August 2010

If you follow a bold pace, you probably know I’m not a runner. But, I truly enjoy finding ways to help Monica with her running (mainly thru music). As Monica’s last post mentioned, I recently had surgery to give my brother a kidney (it all went very well, we are both recovering quickly), which afforded me a trip back to Seattle (my hometown).   It was great to catch up with family and good friends. As you may know, Seattle is known for excellent coffee (Starbucks, Seattle’s Best…both founded here), awesome microbrewery beer (Redhook, Pyramid…my favs), and a great music scene (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Modest Mouse, Presidents of the United States of America, The Sonics, etc). It’s also a very eco-conscious and healthy/outdoorsy city. So it’s a perfect place to run with music (for Monica) or just enjoy the music, beer and/or coffee (for me).

On my last day there, one of my friends found (via Bing…she works for Microsoft) a great place to have breakfast together. Easy Street Records and Cafe is located in West Seattle. It turned out to be an awesome find.

fyi for tech geeks only…you might be interested to know that we probably would not have found Easy Street if we searched on Google. She typed in “Best breakfast places in Seattle”. The first search item in Bing brought her to a top 10 list in Yelp that listed “Easy Street Records and Cafe” as #6. If you typed the same thing into Google you will also find a Yelp listing, but it lists “downtown” restaurants. Not sure why Google would insert “downtown” into the Yelp search, but Easy Street doesn’t show up. And that would have been a real shame because this place (forgive me for this) ROCKED! It was enough to make me change my computer to Bing as the default browser.

At the West Seattle Easy Street (there is another East Street in downtown Seattle, but not w/ a cafe), the cafe is located right inside the record store. They have a great selection of reasonably priced new and used CDs as well as vinyl LPs. The vibe is very indie music oriented w/ lots of tattooed, pierced, colored-hair wait staff, but very friendly and fun. The food had names like “Beck Omelet”, “Gang of Four” (4 tacos for lunch), “New Wave O’s Rancheros” and even “Born to Run” (a “good to go” bfast sandwich). Of course, the music is always playing w/ interesting bands and it’s a casual diner-type place. The coffee is up to Seattle standards w/ some comments on Yelp staying that the baristas here are the “best kept secrets in the city”. We all tried different coffee drinks and I’d have to agree. Even the bathrooms made me smile. Only in Seattle at a place like this would you find reflective, eco-conscious, inspirational graffiti w/ lines like “Be Yourself–those who mind don’t matter, those who matter don’t mind” and “What r you doing? Why r u doing this? Is it a good thing? What’s it’s impact? What’s next?”. Easy Street Cafe bills itself on the web as “the best little record store, coffee bar, and diner in West Seattle”…I don’t know how many record store/cafe’s there are, but I’ll start the nomination process for the best little record store, coffee bar, and diner in the US!
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Sometimes life gets in the way of racing.  We found out in November that my husband’s brother needed a kidney and I learned that giving one takes a long time.  So we went on with our busy lives while he was being tested and part of that was my training for the San Francisco Marathon in July.  There was no way of really knowing if I would get there, but I chose to train anyway ( having also signed up for the Chicago Marathon in October).  The transplant, which ended up being in Seattle the weekend of the race,  was very successful and truly an amazing thing.  My admiration for my husband (aka Bold Pace Music) and his brave generosity overflows.  Race interrupted for great cause, time to move on in another direction.

After consulting a few sources about adjusting my training schedule for a later marathon,  I decided to take a few weeks off with minimal running.  It was good advice.  I did discover the beautiful Burke-Gilman Trail that passes the front door of the University of Washington Medical Center on my morning walks to Starbucks (I walk for lattes too).  I shared the road on a few beautiful sunny 70 degree days with many runners and bikers.  Seattle is dense with healthy looking citizens.  I think the break mentally was more important than the physical rest.  Motivation is hard to keep up over an extended period of time training.  I am happy to have returned to the road, but it has not been a seamless transition.  We spend months working on our conditioning and it seems to take no time to lose it…I did an 18 mile long run this weekend and felt like I was crawling home.  There is some work to be done.  Today it was the track for mile repeats (why does the third mile always seem longer?)–ouch.

I was excited to hear that they changed the date of the Boston Marathon registration to October 18, 2010 which gives all those running an early marathon a chance to qualify for this year.  I thought I would miss that window so this will add fuel to the training fire.  Eight more weeks to fine tune the running…bring it on.

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