settled for a 5k on the 26th. I ran a rather uninspiring time of 32:00 and some change, but given how my week went I was just happy to get a chance to get out and run for more than 20 minutes.

So there you have it, folks - the Running Lawyer's last week in a nutshell. I can't promise a triumphant return to daily blogging any time in the next week or so, but I CAN promise an awesome announcement coming soon...STAY TUNED.