Running Ragged

I would love to be a daily blogger, but alas, that is not what you get with me. 😉  I’ve been quite busy the past five days!  What’s kept me really busy are the two favors I agreed to do this weekend. I will post about them in another post, but for the healthy side of my blog, that meant I had to make some accommodations to my training schedule.

The first favor was take some pictures for the family of one of DS#1’s teammates at 9am Saturday.  I do my long runs on Saturday mornings, and I usually like to start them around 7:30 or 8am, so that I can sleep in a little bit!  Because I had made this commitment, though, I knew that if I wanted to have any chance to rest and perhaps even enjoy my coffee for a few minutes after my run, I needed to be up at no later than 6:15am to get out there and running by about 6:40am.  Somehow, I managed to do just that.

It was actually a pretty good run, although it was darn cold.

Brrr! LOL!  I will say that being in the barn did block some of the wind. I worked it pretty hard and had what I thought was a pretty decent run for 5 miles on a cold Saturday morning.

After I finished, I went inside and got my coffee (cappuccino) set up to brew. For some strange reason I’m still not sure of, I pulled out the printed copy of my training program before I started my coffee.  I was probably just thinking to mentally solidify my awesomeness at keeping with my training program through four weeks.  Only, when I looked, I didn’t feel so awesome.

Damn it. Six miles?? What the heck?! So then I was faced with a quandary: do I say, “Screw it,” and skip the last mile, thereby allowing me an extra ten minutes to enjoy my coffee before I get ready, or do I throw my shoes back and bite the bullet by running the extra mile. If you know me, you know what my choice was.

Yep. I not only ran the extra mile, I even did it outside. In the freezing @ss cold!! Dude…my fingers were SO numb when I was done.  But I didn’t have time to warm them up with cappuccino because I had to be at the high school by 8:45am! I didn’t quite make it early like I had hoped, but I did get there with a few minutes to spare.

On my way to the school, I thought about the fact that I’d just run six miles, and how many activity points I’d earned.  It occurred to me that for the first time in a while, I didn’t have any special event planned where I needed to use my extra APs. During the drive, I idly wondered what I might choose to spend my extra points on.  When I arrived for this special photo shoot that included the young man’s parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and coaches, I discovered that the grandparents had generously brought coffee, donuts and bagels for everyone. And guess what kind of donuts they brought? 😀

In case you didn’t know, I adore chocolate-frosted yeast donuts and have been a slave to them ever since I was a kid.  I can even remember my high school boyfriend stopping by Dunkin Donuts to bring me a chocolate-frosted donut on the way to pick me up for a date on occasion, just because he knew how much I loved them. (And you wonder why I gained 15 pounds my senior year?)

After the photo shoot, I went out and treated myself to not one but two things! Both were, truly, long overdue.  The first was…

Yes, a brand-spanking new computer!! My old one has been dying a slow death over the last 5 or 6 months, and I finally had enough money to get it replaced. Windows 8 has been a new and interesting experience for me, and I’m still trying to get all my pictures and documents on it, but so far, I’m loving it. My old computer was a Dell, and the downside to Dells is that you often can’t see them before you buy them, and there were a lot of things about that one I didn’t like once I started using it.  (For instance, a poorly-partitioned hard drive and function keys that require TWO keystrokes—ARGH!!)  My new one is an ASUS, and it has a touch screen, which is kind of odd, but I suspect I’ll get used to it pretty quickly.

The second purchase I made was—new clothes!  If you know anything about me, you know I don’t like to buy clothes, but I have been getting really sick of my pants having extra fabric at the waist (yes, I know, what horrible problem to have :-P), so I splurged and bought myself four new pairs of pants, four shirts, and three sweaters.  I even went crazy and bought myself a pair of pants that wasn’t…gasp!…black, gray, or brown.

Red pants! Oh my gosh!  I hope my friend Kate from uptownblacktop.com sees this post, because I actually thought of her when I bought them. (She is so much more stylish than me!) They must look pretty good on me, because I had several people at work compliment me on them today!

Late Sunday morning, I had another photo shoot, which required us driving to someone’s home after church and Sunday school. That one will be mentioned in my other post, too, but suffice it to say I had a lot of fun.  I brought an apple and a banana along to tide me over until afterwards, when I had planned to take the boys to Subway (their favorite place). On the way home, however, I realized that DS#1 still needed to run 4 miles that day, according to his schedule.  I didn’t want him running on a full stomach, so I made him a deal: I told him if he could hold off eating until after his run, AND if he could run four miles without stopping to rest or walk, I would let him half a footlong sub at Subway. (He is always asking me to have a footlong, but I feel that’s way too much food for a ten-year-old!)

Well, as it turns out, he nailed it!  And enjoyed the fruits of his labors very much. 😉

I was so proud of him–those are GREAT splits for him! He was also very proud of himself…he kept telling me how happy he was that he’d knocked six whole minutes off his last four mile run. (Of course, that run was outside and not on the treadmill…and in the snow…but I didn’t belabor that point with him. 😉 )

All in all, it was a good weekend, and after my four-mile run on Monday, I hopped on the scale and discovered something surprising.

Holy below-goal readings, Batman!  I hit the 112s! Ha ha, okay, it was only by two-tenths of a pound, but still…what a shock!  I’m not going to get too excited by it, though, one way or the other.  I know my weight fluctuates ridiculously, so I’m pretty confident it’ll go up next week.  Because my weight is so fluctuating, I’ve determined that I’m only going to post my weigh-ins every two or maybe even four weeks, just because I don’t think I need to keep posting my big gains and losses every week. Suffice it to say that if I fall off the wagon, you’ll know long before I weigh myself. 😉

I was really hoping to have my other post ready to go tonight, but I just keep running out of time to get everything done…and tonight is no exception!  I’ll have it up soon, because I’m really excited about the pictures I took. 🙂

For now, thanks for reading!