Last Weekend in Pictures

I just can't seem to get back into the groove of posting regularly. I don't even have a good reason, it's not like I'm incredibly busy or anything.

Last weekend I made the drive up to Boston to visit one of my friends from college. (side note: what's the deal with the traffic in Connecticut?) We had a great time walking, eating and drinking all over Boston on Saturday.

The Boston Marathon finish line before repainting

And on Sunday we went wine tasting and sightseeing in Newport, RI (which is where my marathon is later this year).

It was a really fun weekend! - nice to catch up in person and explore some new (to me) places at the same time.

Marathon Training Week 13

I was going to say I'm sorry for how late in the week I'm getting this posted, but since I've gotten lazy to the point of one post per week, I'm just going to roll with it.

We spent the long weekend at Tom's family's lake house up in Canada and just got home this afternoon. I wasn't sure I was actually going to get any of my runs in, but I somehow actually stayed motivated through the weekend.

Monday - Cross Training

I should really just re-name all of these as rest days.

Tuesday - 5 miles

I actually felt a little bit of speed on this run. The humidity was a little lower and I managed negative splits.

5.01 miles @ 9:33 pace

Look how big Scout is!

Wednesday - 10 miles

As good as Tuesday was, this was terrible. The humidity was back and I had super random achilles and quad pain. The longer I ran, the worse it hurt, so I decided it was better to cut my run short than to push it.

4.06 miles @ 10:40 pace

Thursday - 5 miles

I took it ridiculously easy, but made up for most of my missing miles from Wednesday.

10.01 miles @ 11:38 pace

Friday - Rest day

We spent most of the day dropping the dogs off and driving up to the lake house.

Saturday - 10 miles

I'm really proud of myself for  actually running while we were at the lake house. I felt much better than I did the rest of the week and had fun running in a different area. Plus it's a lot less hilly than around our house.

10.07 miles @ 10:23 pace

The best place to sit after a long run.

Sunday - 20 miles

I almost talked myself out of this run. I shortened it several times over in my mind, but once I was out the door, I just enjoyed the scenery and somehow managed to hit that 20 mile mark. One of my blisters from my last 20 miler was a little less healed than I thought it was and it started giving me a hard time around mile 16, but otherwise I felt as good as you can expect to feel after 20 miles.

20.11 miles @ 11:17 pace

Weekly Mileage - 49.26

Marathon Training Week 4

Umm, well...

In my defense, I haven't really been home much. I got home at 4am on Wednesday and played catch up on sleep in the afternoon. Thursday I actually made it out for a quick 3 miler and felt pretty good.

We drove for 3+ hours on Friday and then spent the afternoon/evening at a wedding.

On Saturday we drove up to the lake house (we were already halfway there) and even though I brought my running gear, I didn't run at all while we're there. We did get a stand up paddle board, which was a lot of fun to play around on!

We headed home on Monday and spent some time getting organized for the week. Tom's sister and brother-in-law stayed with us for the night and it was nice to get to visit with them for a bit.

Today was very busy because we got a puppy!

This is Scout:

He's about 12 weeks old.

Buddy isn't quite sure what to do with Scout, but they have successfully shared toys, played together a little bit, and napped quite close together.

Look at those big feet! We think he's going to end up being close to Buddy's size when he's full grown. He's already 25 pounds.

I'm going to be home (not traveling) for the foreseeable future, so I'm going to get back to my training plan this week.

Probably.

Marathon Training Week 3 (Sort of)

There's no point in breaking down what my training plan called for this week, because I didn't do any of it.

I flew to Oregon to see family I haven't seen in over two years and was much too busy visiting to worry about sneaking out for a few miles.

If it was later in my training cycle I would be more worried about missing miles, but I have a whole summer of training ahead of me. This week won't make a huge difference in the long run.

I came home to a fun surprise - Tom moved the bedroom into the new room! Well, actually he texted me to tell me when I got to the airport so I wasn't confused when I got home at 4 in the morning.

Now excuse me while I go sleep some more - turns out 1 1/2 hours isn't enough.

Marathon Training Week 2

I'm still here! I've been alternately really busy and relaxing, neither of which was really conducive to blogging.

We spent the long weekend up at the lake house with Tom's family for the 4th of July. The water in the lake was warmer than when we were up there in May, so we had a lot of fun tubing. Tom even convinced me to try kneeboarding - it's hard! It was fun once I actually made it up to my knees, but it took a few tries!

So here's a look at my second week of marathon training - it sort of veered off course...

Monday: Cross training. Check it out - I actually did Piyo! The amount of pain I was in is evidence that I really need to cross train more often.

Tuesday: 3 miles. Done and done. I ran around the neighborhood at a pretty leisurely 9:55 pace.

Wednesday: 6 miles. Ok, so here's where things got tricky. Wednesday was supposed to be 6 miles and Thursday was supposed to be 3, but we were leaving for the lake house on Thursday afternoon, so instead I ran 9.25 miles (10:05 pace) on Wednesday and took a rest day on Thursday. It was hot and hilly around the neighborhood, but I managed to run all the hills. I was also smart and carried water with me.

Thursday: 3 miles. Like I said, not so much with the running on Thursday. A lot of time in the car instead.

Friday: Rest day. We spent a lot of time out on the lake, tubing and just cruising and enjoying the sunshine.

Saturday: 6 mile pace run. Nuun  put on a virtual run for its ambassadors/team Nuun over the weekend, it lined up perfectly to help motivate me to run while we were in vacation mode. So on Saturday morning I headed out for a 10k on the hilly roads around the lake house. Why are there hills everywhere I go?

It was decently warm and disgustingly buggy (one flew in my mouth - not ok), but I kept telling myself it was supposed to be a race, so I managed to finish my 10k in 55:43, an 8:58 pace! I'm pretty happy with that.

Sunday: 6 miles. Yeah...that didn't happen. I wasn't on the ball enough to run before we left the lake house, and it was after 10pm by the time we got home. Oh well.

I tried this InstaBoost from my RunnerBox the other day. It's basically energy pop rocks. Buddy was not a fan of the sound.

He's so cute.

Are you training for anything right now?

Long Weekend Laziness

Oh hey! I hope you all had a good holiday weekend! Sorry for the major disappearing act, but we were out of town and I switched into total vacation mode.

We spent our weekend at Tom's family's lake house and had a nice, relaxing weekend. The weather was all over the place, but we had one good afternoon out on the jet boat. Tom likes driving super fast and doing crazy sharp turns/power slides - it takes me a little bit to get used to being on the boat, and then it's a lot of fun.

There's a spot on the lake with a rock that Tom likes to jump off of (he estimates it to be about 20 feet up, or a little less). It took a great deal of patience and insisting that I wouldn't die, but he convinced me to jump. The water was COLD, and that was with shortie wetsuits on (it didn't help that I'm not used to wetsuits and was pretty sure it was trying to suffocate me).

Most of the rest of the weekend was spent relaxing, eating, and visiting. It was excellent.

I did manage to convince myself to go for a run on Saturday, and took a very pretty (and very hilly) 5 mile run on the roads near the house. I don't feel too bad for slacking off a little since I didn't actually take any recovery time after my last race.

I'm back to business as usual starting tomorrow  - apparently my next race is in 18 days, so I should probably get a little more focused...