Running, moving furniture, mowing and burning brush

Running notes

My first half-mile was slow. I clocked it at 7:30 (15 minute miles).

The two-mile mark was 26:22 and the 2.6 mile time was 33:35. 

My plan is to run the 2.6 miles and walk the last 0.4 miles as a cool-down. While 2.6 miles looks like an arbitrary number, it isn't. From the end of my driveway, up the center of the road and around the block to a very large White Oak on the top of a hill is precisely 2.58 miles. Rounding gives me 2.6 miles.

The time it takes to run 2.6 miles at a 12 minutes/mile pace is 31 minutes. If you take out my very slow first half-mile, I was running at a 12:25 minutes/mile clip.

Moving furniture

Two hours by the clock. One hour of actual hands-on furniture.

Pulling weeds and lifting weights

Neither happened.

I pushed a lawn mower for 89 minutes. I was shooting for two hours but I felt a sudden sharp pain in my left, Achilles' tendon.

An academic would have puzzled over the phenomena. He would have opened up scholar.google.com and performed multiple queries. He would have posted rambling essays on his Facebook page. If he noticed many insects boiling out of the ground at his feet, he might have been inclined to snap photos and use an app to determine the species. If his degrees were in the social-sciences, he might have asked them if their aggression was due to childhood trauma while lecturing them on the evils of systemic humanistic biases.

I, on the other hand, am a redneck and this isn't my first rodeo. I SPRINTED out of the area pushing the mower ahead of me. Yellow-jackets are assholes and run in gangs. It is a good day, relatively speaking, when you only get stung by one of them.

After popping into the house to down two Diphenhydramine (Benedryl), I dragged a hose and flopped the end of it down by the hole that the Yellow Jackets were buzzing around. Then I turned the hose on.

Everybody has their favorite method for eradicating ground-nesting bees. Mine is to drown them. I flood the hole for half an hour and then I back off on the rate of flow. I will turn it off completely in the morning. 

Plan B

B is for burning

I burned brush for two hours. My enthusiasm for pushing a lawn mower  or pulling weeds had evaporated.

The branches from the Honey Locust tree that have been drying for three weeks needed to go away. They burned but it was with all of the enthusiasm of a kid going to the dentist.

Two adult beverages were consumed while watching the fire and contemplating the wickedness in the universe.