Chugging

I ran for 34 minutes at a decent clip on Friday - nearly 3 miles though I lost count of the laps. Another woman, about my age/height/shape/speed came in, and was running too - she was a bit faster than me and was slowly lapping me but the funky hip-hop songs I put on my mp3 player helped motivate me to catch her after a while. (Black Eyed Peas are great to run to!) I'd been looking up people's lists of favorite running songs and illegally downloading them (playing htem for free on Rhapsody and capturing them with i-sound. The quality is poor - if I start doing anything else on the computer at the same time, the recording skips around. Someday maybe I'll get an ipod and use itunes, but free is good! (There are a lot of ther things I'd spend disposable dollars on first, like a nice new camera like tha fantastic Fuji I got to borrow for my daughter's ballet recital! Wow!) A lot of songs other people like to work out to are completely boring to me, as it turns out! Outkast is OK, Kanye West was kind of a yawn. I still need something else - suggestions anyone?

Anyway, I was feeling motivated - I'd lost a few more pounds, did a good hard session of Pilates and Elliptical training on Saturday, went skating and did weight training and stretching on Sunday (during the Oscars) and today rested. Tomorrow I'll run with Fred and his coach. But for some reason today I haven't been feeling as optimistic as I should - the scale number went up (premenstrual, or a child's magnet interfering with the scale, or whatever - I know I've been eating a bit more the last few days but not 2 pounds' worth!) and I know my happiness shouldn't depend on the number I see (which is indisputably lower than the one I've been seeing for months on end, just not as much lower as I want)... blah blah, it's not about the numbers on the scale except that it is, honestly. I'm trying to be honest about what I WANT, and I WANT to be thinner. That's a big part of my motivation for this whole project, honestly - to look better. Is that pathetic?