The Easter

So Saturday.

Last Saturday I woke up, didn't take a shower, put on some gym shorts and a shirt not made of cotton, met up with some friends and did a 5-mile charity run. Slowly. In the rain.

We did a run in Broad Ripple for Joy's House. It started to rain about half an hour before the race, and the only upsetting thing for me was that I didn't have a hat. Because my hair gets just atrocious in the morning and when wet. Oh well. When everybody's wet and sweaty, I guess it doesn't matter.

A few things about this run.

It was kind of to see where I am in training for the Mini-Marathon (half Marathon) on 5/5 here in Indy. I'm sort of ok for that, I guess. And what I mean by that is that at the end of the five miles, I didn't feel like I had gotten my ass kicked by angry girl scouts or something.

Here are a few fun facts before I tell you how long it took.

I weigh nearly 235 lbs. No really, I do. I'm not entirely sure where it all is either (your stomach, dumbass) but hey, multiple scales are likely not conspiring against me. I am not a regular runner. I don't particularly like running. I got a new iPod Shuffle on the Friday before the run.

My finish time was somthing like 55 minutes. Not last! There were about 200 folks there. So yes, that would be like, 11-minute miles. Nothing spectacular, but again, I'm not a runner. And it was under an hour, so that's good, right?

This was also the longest I've ever run ...without "stopping." I say that because halfway through, I did take a few walking steps through a drink station. And it felt horrible. So I decided that running actually felt better and what the hey, might as well keep on keepin' on.

As the run started, pretty much everybody passed me, and I was wondering if I was all the way in the back. But I was not! I tried to make sure I settled into a slow methodical pace early on. I wanted to finish, and I wanted to run the whole thing, too. After the first mile, (ten minutes) everybody was at their pace and there wasn't much passing. I tried to keep my eye on a person or two in front of me and generally keep up with them. When I could see the finish line about 100 yards away, I sped up as much as I could just for the hell of it. It felt good.

This coming weekend, as part of the "training" series for the Mini, there's a 15K run. That's 10 miles. I'm shooting for under two hours.

Oh, and thank God the iPod showed up for the run. It performed brilliantly and staved off a good hour of boredom.

After that, we had breakfast in Broad Ripple. I went home, packed up some stuff, relaxed and then headed up to Chicago. It's a three-hour drive ... but the time change makes the way up only "two" hours. Ha ha.

I went to see a family friend (Nadeem) and he got tickets for Second City, which is a comedy improv show type thing. It's in a few cities and has great history to it -- many, many SNL people have gone through Second City in NYC, Chicago or wherever.

The show was like a really good SNL episode (and for those of you who know me, you know I watch -- and have watched -- a lot of SNL over the years.) The skits (which were actually part of a show) were about 90% good. Only one or two were so-so.

I'll try to find the name of the exact show, but it dealt with current political and national issues. My favorite skit was a father talking to his daughter about why she was punching people in the face at school. She said she had a list of enemies and had to perform a pre-emptive strike on them. Otherwise they would attack her first. Brilliant.

At the end of the show they did some actual improv stuff with suggestions and whatnot from the audience. That was fairly decent. I'd say they did well given some of the suggestions.