What happens when I’m in the running zone and someone disturbs me? Regardless of whether it’s a complete stranger or my partner of several years, the result is often flailing, screams, and a wild defense mechanism.

5ks suck for one reason: they hurt. If you’re intent on doing a 5k as a fun run, that’s fine, 3.1 miles is a fine distance for a walk or a jog or a combination of the two. But if your coach wants you to “race” the 5k, you’re essentially tasked with sprinting the entire distance and are a half-burp away from horking up one or both lungs at any given moment.

The gap in my blogging can be attributed to the fact that I got a new job that is making me roughly 1,000% happier than my last one. I’ve been a bit busy getting settled into the new gig but it’s been a rewarding, exciting experience thus far. My coworkers are fun, my bosses provide great guidance, and I’ve been given a lot more responsibility. The job has a couple of notable perks, too: The CEO has completed several Ironman races (dude has an endless pool in his garage for training. for crissakes) and thus understands my dumb-ass hobby. The executive team is very encouraging of fitness, meaning I can come in a bit later if I’ve worked out in the morning, take a mid-afternoon break to run, or leave early if I’m meeting my team for a workout. This is great news for Moobecca as I am currently trying to get back on the training bandwagon, having signed up for a mid-September marathon in hopes of posting a respectable run time as well as shedding some of this flab that has suctioned itself onto my ass.  THE OFFICE IS DOG-FRIENDLY OMG YESSSSSSSSSSS I love dogs to the point of rescuing a milky-eyed derp dog during a hill repeat workout. Every time one of the office dogs strolls by, I am incapable of resisting the urge to scratch behind their ears and pet them for about four straight minutes. Since my grinch boyfriend won’t let me get a dog of my own, I’ve resorted to living vicariously through Skipper and Madison, the two pooches who come to work on a regular basis. Speaking of Skipper, this is him: He’s the CEO’s dog. Oftentimes Skipper looks very forlorn and sad, as if he just spent 10 hours listening to “Cat’s in the Cradle” on repeat. I always try to give him some good scratches to coax a smile out of him, but he is like an emo goth teenager trapped in a dog’s body. My boss, Brendan, casually mentioned one day that he took Skipper for a run around Lake Union. I perked up and said, “So he’s a running dog?” and Brendan said, “Oh yeah, he loves to run. You can take him sometime if you want!” And that was when my job transitioned from being “pretty awesome” to “supremely awesome.” You bet your balls I was gonna take Skipper for a run. On Monday, when I realized Skipper was at the office, I drove home and grabbed some exercise gear so I could take him for a run. He was lazing about all day but when I entered the room decked out in run shorts and a tank top, he bolted up and ran over to my feet, wagging his tail with a level of excitement I had never seen from him. I was so pumped. LET’S DO THIS, DOG. (Random aside: that previous declaration highlights the importance of comma placement in sentences.) As I was making my final pre-dog-run preparations, I asked one of my coworkers who’s also Brendan’s nephew about the one running-with-a-dog wild card: pooping. Me: “Should I bring a bag or something in case he poops?” Conor: “Nah, he probably won’t…weeeeell, actually, you should bring one, yeah. Just in case.” Me: “How many bags should I bring? He’s not going to be like a Play-Doh Fun Factory of poop, right?” Conor: “I would think one is enough, I dunno.” I brought two since I wasn’t innately familiar with the inner workings of Skipper’s butthole. We left the office and I proceeded to trot up the street. I was a little nervous since I had...

I’m writing this post from hot, humid, and sunny (well, not right now — it’s pouring rain) St. Croix, nursing a mild sunburn and a round belly (don’t worry, it’s just the food baby) on the eve of Ironman St. Croix 70.3. I had grand plans to run a marathon before kicking off my triathlon season by tackling the Beast, but the marathon never happened and neither will the race tomorrow (for me, anyway). Truthfully, the months after Ironman Canada have been tough for me mentally as well as physically. After my crashtacular finish, I took some extra time to recover and focus on work. Unfortunately, that focus made me realize how unhappy I was at my new job, and that realization caused a lot of stress and headaches through fall and winter. I’ve noticed this in past seasons: my happiness levels in my personal life greatly affect my success in training and races. Whenever there’s a big imbalance, my motivation suffers and my training swiftly circles down the shitter. So this past fall and winter have been somewhat difficult for me as I struggled to keep it together professionally and drove Jason crazy with typical Quarter Life Crisis freak out laments: Me: “All of our friends our age have ‘grown up’ but us! We should be grownups!” Jason: “What the hell does that mean?” Me: “I don’t know, we should travel more! Or buy a house! We should get married soon! When should we have kids?!” Jason: “So, to be clear, you think we should buy a house but still travel the world, but we should get married first and crap out a few kids? Before the house and travel stuff or after?” Me: “I DON’T KNOWWWW HOW DO GROWN UPS DO THIS?! I need a better job! One that makes me happy! Should I open a Roth-IRA? What the hell is a Roth-IRA? I need to train for a marathon! Everyone on our team is getting faster and having an awesome season and I’m getting fatter and slower by the day! Can we get a dog? I really want a dog! I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M SAYINNNGGGGGG!!!!” I was depressed. I isolated myself from my friends and training buddies because I wasn’t in a good mental place and because my heart wasn’t into exercising or being social. While Jason has been enjoying trail racing and is successfully training for an upcoming 50 mile ultramarathon, I was drowning in despair, ignoring workouts and replacing anything remotely active with eating and sleeping. It got bad enough to the point where Jason and I discussed whether I should seek out professional help and talk to a therapist about some of the things I had been struggling with lately. We both agreed that something needed to change — I had not been myself for several months, and every aspect of my life was being negatively affected. Jason missed his stubborn yet goofy and fun girlfriend, and I missed me, too. But much like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, I endured a mile of shit and darkness and finally emerged into the light. I found a new job, which I’ll officially start on the 15th, and I was able to head into my vacation in St. Croix less stressed out and feeling optimistic and excited for the first time in months. My new gig brings me back to my startup roots, an environment I really enjoy and thrive in, and has me working with smart, passionate people. Plus, one of my bosses has done several Ironman races, so he understands my kooky hobby enough not to raise an eyebrow when I...

I was at work on Monday sneak-watching a live feed of the Boston Marathon as the men’s leaders, a trio of Africans, battled against each other to be the first to cross the finish line and claim victory. For so long, qualifying for the Boston Marathon has felt like a pipe dream, a milestone I would be thrilled to hit but has always felt so far out of reach. When I first started running with Jason along the Burke-Gilman Trail, I would trot along at a 12:00/mile pace while he kept doubling back to me with a barely-concealed look of annoyance on his face. My first marathon was a 4:35, and my second marathon wasn’t much better (in fact, my off-the-bike marathons at both Ironmans I’ve raced have been close to my standalone marathon times). And then my BFG, who has always been a strong runner despite his height and his size, told me he was going to train for the Portland Marathon and try to qualify for Boston. He had run a handful of marathons, each time improving from the last, but for his age group he’d have to qualify with a 3:05 or faster. Jason, who’s always been a more dedicated and more focused athlete than me, hit all his workouts, dropped some weight, and showed up to the start line on a cool, sunny Portland morning looking slim and fit and ready to run his ass off for 26.2 miles. He crossed the finish line in 2:57, earning not only his spot at Boston but a much-admired place in the “Sub-3 Hour Marathon” club. I was inspired. Jason had just shed 22 minutes off his previous best marathon time. He encouraged me to try to qualify too, that I could get there with a little bit of dedication and perseverance. He even promised to not register for the 2013 Boston Marathon and wait until the 2014 signup opened up so we could register together if I were to qualify. So I made my 2013 season goal to run a marathon and hopefully be fast enough and in great enough shape to stamp my ticket to Boston. My training, however, has been frustratingly intermittent. I’ve been depressed. Stressed. Lazy. Gluttonous. Unfocused. I’ve threatened to sign up for three different marathons and bailed each time, never feeling quite “ready” to commit to a specific race. So my goal of running a BQ marathon, or even a PR marathon, has slowly been slipping through my fingers. I thought to myself, “Well, maybe another year. There’s always another year. 2014 won’t be so special.” And then, later that Monday morning, my Twitter feed lit up with news. Scary news. Terrible news. Heartbreaking news. There were two explosions near the finish line at the Boston Marathon. People were hurt. Limbs were lost. Deaths were reported. I sat at my desk, dumbfounded. I IM’d Jason, who I had been chatting with about the men’s finish earlier that morning. He responded with, “What? Are you serious?” As cruel a joke as that would have been, I wish I weren’t. I left work feeling sick, distraught, concerned. Wondering, as I always wonder during large-scale tragedies such as this one, what kind of human being would do something like this to his fellow man. My heart aching for the runners and spectators who were injured, for the family members who lost a loved one, for the victims who were probably runners themselves, now faced with a future where their favorite hobby will forever be altered due to injuries or amputations or psychological damage. But what saddened (and angered) me most of all was this comment...

You know what’s more embarrassing than being kicked out of a bar for being fall-down drunk? Being kicked out of a bar for being sober but clumsy as shit. Last night I pratfalled my way to infamy at Von Trapp’s, a new German bar that recently opened in my neighborhood. I would have actually preferred to be as sloppily drunk as the staff thought I was — at least then I would have at best a fuzzy recollection of what happened. Unfortunately, I was stone cold sober and therefore will carry this facepalmy memory with me for roughly the next seven decades. After work, I met some industry colleagues at a bar in Pioneer Square for a happy hour beer (one pint of Blue Moon at about 5:30 or 6:00 pm). From there we headed over to Capitol Hill for our dinner reservation at Barrio, a trendy Mexican restaurant. I arrived at 7:30 and nursed a somewhat unpleasant-tasting margarita, throwing in the towel about 3/4th of the way in because somehow the drink managed to become both cloyingly sweet and butt-puckeringly bitter. Content to stick with water, I then focused on unhinging my jaw and inhaling a tostata appetizer, queso fundido, superhuman quantities of guacamole and salsa, and a shredded pork taco platter. The rest of the table at this point was at a ratio of at least four drinks to my 1.75, but since everything had been spread out over the course of four hours, nobody was wasted or hammered, least of all me. When dinner concluded, the group wanted to head to Von Trapp’s down the street and meet some of their coworkers there for a couple beers. Since my food baby felt stronger and healthier than ever, I had no desire whatsoever to add another drink to the Mexican fiesta cha cha-ing in my belly, but I was curious to check out the new bar since I’d read and heard a lot of hype about the place. I tagged along, figuring I’d sneak a quick peek before calling it a night and going home. The first thing I noticed about Von Trapp’s is that it is friggin’ huge. Like supermarket huge. It was also packed to the brim, extremely loud, and uncomfortably warm. We made our way to the bar and found the group of coworkers knocking back some beers. Someone offered to buy me a cold one but I politely declined, patting my food baby and saying I had no room for anything else. I had a quick chat with one of the guys from dinner before excusing myself to find the bathroom…AND HERE’S WHEN MY EVENING TURNED INTO THE MOST CLICHE SITCOM EVER. Since this place was so gigantic I’d have better luck stumbling into Switzerland and belting out “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” than finding the bathrooms, I asked the hostess (or waitress, or whatever) to point me in the right direction. She gave me instructions but because the place was dim and I was feeling disoriented from the combination of the noise, feeling overheated, and my Mexican food baby, I ended up walking to a section of tables to the right of the bathrooms instead. Realizing my error, I turned around, tripped, and fell. I think there may have been a ramp or something, which led to this equation: Sloped floor + booties with a small heel + my complete lack of any semblance of grace or balance = Becca fall down, go boom I sat in a heap, feeling embarrassed, when the same hostess or waitress noticed me and asked if I was okay. I sprang up and forced out an overly chipper, “YeahIjusttrippedsorry,” then...