6.25mi, 48:02 (7:41)
Mile loops of 7:37, 7:32, 7:36, 8:03, and 7:19. Felt really weird tonight, I guess I raged too hard on Halloween weekend...before I left I was thinking I'd be happy with a pace in the single digits, so I was definitely happy with not being too damn slow. I was all over the place on the paces, especially near the end. The last quarter of the fourth one was like 2:30, then on the last one I was going super slow at the beginning, then my feet were freezing and one of them felt like there was a giant rock in my shoe, and after I stopped to check it out and realized it was just feeling weird because it was frozen, I started bouncing along and was feeling fast and effortless but with crazy form...so at the half-mile mark I decided to do a fast quarter so I got up on my toes and was bouncing along again, sometimes with insanely long strides, sometimes with little fast strides, and came through at 76 seconds for it, then proceeded to go 2:15 for the last quarter.
I guess this would be a good time to talk about this weekend...
I ran Friday morning before class, then after class I was planning on going to Goodwill or wherever to get a costume, so I invited my friend Sam over since he needed to go too, but Zack got off work later than expected (like almost 8:00--and he had left the house before 7 that morning) and we ended up not having time to go. We had sort of planned to not really do anything Friday night since we were going to get up before 6 Friday morning for GameDay. GameDay is the ESPN show that runs for 2 hours before the Saturday college football games, and they pick the best game each week and broadcast live from that town. Since the games start at noon on the East coast, the broadcast goes from 7am to 9am on the West coast. A few hundred people had camped out in line to be the first ones in so they could be in the front row behind the people talking, and another few thousand showed up a bit before 7 so there was a huge crowd, a lot of them with big signs and stuff. It's a fun thing to be a part of--everybody cheers whenever one of the guys says something about our team, and boos when they say something about any rival of ours.
So Friday night we weren't going to do anything, but then Sam was thinking of going out, so we joined him, and went to the Beer Stein and then a bar, and got home a bit before 2. We slept for 4 hours then got up still a bit drunk (hung over?) and walked to GameDay. I had planned on getting a run in afterwards, maybe a little morning 10-miler, but when we got back we invited Sam to breakfast, and both Zack and I like to do it up right when we have guests, so we made a massive breakfast of pancakes, eggs, and turkey bacon. And not just any old pancakes, either. I had some Halloween candy around, so I tried making Butterfinger pancakes (not so good) and Reese's pancakes (pretty good!) in addition to some super-soft banana pancakes, some chocolate chip pancakes, and one plain pancake. After a breakfast like that, and only 4 hours of sleep the night before, we all needed naps, so we slept until about 1:00.
Then my roommate from last year and his fiancée got into town, down from Portland, and wanted to go out to lunch, so we went out with them (although I only had beer, no food, since I'd had so many pancakes). The food took so long to come that once lunch was over we only had time to swing by a couple houses for a few things we needed, and then my friends dropped us off at the game (actually a few blocks from it, since traffic was so crazy near the stadium).
Normally Oregon fans wear yellow, but since this was a Halloween night game we all wore black. I had a black hooded fleece thing, and to be a little blacker and a little SCARIER I also had a menacing black ski mask. We got to the game about 100 minutes before it started, but we were 2/3 of the way up in the student section. Not bad seats by any means, though.
Oregon's football stadium, Autzen, is known for being super loud. It actually holds the record for loudest college football game ever, when it topped out at 127.2 decibels two years ago against USC. This game was also against USC, and their freshman quarterback had said he wasn't scared of the loudness at all. This is, of course, the wrong thing to say, because we will just be louder and it will definitely affect you.
When the game started, Oregon was on defense, and when Oregon is on defense, Autzen yells. I yelled as loudly as I could every single defensive down of the entire game. The effectiveness of a loud stadium can be measured by how many false start violations the opposing team has. USC had six in the first half, which is a lot. So every time Oregon was on defense I yelled and clapped (my hands hurt after one quarter), and when Oregon was on offense I put my ski mask and hood on and was silent. My throat was hurting a bit by halftime, but I was able to keep yelling when the second half started up. Lucky for us, Oregon absolutely crushed USC, so the fourth quarter was relatively easy for the fans. The team actually scored more points than USC had given up in something like ten years, and was the first team to beat USC with their current coach by more than 7 points--we won by 27. My prediction before the game was UO 24, USC 10, but it ended up being almost exactly double that: UO 47, USC 20.
When the game ended, the fans rushed the field, and I was no exception. We ran around and jumped up and down in the crowd for a while before finally leaving the stadium.
Once we left, we met up with Sam's (extremely drunk) friend and a group of us walked home. My ex-roommate and his fiancée got to my place just as Zack and I did, and we hung out and waited for Sam et al to show up with beer so we could head to someone else's house. We waited forever and Sam never showed up, and after multiple calls I ended up having to run down to the store they were at a couple blocks away and pay for the beer because somehow none of the four of them were able. When we finally got back to my place, my Portland friends had to leave, so we said goodbye and the rest of us headed out to someone else's house. Since we had never had time to go get costumes, we had to throw stuff together, and Zack went as a lumberjack and I was I suppose a ninja or something--I just wore the hoodie and skimask I had worn to the game. With jeans.
The place we went wasn't like a huge party or anything, but there were a few people and we hung out and had beers and ordered DoughCo and left pretty late.
Sunday I woke up late feeling pretty crappy, and due to all my yelling the night before, could pretty much not talk. I spent the day doing homework and didn't ever have time to run, for the second day in a row.
Today I still can't talk, and I think I'm slightly sick in addition to that, but tomorrow I have the day off so I should be able to run a couple times and hopefully recover a bit.
I'm not even going to bother editing this post at all.