I had a fabulous weekend! I went to a local artisan marketplace and shopped with friends, had a lazy pajama coloring session with the family, made lots of delicious meals from scratch, and got a nice workout in.
Mushroom tort from Kathy Patalsky’s blog – love her food!
Workout
I didn’t feel like running Sunday, so I started with a nice 10 minute indoor cycling session to warm up. Then, to split up the running, I decided to do 800 meter repeats on the treadmill with TRX rows in between. Having the indoor bike, treadmill, and TRX (equipment which we’ve slowly acquired over the past four years) makes our home workout space feel like a real gym. I love the feeling of going back and forth between the different items on my own little circuit to keep things from getting monotonous when working out indoors. I’ve never been able to motivate myself to go to an actual gym, but love the peacefulness and flexibility of working out at home when the kids are at preschool, sleeping, or otherwise occupied.
Winter running goal
15 miles per week. There, I said it. That was the only hard part, right?
It’s like orange juice with a zing but no sugar high. When I feel a sore throat coming on, I like to add the optional cayenne which has purported anti-septic properties as well as being anti-inflammatory. It soothes the back of the throat and gives this orange “smoothie” a nice kick. I often add 1/4 teaspoon of turmeric to the smoothie for its health components.
Even if you’re not into the ginger and cayenne, I love the technique of using a whole orange and ice to make a nice cold orange drink that hits the same sweet spot as orange juice, but without the same sugar crash because it still has the fiber of the whole orange. This could revitalize my weekend breakfasts; I love the taste of orange juice but not how I feel after I drink it!
Sort of wearing an obnoxious amount of “half marathon” gear… wasn’t intentional.
Had a lovely run this morning! Went out for 5, got lost on the college campus, ended up running 6.8. Awesome! (I mean that, actually.)
It feels SO GOOD to run that first “long” run after a half marathon. Every time I run a half marathon, part of me is secretly afraid I will never run further than a 3 mile run ever again. After all, it’s getting cold out there, and with no looming race to be in shape for, it’s easy to talk yourself into sitting at home with a cup of coffee.
And when you’re sitting at home with a cup of coffee, you don’t get to see beautiful views like these, and feel warm in the sunshine despite it being 34 degrees!
This last photo is a special place on a nearby trail where we’ve stopped to snap a photo at different times over the years. Here’s one of me with Will in April of 2011:
He’s changed some, don’t you think?
And so have I 🙂
Happy Running, and everything else that makes you who you are!
I was just thinking about the first 5k I ever ran with the double jogging stroller. I ran at 10:13 pace, so was towards the back of the pack, but certainly not last.
At about mile 2 I rounded a corner and went by a police officer and race volunteer, gave them a little wave and thank you, and kept going.
As I was lifting my hand to wave, the police officer looked at me and the stroller, looked back at the volunteer, and said “So, that’s probably it then?”
Not able to see around the corner, he assumed that the mother runner pushing two kids HAD to be the tail end of the race.
I came in 57th out of 101 people. That officer had to stand there JUST a bit longer.
Now, it’s totally possible that I was overhearing a snippet of conversation out of context. But I think he genuinely thought I had to be one of the last runners.
The thrill of this story isn’t that I was faster than the people behind me, it’s that I surprised him by what I was capable of. He didn’t know what pace I was running, he just assumed the kids would slow me down to match the runners at the end of the race, not in the middle.
It feels good to surprise someone with what you’re capable of.
I hope you have a happy memory of surprising yourself or someone else with what you’ve achieved through your running, and I’d love to hear about it in the comments below 🙂
Fall is here, and it’s beautiful! Have you noticed? I’m trying hard to take it all in.
Here’s something I did this morning that I highly recommend:
Take 5 or 10 minutes. Go outside. Look around. Observe quietly. Pay attention to the way the leaves on the trees are changing color. Look at the vibrant blue sky, and how gorgeously it contrasts with the bright orange and red leaves. Feel the slight crispness in the air, and notice how the brush of cold feels on your skin. Be present in this October day, this moment in your life. Think about the people in your life right now; how old they are, how old you are in this moment. Think what it might be like to come back to this moment from ten or twenty years in the future. Or even three months from the future, when the trees will be bare and snow will cover the ground. What would excite you about being in this moment, if you had just traveled here from January, or 2025?
Let’s Go Fly a Kite: Yesterday was an unseasonably warm day, and as I looked outside at the falling leaves I realized that October was slipping by us. Had I spent enough time doing the important things? I ignored the mess in the kitchen and spent an hour in the backyard swinging and kicking a ball around with the boys. Then we grabbed the kite and went down to the town green for an impromptu kite-flying excursion. It was beautiful, it was amazing, it was exactly what we should have been doing on that fall afternoon.
The dishes were still there when I got back, the legos and marble works still strewn across the living room. But both the boys and I had renewed energy from our time together outside, and Will helped me clean up every last toy and then played quietly while I finished washing dishes. The house was cleaner than it had been in days, and we were in great spirits. It was like we had created time, because we were working peacefully and efficiently and got so much more done after recharging ourselves.
And, since this is my running blog – here’s an update on my running!
My Running: I’m almost there! Sunday will be one week from the Chilly Half Marathon. I’ve been enjoying the scenery on the long runs, and the unpredictability of the weather (yes, it’s kind of fun to have the variety). One of my favorite runs recently was a long run in the early morning last weekend. I had a packed schedule, so the only way to get in the miles was to leave around 6:15 on Saturday morning. It was 30 degrees and still dark. It felt adventurous, epic, and a little crazy; which matches how running 11 miles should feel anyway. I ran and watched as dawn broke. I saw the clouds of early morning give way to breaking sunshine over a lake. I saw the bright orange of leaves being hit with a glint of early morning sun.
It was beautiful. It was a gift from running.
What has running done for you this week? What do you love about October? What excites you about your Halloween plans for tomorrow?
At Two Lights in Maine, another silver lining to going up for the Maine Half Marathon.
Mair was right. I found a silver lining to Sunday’s race… even though I didn’t run.
It’s hard to reverse a decision. I had decided to run, I was all in, I had accepted that it wouldn’t be a PR, I was ok with just running the 13.1 miles at whatever pace I could manage to prep my legs for the Chilly Half Marathon in November.
So I was pretty upset when it became clear in the middle of the night that my cold had taken a turn for the worse, and it was going to be all I could do to get out of bed and spectate, let alone run. Coughing, sinus pressure, congestion… I was downstairs several times between 2 and 3:30 a.m. raiding the Caiazzo medicine cabinets looking for sudafed and trying to get rid of enough congestion so I could go back to sleep.
Needless to say, when Greg’s alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. I told him I didn’t think I should run. He emphatically agreed, which is when I knew I really shouldn’t run.
How it felt: I should have felt relieved. After all, I no longer had to go battle 10-15 mile per hour head winds and 45 degree weather I wasn’t used to. I no longer had to tackle the challenging (and slightly long) course all while feeling under the weather and battling a cold for the second year in a row, knowing it’d be a mediocre race time. I should have felt relief, right?
I wasn’t even going to run this race originally! I signed up for it long after Greg did, because I was going to watch him run, and save up my training for Chilly. All I was doing was reverting back to the original plan. It shouldn’t have been such a big deal – up until about 6 weeks ago I wasn’t going to run anyway.
But I didn’t feel relief. I felt profound sadness.
I was supposed to be out there, struggling. I was supposed to be pushing through that headwind, digging deep to make it up those hills, laughing when my eyes watered going over the bridge with the cross-winds, wondering what the heck I was doing, feeling crazy and strong and epic and like I was part of something.
I felt anger. Why didn’t I make the decision to quit when I first felt sick, not at 3:45 a.m., 4 hours before the race, after I’d set out all of my running gear and posted my bib number on Facebook. Now I felt like a quitter, looked like a quitter, and suffered remorse because I felt no satisfaction or relief in exchange for quitting.
I almost cried: I was telling Katie (she’s family and a triathlete, so she gets it) why I wasn’t running, and I started to choke up. I was so upset not to be running.
My sadness is the silver lining: I didn’t realize it yesterday, but my sadness is actually the silver lining to dropping out of the race. Not only did I prevent myself from deteriorating into another drawn out case of bronchitis, I also learned something important.
I want to run half marathons.
I don’t feel relief when I’m unexpectedly spectating, I feel loss.
I saw someone walking at mile 10 when we went to pick Greg’s gloves up on the side of the road, and I even felt jealous of them because they were completing the distance. Their legs hurt. They FELT something. They’d endured. They were having the 13.1 experience, and afterwards, they’d have a story to tell. They were also wearing a green tutu. Clearly they had a story.
I realized then that I didn’t really care as much as I thought about accomplishing a pace goal. I do care, I will be sad if I don’t do well at Chilly, but I care just as much about being out there and engaging in the challenge. I would have given a lot just to be out there finishing even slower than last year, just to have the chance to run the course and feel alive in the peculiar way pushing your limits makes you feel.
It WAS great seeing Greg finish: Greg ran a great race, has a new PR in the half marathon, and his time is even more respectable because it’s a slightly long and rather challenging course. He came in 34th out of 1,765 people. It’s quite trippy to watch your husband finish in the top 2% of a half marathon. These are all people who run enough to make it 13.1 miles, and he’s coming in 34th out of seventeen hundred. THAT’S INSANE. A new goal on my bucket list is to get to the point where I can run just one mile at his half marathon pace. I’d better do it soon before he drops the pace target again.
So here I am – I have a renewed faith in my identity as a runner. To feel so upset made me realize that I do want this. I am doing this for myself, not just because Greg’s a runner too. This is who I am, this is what I do.
I am running this… and I would rather run slowly than not run at all, because I crave the struggle and the journey even when faced with uncertain results.
If you ever wake up the day after a race you didn’t run and feel like crying because your legs don’t hurt and you have no memory of suffering and surviving miles 9-12… you too will know that this is who you are. This is what you do.
