another week closer

5.13.08

3 miles (no walking can be a given for all short runs) + workout

5.14.08

i was SUPPOSED to run 3 miles on this day, but an upset stomach prevented that! i would be 3 miles behind in my training, but because of the 1.22 extra i ran on last week's long run i am only 1.78 miles behind. (haha) now i just need to figure out where i'm going to squeeze in that extra distance!

5.15.08

3 miles + workout

5.17.08

7 miles (only walking twice for a total of about 30 seconds! wowzers!!)

hello world.

long time no see!

so do you all remember when i said i could feel something new and exciting on the horizon? we'll i could have never guessed how new and exciting it would truly be! no, i'm not getting married and not i am not pregnant. (it's much bigger than that!) however, you all will just have to sit tight until i announce what it is. i hope it's worth the wait!

and just so you know, i am not bringing up the fact that there is new and exciting news to drive you all nuts.. it's my excuse for being so busy lately! i'm not going to have the time to blog like i use to, but i will post once a week to keep whoever is interesting in what i have to say up to date on my training!

5.6.08

3 miles (no walking.. a FIRST for me!!!) + workout

5.7.08

3 miles (no walking)  + workout

5.8.08

3 miles (no walking) + workout

5.10.08

ok.. this run deserves a backstory.

aj and i are running 4 days a week on our training.. tuesday, wednesday and thursdays during the week, then a long run on saturday. the first long run on our first saturday of the new training program was 6 miles. neither of us have ran that far since we've started training and we were very excited and nervous all week long. or at least i was. for me, i was so excited to finish the run and hear the man in my ipod say, "congratulations, you have completed 6 miles. this is your new distance record."

well, with that said, saturday morning rolls around and aj and i drove to a bike/jogging path here in town. we park, get ourselves situated and take off. aj quickly disappears ahead of me (i am REALLY slow) and i start zoning out and get into the grove of my run. one crappy song comes on after another and i decided i needed to skip songs until i got to a good one. i hit the buttons on my armband and once i found a good one i wanted to know how far i'd gone so far and continued to hit random buttons. (i couldn't remember which button did what!) then, before i knew it, the man in my ipod said, "workout ended." i screamed a few profanities and got so upset i almost threw in the towel. the man in my ipod said i had run 2.75 miles so i decided i'd just punch in a 3.25 mile run and be on my way.

yeah, good idea until i realized i wouldn't know for sure where the halfway point was. you see, the trail we were running on goes clear into the next town, then attaches to a few other paths that extend all throughout southwest ohio. our plan was to run until we were alerted we had reached our half way point, then run back to the car. i figured sooner or later aj would be running back towards me and i could let him know what happened and he might be able to tell me where to turn around.

another mile passes and aj is finally in my sight. i yell to him as we pass that my ipod got screwed up and he told me to turn around at the gate. yes! a solid point to turn around! i was so relieved, but then i look down the straight path to see no gate. i saw two bridges and just assumed that was what he meant. but what if it wasn't? i was so confused and frustrated that i continued on to the furthest bridge then turned around there.

then man in my ipod started counting down the meters until i was finished. i knew he was wrong. i knew i had much further to run. "3.25 miles completed," he said. i kept running. "4 miles completed." still i kept running. then i saw aj coming back towards me again. he got by my said and started running with me. run to the road, thats the end! i kept pushing, but finally i gave out, just meters from where "the end" was.

apparently aj had been done for about 20 minutes and started to worry about me. "when did you turn around?" he asked. i told him i kept running until the second bridge and he told me i should have just turned around when we passed. good to know now! i didn't care. i just hoped i had gone the 6 miles or else i knew i'd be really upset.

we added the distance from the two runs and found i had met the required amount of milage for that day. and some. i had ran almost 7.25 miles! wowzers! i had never ran over 4 miles, and here i am running well over 7 miles and only walking less than a minute of that! (just when i had to stop for traffic and the other time i just thought i was going to die.)

so, here are the TWO graphs from that saturday. i promise i wont be such a dumb ass next time and will do the whole thing in one shot!

i suck at life.

ok, let's just get one thing out in the open before we begin:

i suck at life.

alright, now that that is off my chest lets talk about running..

i was getting my butt out there in the antarctic mornings of january and february, but now that the weather is not so frigid.. there i lay in bed at 6 am! what the hell is wrong with me? now don't get me wrong.. i have not completely stopped running, but i have not been getting my four runs in a week and i sure have seemed to give up on my career of a potential published author. (sorry aj.)

i guess sometimes we find ourselves in a rut. sometimes we get overloaded at work and in our personal lives. sometimes the weather is just a downer. well, all of that is about to change. i can feel something coming. there is something new and exciting on the horizon and i am relieved. it is gradually getting nicer outside, i'm finally catching up with life and the rut is losing it's hold.

so this time when i say keep your eye out for some new stuff i mean it! i might not blog every single day, but you can bet i will be out there pounding the pavement or in the gym getting toned. i am going to get in shape for summer, and then stay that way for good. i am going to stay on top of my business and personal responsibilities. i will keep the apartment clean. i will get our companies up and running. i will find more time for my friends and family. i will be a better person. i will run.

here are some past runs from when i was able to pry myself out of bed:

ice ice baby

so i haven't run since february 17. that's about to close in on 2 weeks without a single run.. and i am going nuts!

it's one thing to not be able to run, but it's whole other thing when the majority of that time not running is spent pretty much locked up in doors. the weather in ohio has been dreadful the past few weeks and has made running outside impossible. well, unless you strap on some ice skates in place of your nikes, then you might have a chance. 

and i promise this is no exaggeration.

for a week solid neither snow nor rain fell from the sky, instead it was straight up ice. i felt like the whole damn city had been placed in the little nook in front of a refrigerator for ice to spill out on us. the roads, the trees, the telephone wires.. all covered in a thick, icy glaze. they tried burying the city in salt, but it didn't help. the ice just kept falling from the sky.

the past few days the weather had finally decided to let up, but the snow and frigid temperatures remained. today has been looking up and all the wind has died down allowing a sunny 22º day not feel too shabby. my fingers are crossed that the sun will melt the snow on the sidewalks and a run or two might be in my forecast this weekend. (cheesy joke, i am aware.)

aside from the weather, a few important dates are coming up.. the first being my birthday on march 10th. i'm turning the big two-five. oh joy. a quarter of a century old. how exciting. at least it's a leap year and i get to live one extra day in 24-year-old-land. after that on the 15th is our first race! it's a little 5k race for leukemia and we are very excited to be official for once. (no, the man in my ipod does not count as being official.) aj and i will be running solo, even though our boss signed up for it. she is going to have to sit this one out for a knee surgery on the 4th. apparently her knee cap was in the witness protection program and it relocated itself over a year ago. after months and months of searching she found the little sneak and is going to put him back where he belongs.

ok, that's all i've got for now. i'm not going to write about my last two runs (from 2/16 and 2/17) because they were eons ago but i will still put up the results as proof that i did run!!

oh, and keep your fingers crossed for me for this weekend. i need to run.

attention!

i have been mia for a week. yes, a week. i know i am a terrible, terrible person but i promise to make it up to you. ("you" mostly meaning kylie.)

halmark had to go and throw a fake holiday in my running mix, along with me getting sick and ice falling from the sky. not a good combo. none the less, i have been running despite the rumors that have flooded tmz, in-touch and best week ever.

so keep your peepers peeping. i will soon have a juicy new blog full of pushing wind with my face, growing rocks in place of my calves and the latest mad cow outbreak to hit ohio.

see you soon..

the 5k that wanted to be a 10k

since the weather has been so incredibly miserable, aj and i have been really into running 5k's lately. they are quick and fun runs that end even sooner if you move your butt along at a faster pace. (good motivation to get out of the cold!)

we got home from work yesterday knowing the snow was going to come soon. the sun was setting and the temperature was dropping fast. i was really trying to talk aj into not running, but thank god he was pumped up about the run and made me suck it up. that's a great thing about our running dynamic.. usually if one doesn't want to run the other does and pushes to make it happen. just imagine if we were able to talk each other out of it. we'd both still be wearing our fat jeans.

after what i felt was an ample amount of complaining, i got dressed and we headed out our door and down the steps to the front of our building. aj being the goof ball he always is, thought it'd be fun to swing around like a monkey on the banisters. i made fun of him and quickly made my way out the door because i wanted to get this run over with. as soon as the cold air hit my face i heard aj yip like a little wounded puppy. i turned around to see what had happened, and he actually managed--through gloves-- to get the world's largest splinter. seriously folks, this sucker was like a full-grown redwood sticking out of his poor throbbing finger. he took the glove off his wounded hand, and with the glove still on the other hand, tried to pull it out. not wanting to make too much fun of him since he was having a mini crisis, i only laughed as i suggested to take the other big, clumsy glove off. in our state of emergency it didn't register that he could take the other glove off and i just cried for him to pull it out with his teeth! crisis averted.

sliding his glove back on, and giving that darn banister a dirty look, we were ready for our 5k. we hit the center buttons on our ipods to start the workout and parted ways. i had on a double layer of pants, double layer of shirts under my hoodie, gloves, scarves.. the works. but it was still cold. i knew if i just kept pushing i'd warm up eventually and enjoy the chilly evening run.

i flew past my 1 and 2k points, and waited to hear that i was halfway through, but the man in my ipod never alerted me. knowing very well i was more than past the halfway mark i turned around and ran my route backwards. this was the first time i had ever done that, and let me tell you.. it felt very strange. it was as if i were in the twilight zone and everything seemed familiar but was very different. i started to feel dizzy. i wondered if i was freaking out or maybe i just wasn't getting enough oxygen into my lungs. i stopped to focus on my breathing but it was really difficult. i couldn't get the breath deep into my lungs. the air kept hitting a painful wall. i brought my gloved hands and scarf up to my face and started breathing through them to warm the air. finally that seemed to work as my lungs miraculously opened and the air was flowing through me like never before. i was completely refreshed and ready to kick some 5k ass.

as i passed different streets, random people and even aj a time or two i realized i was in a groove. nothing on me really seemed to hurt more than usual and i was breathing right on beat. it was almost as if my body were on auto-pilot. i couldn't believe it! finally i felt like i was really figuring out a lot about how i need to run and how i was going to be able to cross that finish line at the usaf marathon in september.

while having this mini celebration in my head, i quickly came back to the real world and was starting to wonder why the man in my ipod wasn't counting down the final meters. i had passed the 4k mark a while back. yet he was silent. right about that time his voice kicked in and to my surprise he said, "halfway point. 5k completed." what? halfway? 5k done? i was so incredibly confused. then it clicked. i must have set my ipod for a 10k. damn it! i rushed to hit the pause workout button and quickly pulled my arm out from my hoodie to expose the ipod strapped to my arm. i was more than excited to see that i had cut off an entire minute from my last 5k, but was bummed that it was being labeled as a 10k run.

oh well, i know it was intended to be a 5k. it being labeled incorrectly on my ipod or on my nike+ account does not change the fact i ran it faster than ever before, or that i only walked twice. i did great and i know i will only continue to improve.

5k on the brain

deciding i needed to give my poor defenseless shins a rest, and wanting to break away from the monotony of starting my blogs with olie whining at 5 am, aj and i decided to take friday morning off. we thought it would be more beneficial to cross-train that evening and save our last two runs of the week for saturday and sunday.

cross-training has been both enjoyable and entertaining the past few days. to our amusement we have been inadvertently working out with this kid named andrew. my guess is that andrew is in the seventh grade, about 4'9" and sitting pretty at 85 pounds. to paint you an even more vivid picture he looks like he'd be the default kid casted as "boy number 2" in a diary of anne frank remake. i'm sure this poor kid gets made fun of enough at school, so i really do not plan on jumping on the bandwagon, but he is quite interesting to watch.

yesterday andrew came into the workout room with another pubescent and equally awkward kid. apparently andrew had been raving about the 60 pounds he could now curl and wanted to show off to said pal. you see, normally i am the person who roots for the underdog. normally i would take one look at andrew and applaud him for all of his efforts. you can tell that inside his tiny frame he is just dying to be like some of the boys at his school that are starting to fill-out and come into their manhood. poor andrew is far from filling anything out.. except maybe a scantron test in seventh grade social studies. i'm sure he'd excel at that.

but anyway, i am digressing from digression. i really have no moral of the story with andrew. he is fun to watch when he makes fish-faces while doing lateral pull-downs and i just thought he deserved a cameo in here somewhere. (i'm hoping he'll become a regular.)

today aj and i slept in. we woke up to the sun shinning in though our window and the wind crashing into the side of our building. i took olie outside to see that it was a beautiful and sunny 46˚ day with some frightening 37 mph gusting winds. we got all wrapped up to protect ourselves from the wind and set out for a 5k run. my shins where doing pretty good, even though there was some pain on impact here and there when i started. as i continued on, the pain got a little more intense and breathing became an issue as well.

over a year ago i was having a lot of chest pains and breathing problems. i went to the doctor and she told me that she did not want to declare me asthmatic, but that i did breath like someone with asthma. she put me on medication and the problem started to go away. feeling like i didn't want to be on medication forever i chose to stop inhaling steroids and the breathing problems never returned. i don't think that i have any kind of breathing problem and i know i don't have asthma. i think that my lungs just aren't as strong as they could be, and through all of this training i feel like they are getting stronger everyday. the natural way.

with that in mind while i was running, i knew i was not going to have an asthma attack or keel over from lack of oxygen into my lungs so i kept pushing. i realized early on that it is just more difficult to breath when the wind is smacking you in the face at over 30 miles per hour. i really tried to focus on a rhythm to my breathing and it seemed to help. in addition to the pain in my shins and the difficulty breathing, the mucus in my face was going nuts! i always try to throw a napkin or two in my hoodie pocket before a run and luckily today was one of the days i remembered it! every time i slowed down to catch my breath i blew my nose and spit out the incredibly thick funk in my mouth. nice imagery, i know, but it's what helped me keep going.

i altered my route today so that i did not have to run the cal de sac with the hill, and i tried to not run directly into the wind too much either. running into the wind is pretty much like trying to swim in chocolate pudding. it might feel a little refreshing, but you get nowhere.

as the man in my ipod starting counting down the kilometers i tried to not walk too much, despite the fact a kilometer means nothing to me. as i closed in on 800 meters left i got a sudden burst of energy. i had just passed aj a block back and i had really expected him to finish his 5k hours before me. i had to keep running. making a turn around a small cal de sac and into the wind, i knew my final stretch was going to be a struggle. i passed a kid on a bike who looked like he'd never seen a person run for fun before in his life, but luckily he knew some runner/biker sidewalk etiquette and gracefully peddled in the grass giving me ample room to pass. at that moment the man in my ipod congratulated me on completing my goal of running 5k and i abruptly cut him off by ending the workout. i generally leave my ipod on during my walking cool-down just to have the added milage, but this time i was very focused on short run time and a quick average pace.

i headed back to the apartment and saw aj still standing outside. i waved my arms at him from a distance and he started heading towards me. seeing that he was not huffing and puffing like i was i knew he had finished before me but the fact he was still outside made me feel great. maybe i had actually finished with a pretty good time. we walked over to the sauna and shared our experience with the 5k and our results. aj had finished in 31 minutes, cutting 40 seconds off of his last 5k! i, amazingly, only finished about 4 minutes behind aj at 35 minutes! i couldn't believe it.

while i didn't run the entire thing, i am very confident that i will be able to run the entire 5k we just signed up for on march 15!!! (yes, that was worthy of three exclamation points!) this will be our first official race and we are very excited! we are going to continue to run four times per week and cross-train as often as we can find time for. come race day we are going to be fit and ready!