I caught a baseball!

For real, I caught a baseball today and it was pretty sick. Now, let me preface this by saying I've never actually caught a ball at a baseball game. I was at a Twins game in sixth grade and I got a glove on a frozen rope line drive that was going to take the old woman behind me's head off, but that popped out and some overzealous fat guy pushed me out of the way to get it so we won't count that. Today I was doing the Rice Park loop (~10 miles) plus going to add on another 3 mile loop for my 16 mile long run to bring my weekend total to 26 (36 if you want to count Friday) and I run right past the Hamline baseball field on my way down to Downtown St. Paul. Well there was a summer ball game going on, and some guy popped up a can of corn foul ball. So I'm running by, doing like 7:50's, and kind of watching the game out of the corner of my eye. You go over a bridge over some railroad tracks before you go past the field so I had a good vantage point for a while. So i'm a little behind the field when this guy pops it up behind the backstop. I don't alter my pace any, but stray a little to the right and hold out my hand and catch it, all nonchalant like. It was pretty cool, one of the cooler experiences I've had on a training run.

The rest was a world of suck though. I woke up at 9:30, but waited until 3 to do something with my life. By then it was 80 degrees, and 85 when I came back. Downtown it wasn't that bad, but going from like Hamline to John Ireland was super boring. Thats like the boondocks of saint paul kind of, and there isn't really anything to see. It sucks. Coming back I ran on the Minneapolis side of the river down Water street and on some secret trails, but most of them were flooded out, so that wasn't cool. On my extra six miles I met up with a couple random guys and convinced them to run with me. See, thats whats cool about runners, I just ran past them and asked how far they were going, then said I'd do 6 with them at least and they were like lets do it. Pretty soon we were flying down the river boulevard at a decent enough clip singing Piano Man by Billy Joel at the top of our lungs, it was good stuff.

So thats that, but the rest of the week was pretty bad. For those of you who don't know, Minnesota was blasted by a heat wave, and the entire week was in the upper 80's- upper 90's range. At least 3 or 4 days had heat indexes over 100, so running was not fun. Usually I ran at 11 or so at night, which felt a little better, but it wasnt really cooler at night. I think it was Wednesday that I woke up at 5 A.M. to run and it was 90 degrees already. What really got to me was there was no escape from the heat. My house doesn't have AC and my room is the only one in the house that doesn't have a window unit, so it was like this: sweat when you're sleeping (if you can even get to sleep), shower, immediately start sweating, run, sweat more, shower, start sweating again. Yeah, I guess I could have gone to my parents house, but one thing I absolutely hate more than anything is people that aren't self sufficient. I don't know, I'm increadibly headstrong too, you kind of have to be to keep putting in 300 mile months, every month.

This post is getting ridiculously long, so if you read this far, kudos to you. Here's some random thoughts and happenings lately:

• The new Matt Nathanson album, Modern Love, is super good. Like amazing. I feel like only girls like him, but whatever. I saw him at the Electric Fetus a couple weeks ago an am going to see him again at the state fair. What up?
• Bon Iver's self titled CD is sickness as well. Just super dirty. Hipster Alert! I'm seeing them also in November. They just kicked off their tour in wisco two days ago.
• This kind of describes my feelings on the weather lately: http://thefuckingweather.com/
• The government is working! hooray! now I can drink beer, and get arrested for all the fun stuff I did when the gov't was shut down (like quarry jumping)
• This weekend I worked St. Thomas' Orientation and Registration. I feel bad for those kids.
• Half Marathon on the 6th, I've got to figure out how I'm going to get there
• I signed up for another half marathon on the 28th, this one with my roommates. I probably won't race it so I'm going to wear my Wisco singlet and America shorts. These ones-
• When will the Eugene Marathon get their sh*t together and open registration?
• 2 months and 1 week until Twin Cities