Holy F, It’s Cold!

Are the rest of you in a deep-freeze? Because I sure am!

Saturday I got up around 7 o’clock and headed out for a 9-mile run. It was definitely nippy, but at least the winds weren’t bad, and the sun was out.  I took a rather circuitous route to get the full 9 miles in, which included a trek into a neighborhood near me that I haven’t actually visited before. It was one of those neighborhoods with the really big houses and even ponds!

I didn’t even know we had such neighborhoods out in the sticks. 😉 It was quite pretty actually. At least, it was until I took a wrong turn and ended up on a dead end lane. 😮 I wasted precious time and extra yards trying to figure out where the hell I was, and then, when I finally found the route back to the road, I nearly clotheslined myself on a barricade.

I was totally not looking where I was going, shame on me. I eventually made it back to the road, and continued running by the creek for a while.

So pretty–even in the cold!  I then headed home, and although my stops didn’t give me a great pace, it wasn’t too awful for nine miles.  Definitely an “easy” run pace, at least.

Later that day, I went to my friend Amy’s 40th birthday party.  Amy and I have been best friends since 1992, and we always have fun together, especially when she’s trying to get me to do crazy things for pictures.

I think I was supposed to be a gangster or something, but clearly that is one persona I can’t pull off. 😉 For her gift, I made her a collage of pictures from her lifetime, in a neat frame that looked like a window.

I’d like to say that I reclaimed it from an old barn, but the truth is, I found it at Target. 😉

I had actually expected to eat more at the party, which was why I chose to run 9 miles and also why I decided to have a very light lunch. But they had it at a pizza place, and I think my feelings on pizza are pretty well known by now*, so it was just a plain chicken salad for me.  Oh well, at least I had plenty of points left over for the birthday cake, modeled here by Amy!

Chocolate, my favorite!!

On Monday morning, I woke up to a dusting of snow. :/ I might have thought it pretty, had I not planned to do speed work. I tried to do it on the road, but the footing was too uncertain, so I just turned around and used the treadmill.

Blah. I swear I felt like I was running a lot harder then a 10-minute mile.

When I weighed myself later in the morning, at least it was good news, if not great news.

That’s a 1.6 pound loss from last week, which certainly sounds nice, but doesn’t make up for the 3.6 pounds I somehow gained last week. 🙁  The truth is, though, I haven’t been feeling all that skinny lately, so I guess I should just be happy with what I have!

Saturday, at the party, I had my picture taken with a friend (who shall remain nameless, ha ha).  As we prepared to take the picture, she made me move to her other side, joking that she wanted to be shown at an angle that made her look skinny. I laughed, and said, “What? I’m not allowed to angle for my skinniest side?”  The photographer, who was also a longtime friend and who knew me both 90 pounds (14 years) and 40 pounds (3 years) ago, gave me a censorious look from behind the camera lens and offered a rather sarcastic, “Really, Steph?”  When she said it, I realized that, for all that I’m focused on losing 10 pounds to get back to goal weight, the truth is that this is the first time in my life when I probably don’t have a “fat side” for pictures. 😛

That’s not the only part of my life that has changed in recent years, though. This morning when I woke up, it was 12° outside, and the winds were in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 miles per hour.

(Don’t be fooled by that average wind speed–it was 20 mph gusting to 30 mph not long after that picture was taken.)  And yet, despite the Arctic chill and the gale force winds, I still bundled up at 5:15 a.m. and headed out for a 4 mile run. Hard core!!! 😉

Thanks for reading!

*Side Note: I am always amazed at how astonished people are when I don’t eat pizza.