Just Another October 4th

Happy National CB Radio Day!

Oh, right, it also happens to be my birthday. 😉 But, yeah, that is really a thing…President Carter actually made it official back in the late 70s, when CB radios were of course at their peak of popularity. I had forgotten that my birthday (10/4) was CB radio day until I heard it on the Sirius 70s station this morning. They’ve been highlighting it all day, and it has made me laugh out loud and brought back some good memories.

So, today, I turn 46, and although my birthday has been pretty low-key (no 10K to run on my birthday this year!), I am totally OK with that. I’m just happy I only have to deal with one sport today (football x 2) instead of two sports for two kids.

I’m a little behind my posting, so here’s a quick catch up:

JJ’s hockey team had a tournament right after my last post, way up in Fraser. (That’s about an hour from our house.) On Saturday morning, we had to leave the house at 6:45 AM in order to make it in time for our game. That didn’t mesh well with the fact that I had an 8-mile run on the schedule. That run would take me about an hour and a half, so that meant getting out on the road by 4:30am if I wanted to actually get it in before we left. So what do you think? Did I do the run or not? Hell yeah, I did that run!

It was definitely a tough one…even I’M not totally cohenrent at 4am. 😉 However, I was able to get back in time to get my husband and my kid out the door by 6:45, and we made it in time for the first game. Afterwards, the team went out for an early lunch, and I did something I rarely do:

That’s me, having a drink at 11 AM, long before my normal “no alcohol before 4 PM” rule kicks in. 😛 I figured that running 8 miles before 6 AM qualified me for an early drink. The rest of Saturday was pretty challenging, and while most of the remaining team families hung out in the parking lot, tailgating in between games, I went into Jason‘s truck and slept in the backseat. No easy feat, when you consider that it was 90° that day! 😮

I ended up eating pretty well on Saturday, mostly because I was so busy with the hockey tournament, so I really didn’t have much time to eat. Plus I was damn tired! Sunday wasn’t quite as good; I was still recovering from not getting enough sleep during the week, and I got lazy and ate more than I should. I didn’t want to weigh in on Monday, but since I had skipped the week before due to my canning weekend, I knew that I had to do it. And I was actually rather pleasantly surprised!

After two weeks, I had only gained about half a pound! That’s pretty darn good, when you consider how much food I ate during canning weekend.

Now onto last week, which was pretty much more of the same, minus the hockey tournament. I’m still doing football pictures every Thursday and Friday night.

I know it’s kind of silly, but I still almost have to pinch myself to remember that I really do get this view every Friday night. 🙂 I really do love it!

Between the kids’ sports schedules, doing pictures for the varsity football team, and my half marathon training, my sleep has been pretty limited these days. I’m averaging about 5 1/2 hours per night, which I know is a recipe for disaster. Last Saturday was our final double-digit run, when two of my running partners and I did 11 miles together.

We managed to get out on the road by 6 AM, and we even got a little hill work in. Since we are running the Detroit Free Press international race, which includes going over the Ambassador Bridge into Canada and then back through the tunnel to the United States, we need to do a little more than the flat lands of southeastern Michigan that constitutes our normal runs. We all hate it, lol!

I also did my last speed workout yesterday, and thank God for that…I have been dreading Tuesday mornings every week for 11 weeks! Although I did manage to accomplish all my speedwork goals over the course of the training program, I am so glad to have the last one done…they are hard! But at the same time, I always feel such a sense of accomplishment when I’m done. A week ago yesterday, I did four sets of hard (8:00-8:37 pace) five-minute intervals with three-minute recovery, and it was a sweltering 70° with a 69.3° dewpoint. It’s only a little bit of exaggeration when I say I thought I was going to die. 😛 But I did them, and I felt so damn proud of myself when I was done, I may or may not have fist-pumped the air and told myself that I was awesome. (In the middle of my deserted road in the dark at 6 AM, ha ha!)

So anyway, back to my catch-up: I weighed myself this week, and I was a tiny bit disappointed:

Again, about a half a pound gain, but the reality is, I got off pretty lucky last week, and I think my body may have been making up for all the biscuits and quesadillas and spaghetti with meatballs that I ate the week before. I’ve only gained a pound in the last three weeks, so that’s not the end of the world. I did weigh in at Weight Watchers for the end of September, and I was quite happy to be down 2 pounds, so there’s that, too!

So now, back to me getting another year older. 😛 Even though this birthday isn’t all that exciting (thanks to our busy schedules and my husband working tonight), I’m feeling pretty good. I look back at where I was six years ago, when I turned 40 (and a month before I joined WW for the LAST time), and even I’m astonished to realize that I am so much better off now than I was back then, healthwise and in many other ways as well.

Just yesterday, I was driving to get JJ from football around 7 PM, and I saw not one, not two, but three teenagers running separately down the road. I realized that they were cross-country runners practicing, and I had this crazy thought: I was kind of sad that I had never done cross-country in high school, because that would’ve been a great sport for me. I could have participated in a school sport, but still competed individually, and it wouldn’t have mattered if I was the fastest or the slowest, as long as I just got out there and did my part every week. And then I was like, “Wait…what?!“ 😛 Since when did I ever think that I should have run cross-country in high school?? To truly understand how crazy that thought is, you would have had to have known me in high school, when I was incredibly lazy and didn’t participate in a single school sport.

Regardless of my high school experience, I think I turned out just fine, and I’m excited to see where the next year takes me. 🙂  (I’m also excited to be almost done with half marathon training, ha ha!)

I that’s enough for one post, so for now I’ll just say 10/4, over and out. 😉

(I’m sorry, I HAD to!! :-P)

Thanks for reading!