No power leads to unexpected power

Note to Sports Authority: sale items are supposed to cost less

Today's run (street): 3.2 miles

I worked from home this morning which allowed me to sleep in a little later. Sort of. At around 4:00 AM our house alarm started bleeping, indicating a loss of battery power. I noticed that the digital clocks had no display and that we were having a power outage. I went back to sleep for an hour, but when I got up for good, I was suffering a bad headache. The power had come back on, so I had a couple of strong cups of coffee and headed out for a neighborhood run .

The humidity was low at 6:30 and the temperatures were in the 60's, so my run was pleasant. I started slowly because my headache was sapping some energy. I picked up the pace and covered a little more than 5K. I was moving steadily but it didn't feel especially fast. I lamented the fact that I hardly ever manage paces faster than mid-9:00 these days and I expected today's to be even slower.

I finished my run and was surprised to see that I almost hit 9:00 overall. It may be that I'd had about an hour between getting up and running or that the weather helped me. Probably a little of both. Either way it was nice to break out of my normal metric and show some better performance.

I had much to do between 11:00 and 5:00 and, throughout the day, I had periods where my headache made me want to lie down and take a nap. Ibuprofen helped a little but, once again, it was Sudafed that did the trick. Pseudoephedrine is wonderful thing. I take it sparingly and I'm always happy when I do.

At one point this afternoon, we stopped into Sports Authority to get my son a new pair of water shoes. I'm very disappointed in their decision to drop brands in favor expanding their floor space for more Nike and Under Armor clothing. I guess people like that, but I don't. My son and I were amused to see this great deal on Adidas running shoes in the kid's section (above). I think their marketing people need to rethink both their merchandise lines and their pricing