Crunch Time and For the Love of Crunches... Tuesday, October 26

With the crunch date of my half marathon quickly catching up to me, the pressure to get out and put some mileage on my Adidas runners is getting up there. The doctor advised me to take it easy with boxing for a week but he didn’t say running was totally out of the question. So I’ve decided to take this week off of boxing and rack up my running time.

Today I ran 17km. It took me one hour and thirty-five minutes.

At an estimated 6 minutes per kilometer, today’s run left me nothing short of frustrated and annoyed. I can do 7kms in 35 minutes, meaning I can shave off a whole minute with a shorter run. Of course, shorter runs are easier but my frustration lies in the fact that my goal is to finish 21kms under the two hour mark and at 6 minutes per kilometer, my estimated finish time is two hours and ten minutes. Ten minutes means the difference between scoring a sweet cash bonus from one of my sponsors or not scoring anything beyond sore legs and a long trip home from Seoul.

Ending up meeting up with Cheeto Girl and Mouse Doctor tonight for coffee and some much-needed, or so she claims is much-needed, diet advice Cheeto Girl’s been bugging me to give her for quite some time now. I think she’s adorable and shouldn’t be so worried about her body and I told her this too but then she hit me with a totally unexpected question.

“Would you want my body?” she asked.

“I’m into men, thanks” was my best attempt at avoiding that awkward conversation.

As for whether or not I’d want her body, as in switch bodies with her, no, I wouldn’t want to. I say no not because I’m this heartless beast of a woman but because what in my mind is the so-called perfect body (if I even dare to say there’s such a thing) is so far different than what others envision as being. Among my wide range of female friends, I’ve yet to only meet one person with the body I think is worth envy-- Anna. My friend Anna is a personal trainer/ female bodybuilder back in Toronto and she use to be one of my workout buddies at my gym. She stands in at only about 5ft2” but rocks some killer shoulders, sports some mad buns of steel, and has abs that aren’t too overpowering for a woman but that clearly reap the signs of pure dedication, hard training, and crazy-clean eating.

What is beautiful -- physical beauty that is -- is a good question but I’ve learned that beauty isn’t universal like I had always assumed it would be. While very few Korean men find my toned arms beautiful, it’s easy for me to attract the attention of Western men with these very same eye-brow-frowning arms. I’ve always regarded the natural Korean women to have a certain exotic beauty to them. They host a beauty I can admire but not a beauty I’d ever want for myself.

Wow… look at how far I rambled on and away from the initial subject… hahaha.

QUESTION OF THE DAY...
What beauty does your eye behold.

QUOTE OF THE DAY...
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
-- Author Unknown