Garmin back, but motivation not

My get up and go has got up and left. It always happens at this time of year:

1. Daylight savings has just taken away the 6:30 AM sunlight (although, it's back now. But it's been a month)
2. There are no races for me to 'scare myself into shape' with
3. The weather usually goes into a '1 day great, 4 days rain' pattern. After the previous 7 months of darkness and rain, this usually makes me want to curl up into a ball. 

After a very blah March, my motivation has been creeping back as the sun has started to rise earlier and earlier. Running without a headlamp is nice! And not having to layer up for 30-35 degree runs is nicer!

I have been getting out on some long(ish) runs, between 8-9 miles, where I'll warm up for 3 miles, run a couple miles hard, then a couple easy, then finish with a couple hard. My findings from the 'long, hard run' experiment:

1. running fast is hard, painful, uncomfortable.
2. running fast makes running slow much more enjoyable
3. in fact, what once felt fast feels very do-able right now.
4. too bad that my 'fast' (7:15 miles) is a lot of other people's 'slow' :) 

I'm going to keep up with the whole 'run as fast as I can' thing, just to see where it takes me. It's better (and seems more entertaining) than 'run slow for a marathon'. I think I'll start running short and fast and see how I an extend the distance -- at the very least this will be fodder for humorous tweets. The other thing  I was thinking about investigating is the whole plyometrics thing. I'm scared of hurting myself, but from what I've heard the P-90x plyometric program seems relatively safe, and it also looks fairly painful.

I've been trying to spend as much time as possible in the Hurt Locker, but honestly, I'm kind of a wuss about going there. I've been doing a whole lot of reading and I'm convinced that the more I can convince my body that being uncomfortable is not so bad, the faster I can go. Because I notice that on my last hill, I can move a lot faster than I can on the hill in the middle of the run. Mental? Definitely. My head has always been the most suspect part of my body, at least now I'm admitting it.

In other relieving news, my Garmin is back. Turned out the USB cable was crunked, a new one fixed all issues. I've started on my pet project of making a browser enabled run tracker, only to get foiled by a strange firefox issue. One day, when I dont have an assload of real work to get done, I'll figure that bug out.

The first race of the year is looking to be the Issaquah sprint triathlon, on June 5. It's mid April now, so its time to get swimming again. I haven't been swimming in so long that I'm basically starting from scratch. This is good! I get to work on bilateral breathing (again), maybe this time I'll get it down...I've actually been doing OK with the whole bilateral breathing thing since I started focusing on relaxing and gliding along on my weak side...the fistgloves, of course, are really helping me get my balance in the water while saving my shoulders.