Almost Got My Bragging Rights

Argh argh!!!

I just counted again, and I'm at 98 freaking miles!

One more walk with the Captain will finally put me over the 100 mark--it's so close I can TASTE it. If tomorrow goes well, I'll have traversed one hundred miles by walking/biking/jogging/skiing in just 64 days.

I originally started counting the miles because of my gym's summer '100 miles in 100 days' challenge, which started in June and just ended. I only found out about it on July 7, and didn't think I'd ever be able to log that many hours. And then I got a dog....

Just think--if I'd started the challenge with everybody else, I would have won an ugly tote bag or something. I would have been one of the few competitors who made their goal. Hell, if I'd only started a month late, I would have still made it. Ah well. Now that I can't get the mad props and tote bag, I'm just doing it for ME, and that makes it somehow more fulfilling anyway.

My obsessive need to collect and list things has got me plotting out my trips on Google Earth so I can account for the distance travelled. I use satellite maps to dream up cool new routes to walk. I'm exploring the city for the first time (with a hammer in one pocket to ward off loose dogs, and a pocket knife in the other for any two-legged strays).

Tonight I jogged a quarter of a mile alongside my dog while we were out. Okay, so that may not seem like very far, but I haven't dared to run much since I grew man-tits and started getting teased about the bouncing. I also have asthma that kicks in when I exercise and poorly-repaired hernias in both calves that still like to pop up and cause intense burning when the muscles are flexed there. (I recently noticed from a photograph of Kyle Gass of Tenacious D that he has them in the exact same places. Torment twinsies!)

So being able to go even a quarter mile without using my inhaler, NOT getting winded or struck by severe pain in the process, is a pretty big thing for me. A hundred miles of non-essential exercise in two months is fucking astronomical.

I want to go out and finish those last two miles off right now, but it's 6AM and the mosquitoes are out, and I really need to sleep. I guess I should just do like I do at the gym and quit before I'm tired, so I'll be more eager to return the next time.

I almost hate that we're leaving St. Paul, now that I know all the little places to visit and have favorite walking routes and everything. It just figures I'd only start to appreciate the North End before moving out of it forever. I think I'll miss the adrenaline rush of danger that hits me when a dog comes running at me in a froth of anger and gets pulled up at the last second by a previously-unseen tether.

Hahah. Sure I will.

PS - I did end up getting some lightning on video. I'll upload later. I also still need to finish splicing together the clips from the BIG storm we had a few weeks ago, when I went and laid down in the baseball field and just held the camera toward the sky for an hour or so.

There's a lot of video to comb through and lightning of varying quality every two seconds, so it's taking me a while to crop down the footage to make a badass light show. I think I'll need to put the resulting video to the East Village Opera Company's "Overture Redux". That song is perfect for electrical storms.