My running this month has gone downhill ... or is that uphill?

Just finished up with a run that barely covered two miles, but I was heaving and sweating like a ... well ... a guy who hasn't been running a whole lot lately and has been treating his stomach like a dumpster.

The challenge about running in my neighborhood is that the hills will slap you around and make you feel like you're running in a dream -- the dreams where you're trying to get away from the monster/kidnappers but your legs just won't go as fast as you want. Instead of doing the mileage I wanted, I cut it short and went in.

Excuse: I've got the hook-up that makes your iPod talk to your shoes and vice versa. While running a voice will actually tell you how many miles you've covered. For some reason this time it started calling off the distance in kilometers. Maybe it was having Olympic withdrawal.

On the settings I have it set to "miles," but it still rattled the distance off in kilometers. On one hand I kind of dug it because hearing I had completed 3 kilometers sounds longer than the mile-and-a-half (or thereabouts) it actually was. Still, that was all the reason I needed to stop the run .. and the fact that I hadn't done much running in the past week and was winded.

Another ready excuse is that I'm planning on starting back into my running (jogging or puttering might be a more apt word, but running sounds more athletic) schedule tomorrow and don't want to over-exert myself. Yet another is if I'm chugging along around the neighborhood in the morning before daylight, I can go shirtless and no one is awake at that ungodly hour to complain or laugh. Trash pickup guys and the newspaper delivery dude have had words with me though. It's all good. They chipped in for my very own bro.