Fooling the brain

I won my Ebay auction and I'm one happy camper. I found an antique oak jewelry chest, I'm guessing circa 1920 or so, that was the perfect replacement for the jewelry box some rotten bastard stole from me in December. I'm a sucker for anything that's a mission style, arts and crafts, quarter sawn oak kind of thing and this is the first jewelry chest I've ever seen in that style. I got my last bid in 5 SECONDS before the auction closed and it was nerve wracking. That's what you gotta do on Ebay if you really want to win something!

I did an easy, slow 8 miler today. I'm getting really bored with my same old running course; seriously, I've been running the same streets for so long now that I'm convinced there's a rut in the pavement. So I decided today to change it up a little without actually leaving this neighborhood. There are a lot of cross streets on my route and I started doing a criss-cross kind of thing-down one cross street to a main road, then back the other direction down the next cross street, then back again down the next cross street. The crazy thing is when I came to my next mile marker, which normally would have been the 5 mile mark, I was at 6.2 miles! I gained a whole mile by criss crossing and the weird thing is I felt like I had shortened my run by a mile-how crazy is that? I mean, I still ran 8 miles, I just left off the top loop of my usual course and ran a more direct path home. It just felt shorter, somehow, like my brain was saying, whoa, dude-Garmie says you've done 6.2 but this is always where Garmie says 5. You're a whole mile ahead of the game! you don't have to run up the hill past the big poodles and the horse barn! Man, my brain is really, really stupid sometimes.

And why, you may ask, do I always run the same old roads, day in and day out, when I live in a nice, quiet rural community with some lovely potential runs past strawberry fields and green pastures? It's because I'm a woman and I run alone. There have been a couple of times when I've been on an isolated road and my "spidey senses" start to tingle a bit and I start feeling a little scared and insecure. I've actually had runs where I felt like somebody was watching me and it creeps me out. So I stay where I feel safe, where there's lots of people out walking their dogs or taking kids to school or where I see a sheriff's car drive by occasionally. By now, I know all the walkers, and they all know me. Better safe than sorry!