Summer Runnin’ And Other Things

You know it’s hard to keep a Suzy Sunshine down, and I’m nothing if not a Suzy Sunshine. 😉  I’m still bummed about being 12 pounds over my goal 🙁 but I’m trying not to let it ruin my life by keeping it in perspective.

Case in point:  on Wednesday, we had early morning thunderstorms blow through the city where I work, and when I arrived, I discovered a surprisingly deserted parking lot at 8:15am.  Turns out that our entire building was without power!  You’d think that would be a license to turn around and head back home (to work on my laptop of course), but no…seems that our company was the only one in the building that had put up the big bucks to have a generator installed.  (They can’t splurge to upgrade us from Lotus Notes to Outloook, but whatever…)  Of course, we are a pretty big, national company, so I can understand why they wanted uninterrupted operations, but there was just one tiny issue: the generator doesn’t power the building’s AC.  :/  So we all got to sit in a nice, steamy office building and work. They brought out coolers full of bottled water (I prefer my water on ice, so I was at least happy that the ice and water machine was on), but by 1pm, it was getting pretty miserable.  At that point, our chief marketing officer announced that everyone could go home if they wanted, but since I had a meeting at 3pm that was kind of important, I stayed.  (The 8-month pregnant girl did go home, bless her heart for staying that long!!)

So what does all this have to do with me being positive about my current weight situation?  Well, I’ll tell you:  after a day of sitting in the heat and humidity of my office, I finally had to take my rings off at 1:30pm.  You see, I am a person whose body tends to hold onto water in the summer heat and humidity.  Quite a bit, actually.  My wedding and anniversary rings are actually quite loose on my hand in winter.  In fact, I’ve had many occasions where my ring has flown across the room at work when I’ve been involved in an animated discussion, which always causes my coworkers to insist that I get my rings resized.  I have to explain to them in the summer my rings fit almost normally.  It’s been that way all my life, and it’s why I had no choice but to get my rings resized when I was over 200 pounds–I couldn’t wear them in the summer at all when they were sized to my pre-200 self.   Unfortunately, now they’re really big, but I can’t bring myself to have them sized down because of things like Wednesday’s lack of AC issue.

It was when I took my rings off that I had an “a-ha” moment:  it’s summer!  And my rings are fitting fine–which means I’m retaining water.  Twelve pounds worth of water? No.  But certainly a few pounds, right?  This is my second summer of being at maintenance (I hit “maintenance” in April 2012, but at that point, I had just started running, so I lost more weight over that summer).  I gained weight last summer, and then, by January 2014, I was back to 113.  So, although I know I do need to lose some weight, I don’t think that I’ve really gained 12 pounds.  So, while I’m not going to go eat everything in sight, I’m not going to be quite so concerned as I was.

So I mentioned in my last post that my half-marathon training schedule got all off-track because of my sister’s surgery. (She’s doing better, thank you!) I ran on Monday afternoon, but my alarm didn’t go off on Tuesday morning, so I missed that run, and I couldn’t get it in that afternoon because of JJ’s baseball game.  Did I mention JJ is the lead-off batter and is pretty freakin’ awesome at machine-pitch baseball? 😉  He has only had two instances in 4 games where he hasn’t gotten a base hit, and on Tuesday, he even tagged out a runner at first base. 🙂  Here he is at first base.   Later, he had yet another base hit, which eventually scored the tying run against a tough team. (They lost, but it was their first loss of the season so that’s okay.)

When I got home from work on Wednesday, I knew I needed to get in a 3-mile run, but I was up against two issues: 1) My husband was leaving for work in less than an hour, and 2) more thunderstorms were coming.  You know I love me some weather, so here’s a shot of the storms from my weather app.

God, I love that stuff. 😉  And here are some pictures of the storm I passed through on the way home, taken after I drove past it. Because I love storm pictures!!

Okay, okay, back to running.  As it turns out, I was able to meet my first goal (get home before my husband left) but not the second (beat the storms).  I got soaked.  We ended up getting the tail end of the storm, and the lightning was, thankfully, pretty far away, but it was a bit nerve-wracking, nonetheless.  But on the bright side, because I was busting my ass to get home, guess what?

That’s my fastest pace for that distance!!  If I had been running a 5k, I would’ve totally PR’d! 🙂  But I was definitely soaked.

I jumped in the pool afterward because I was so hot, but that’s not pool-hair, that’s storm-hair, lol!  Because I feel the need to show that my hair does not always look like that, here’s a selfie I took to show my sister how much I love her suggestion of using hair-oil.

Forgive the self-indulgence, but if you had any idea how much I have struggled with my curly, frizzy hair every summer before this, you would celebrate with me, too. 😉

This weekend is strawberry-jam canning weekend, so I plan to be busy, busy, busy.  There may or may not be another strawberry shortcake in my future, but I’ll probably try to lighten it up a bit after last week’s calorie-laden version for my mother-in-law.  😉  I also have a 7-mile run scheduled for Saturday, which I’ll do after I get my strawberries at the farmer’s market at 7am, so hopefully that’ll help. 🙂  And, let me make the exciting announcement that my jam will include a few (just a few) strawberries from my own garden!!

That’s a picture of our first strawberries, after years of trying to grow them…which the kids and I have already eaten. 😉  We have more though, which I’ll be using this weekend.

Thanks for reading–I’ll see you next week!

PS:  Please note that I thought I posted this last night, but then I looked this evening and realized I forgot to hit publish, lol! 😀