Give it a rest

So, I took the day off yesterday. Not just from running, but from the gym altogether. That's my first pure day off since January 6, so I think it was OK to take a break.

Kell and I enjoyed a nice Friday night out on the town, getting dinner, stopping by a book store and hauling off some bags of candy from Sugar Mountain mmmmmm. I went to bed with a belly ache and it was marvelous. It was one of those stomach aches that was solely from over-endulging, not because you ate anything bad.

But that's that. Today I'll be back at it again. The plan is to run 5 miles today and tomorrow to finish the week with another 24 miles in the books. I'm closing in on 300 miles for the winter. On Thursday night, I ran four miles in 29:30 and then took part in an activity I hadn't done since high school: volleyball.

Some time in the past two weeks, Kelly dragged me into the gym at our local rec center and tried to knock a volleyball around with me. I warned her I wasn't very good and, yeah, I wasn't very good. Kell played in high school and was a pretty good server/back-row player or defensive specialist, or whatever you call it.

So, she showed me a thing or two, and I figured since I'm leaving for six weeks soon, what harm could it do to take part in the wife's weekly volleyball game. We found out about it through friends and thought it'd be fun for Kell to play in. There's a good mix of men and women, who are a wide-range of ages and play at a small school gym outside of Toronto.

I went, fully expecting to be completely embarressingly terrible. And I was pretty bad when we first started. As the night went on, though, and I relearned some of the rules -- Kell wasn't aware that I wasn't aware of a few "basic" volleyball rules -- I improved. Apparently, you can only volley it three times on your side and there's this person called the "setter" in the front row who "sets" the ball on the second volley, if possible. Who knew?

I turned out to be much better in the front row than in the back. At first, those serving on the other side were targeting me -- at least I thought so -- but I learned to get low and bump (or, pass, as Kell says grown-ups refer to it) to the others. Pretty soon they weren't hitting it only at me.

A few people remarked at how impressed they were with how high I could jump. Ha! I said "That must be new" because my 5-foot-8 (on a good day) self has never been known for his hops. Perhaps all the running, combined with all the weight lost, has given me some new "springs," as one of the women described my newfound leaping ability. Bad news, though: I still can't dunk :(

That's my report for today. I have a whole lotta work to get done in the next few days -- much in preparation for Spring Training. So the plan today is to sit on the couch, knock out a few articles and hit the gym with Kell when she gets home from work. Stay tuned for more...