Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Tuesday's unexpected tempo run—and its faultiness.

I just wrote this entire blog on my phone, copied over it with a link from my clip board and realized there is no "command z" on an iPhone. This blog post just got a bit more ironic.

Start over:

Yesterday a deadline moved up on me by two weeks. I lost 10 working days on a rather intensive interior. If people didn't like this book I'd be freaking hard but since most people are responding positively to it I'm mildly annoyed. (Truth? I'm stressed, worried about its completion and thus freaking hard core.)

See I'd missed two days of work recently—stuff piled up. Yes taking two days off yields hilarious amounts of work. But my absence had also given me a lot of positive surprises. Behold! New finished books for the shelf:

See my Leggo Edgar Allen Poe? He's good friends with bobble-head Kenneth.

Notice most of these titles are of a Mr. Gaiman persuasion? The latest, UNNATURAL CREATURES is so cool I could scream. Granted I had little to do with this cover. You know you have a great illustrator/artist when you say "a hand-lettered cover with 'unnatural creatures' drawn in would be cool." With a talent like Iacapo Bruno you get this:

I wish I could eat all this talent.

All this rad-ness aside, I still have to figure out how to handle my current situation, what to do. I decided to combine the two things I love most to figure it out. Yes, let's run thru Central Park (Oh! I work next to a park, right! Let's go!) while thinking about book design. I left at 5:00 for a slow run—about 5 miles through some seriously awesome scenery, right? Wrong.

Somewhere around 105th st. I realized I was out of breath, struggling, and dizzy. Was I sick? Was I really that stressed? Was last night's TRX class really that hard? A quick glance and a few short maths later I realized I was flying thru this run. This easy run had turned tempo—and had been for a while. Now I was really in trouble. So I stopped, took a breath and a picture.

There is nothing here to note: nothing.

How to deal with these long work days and runs? I'm not so sure. But I know the two can not interfere with each other. I will finish this project and I will train properly for this marathon. I just need to slow down, take a breath and kill it.