work hard, play hard

I am so physically tired right now, and it feels marvelous.  It's been a long time since I've trained for a big race (nearly a year since my last marathon - jeez!), not that I'm doing that right now, but I did go for a really nice, relaxing 10 mile run down and around Lake Merritt yesterday.  It'd been so long since I did a decently long run, and I kind of just wanted to make sure I could still do it.  Plus, it's so meditative just letting your mind wander while you scoot around town, and it's really fun to cover so much ground in a relatively short amount of time.

So yesterday, I woke up, drank some tea and had a little snack, and headed down to the lake, in downtown Oakland.  I did one lap around, and the sun was shining and the sky was blue, and they're finally almost done working on the new pedestrian path and bridge they've been building for the past several years.  It looks really nice, and you can go all the way around the lake on the same path now, without having to switch around and dodge orange construction cones and all that.

I probably ran for something like an hour and a half, felt totally comfortable and good (I remembered to put my Body Glide on before I left!), and was even able to pick it up on the last stretch, finishing in a sprint of glory at the corner of Grand Avenue and Lakeside Drive.  Then I walked over to Whole Foods and treated myself to a cherry chocolate cashew bar and a yummy latte as I walked and cooled down for a bit, hopped on BART, and was back at my door within two hours of when I left.  It was a really, really nice morning, and I slept like a rock last night.

Today, we had an excellent frisbee game.  There were only 5 of us who showed up, due to various people being out of town, but there was a huge group of barbecuin' frisbee playin' hipsters already hanging out at our park.  These guys were SO East Bay, it was really funny.  They all had tattoos and neon short shorts and generally looked like they just stepped out of 1982 (the guy with the sweatband and mutton chops, in particular).  And a bunch of their friends were just hanging out, drinking beer, having a picnic and playing weird 80s hipster music (plus plenty of the Black Keys, at least).  They could have been jerks, like "we're too cool for you" types, but it turned out they were really friendly and totally happy to have us play with them, and they learned all of our names and actually included us in the game.  (Which is much more than I can say for the last frisbee group we ran into - they "let" us "play" with them, but they never actually threw it to us, and I really didn't have a good time that time.)

So it was very fun, and we played for almost two hours, and now I'm very pleasantly exhausted.  I'm going over to some friends' place to play test a board game in a few minutes, despite the fact that I'm nearly ready to fall asleep, but I guess it's probably not a good idea to go to bed at 7:00, and I'm sure I'll have a good time, anyway.

What a nice, restful-but-exhausting weekend!  And now I'm feeling ready to tackle the week.  Work hard, play hard, I guess!