21 miles. My second run of 20+ miles during this training cycle. Dare I say I was -- excited?
Saturday: I originally planned to wake up with Ben
and ride in with him to work to utilize the trail right next to his building. However, I woke up about 10 minutes before our alarms were set to go off
and heard rain. If it had just been rain I might have been brave and gone out
anyways, but there was also thunder and lightening and I didn’t want to tango
with that combination. I went back to sleep and hoped that the weather would
clear up by the time I got up.
After two more wonderful hours of sleep I awoke and the
weather looked better. I was still a little weary since the forecast said 80% chance of rain, but I headed out anyways. I started out on my
favorite 10 mile loop around my neighborhood thinking that I would do it twice,
but didn’t get started till after 10:00am so I knew it might get too hot and/or rain
so my back up plan was to go to the gym to finish the second half.
Well – I ended up going to the gym for the second half, but
not cause of the rain. The HEAT. By the time I had run the 10.5
miles in the loop (the added .5 coming from the run to the gym) I was drenched
in sweat and wanted to run without my hydration pack weighing me down. I
headed to the gym and ran at a pace a little faster than what I was doing outside while watching the movie Bewitched. I’m not sure what my average pace was between the two settings,
but it was a little slower than my last 20 mile run, but still satisfactory.
I had planned to take a nice leisurely walk home, but as
soon as I walked outside there was a huge crack of thunder. Now I’m maybe a bit
of a baby when it comes to thunder and lighting. I blame it on the assembly
they made us attend in the 7th grade drilling into our head how lightening
is the number one killer of natural disasters. So
even though my legs were tired and my body was spent all it took was the sound
of thunder to scare me into running. I hated every second of it and wanted to
stop, but my plain old fear kept me going. It’s a good thing I started running
when I did because once I was a good 10th of a mile away it
started down pouring. Not “this is an uncomfortable drizzle” but rather “I
can’t even keep my eyes open and it took 5 second for my shoes to be soggy”
type of rain.
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| Rainy, not sweay. |
Ben got home around 3 and we decided to head to 4:45 movie
downtown. We hadn’t seen each other since Wednesday night, so we were anxious
for a date night. Before we left I went on a quick shopping trip. Mission: find
pants that fit. Those who know me well know that I generally buy my pants a
size or two big, because I don’t like feeling super constricted. The only
problem is when you lose a little weight they go from being comfortable big to
downright baggy.
I found pants and two shirts for 25 dollars. Not too bad of
a haul!
Ben and I ended up seeing Premium Rush, which we both really
enjoyed. It was an entertaining movie that wasn’t necessarily anything special,
but I’d watch it again. Next up was a trip to Chili’s. I know, so fancy. By the
time the movie was over those 20 miles were really catching up with me (I had
snuck in some candy and kettle corn to the movie and had a PB and J before we left). I annihilated the chips and salsa and my entree. I was still hungry
when we got home so I also went to my standby of things covered in peanut butter
and bowls of cereal while Ben and I watched the recently added to Netflix 4th
season of Parks and Rec from the beginning.
Sunday: I did not sleep great on Sunday night and despite
going to bed after midnight (ridiculously late for me) I was still up by 8.
However, I woke up with a surprising amount of energy and excitement for my
recovery run that morning. I took my time getting around to it though and
spent my morning watching TV and preparing my Sunday school lesson.
After about 2 hours of lazying around I did my 30-minute
Jillian Michaels video and headed out to do an easy 6 miles. I usually do my
recovery runs on the treadmill to keep myself from going too fast, but after a
week relegated to the treadmill after work I was itching to run outside. So
even though it was a bit warm I did my best to keep it slow and enjoy my run.
Soon after my run came church and teaching Sunday school.
Ben and I teach kids 12-15 and they are such good kids it actually makes it
hard. One time we were teaching them about peer pressure and I said:
“Have any of you even been invited to a big party?”
And showing their total innocence one girl said, “you mean a
birthday party?”
Ben was working all night, AGAIN, so I made myself a huge
tuna salad and planted myself on the couch for most of the night. When I got
bored I decided to go for a walk.
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| View of the Bountiful Temple on my walk. |
I ended up walking for about an hour and a
half. Wanna know what I thought about for most of the walk? What I wanted to eat
after the Chicago marathon. I kept going back and forth between pizza and make
your own sandwiches for an entrée and ice cream, cake, cookies and pie for
dessert…
I rounded out my night by making some chili and corn bread and watching Julie & Julia on tv.
I rounded out my night by making some chili and corn bread and watching Julie & Julia on tv.
Monday: Ben had to be to work by 10am and I wanted to do my
run on the trail next to his job so I was up and doing Jillian by 9 despite
another late and mostly sleepless night.
I had zero expectations for this 10 mile run. I had only
run this trail once before and so I was pretty unfamiliar with it. I knew it
was less hilly (although still had rolling hills) than my neighborhood route so
I went for it.
This turned out to be one of those runs that made me feel
like I am not crazy for having the goals that I do for this marathon. I did one
warm up mile that was around 9:10 and the rest were all sub-9. My last mile
came in at 8:20, which for me, is a fast last mile. That was in spite of the heat too! It was over 80 degrees by
the time I finished.
 |
| Sweaty, not rainy. |
I did a mile walk cool-down and headed to the store (I go to
the store a lot if you haven’t noticed). I still had about 6 hours to occupy
myself while Ben was at work. After watching some TV I was starting to feel
lazy so I decided to do a deep-clean of the apartment. However, I had a kitten that
wanted to be paid attention to that was following me around so I tried splitting my attention.
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| "Pay attention to me!" -- Veronica |
I was able to scrub down most of the apartment before picking Ben up from work at 6:00pm. I made chicken stir-fry for
dinner, we watched Breaking Bad, Ben’s parents stopped by, Ben and I ate some
brownies and ice cream and I went to bed and set my alarm for 5:30am (back to
morning workouts!)
All in all it was a really great long weekend. I was feeling slightly burned out at work and having the extra day off really revitalized me and by the end of the day I was actually looking forward to working the next morning!
But lets be honest -- I was looking forward to my run more :-).
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