Beautiful Saturday

It was a beautiful day here in TN today. Well, beautiful if you running and not trying to plan a pool party or get a tan. Most of the day was overcast and cool. Brent woke up before me this morning (which is beyond rare), and cooked some turkey bacon, eggs, and biscuits. Not exactly a great pre-run meal, but very yummy and much appreciated. We let our breakfast settle for a while and then headed out for a run around 11 am. Normally my late morning Sat runs are hot, muggy, and miserable - but not today! At 11 the temp was 67 degrees! CRAZY!! Most of my evening runs all summer have been considerably warmer than that, usually in the upper 80s and 90s. There was even a nice breeze to go along with the cool temps and big clouds. Perfect! Brent suggested we do some hill work so we headed out of the subdivision, up the road towards the park we normally run to but then we took a left and up into a VERY hilly subdivision appropriately called The Highlands. To get up to these houses you have to run up a really steep hill. The last time we had a real snow, back in January 2003, most of the home owners in this subdivision couldn't even get up their homes! We had a grand time watching them slide down the hill. So we headed up that hill, and continued up a series of several more hills until we reached the top of the subdivision. We'd seen a new water tower they're building off in the distance from our house, but we never knew where it was until today. We actually ran right up to the base of it. From there we headed back down out of the subdivision (dazing one dog in the process) and down to the park. We changed up the return route a bit and ran up a side street and then down a main street. We've seen several runners on it before and we thought it had a pretty good shoulder. Not so much, really. Maybe this winter it will be a little better, the grass was so tall you really couldn't run through it so you had to run in the road, which I'm not a big fan of doing. From there we headed down the side street towards our house but continued on to the hospital and then back home. All in all it ended up at 6.4 miles, which was great. We weren't sure what the distance would end up at, and my initial goal was 6 miles.

The rest of today we spent around the house getting small projects accomplished. Right after our run we spent some time outside trimming some shrubs and doing some light yard work that desperately needed to be done. While we ate lunch we watched Tuesday night's The Biggest Loser. I **LOVE** that show. So far I'm rooting for Matt and Suzy. It always amazes me how much weight they lose that first week. I know most of it is water and the shock of actually doing some exercise, and that it will slow down, but wow! It's also pretty surprising to me how shocked they are - you'd think you lost 18-28 pounds you'd know! I know I would, but I'm also not 400 pounds. This season there's not a person on there under 200 pounds. I think the lightest person was about 225 - that's double my weight!! One lady was also 5 ft 3 and she weighs about 270. I can't imagine carrying that much weight on my frame. At my heaviest I was a little north of 150, I can't imagine being 270. They also had them wear shirts with their goal on it - various things like 'to be healthy', 'to be a role model', 'to be there for my kids', and even a 'to be a princess'. I can't say I get that one, but Brent asked me what I would want on my shirt. I really don't know, I'll have to think about that one. I know when I started losing weight I wanted to have a strong body I could feel proud of. I hit rock bottom with a peanut butter pie on the beach in Florida in April 2004. I had had enough of gorging myself with gross fatty, fried foods. I was also sick of seeing pictures of myself and not really recognizing the person in them. One of my friends, A, had take up some light running so when we got back I called her and headed out for a 3-miler with her. Ha! I couldn't run the whole way, or even half the way, and once we were done I couldn't sit down for about 4 or 5 days. From there I mostly ran on my own, and worked my way up to running the whole 3 and then started working on my time. I cut out soda - I used to drink about a 2 liter of Dr Pepper a day. Now I can't stand the taste of Dr Pepper and stick with water and milk, and the occasional soda as a treat. The rest of 2004 I ran most days and even ran in a few 5Ks, but I only went 3 or 4 miles. In January I decided to run my first half marathon (the CMM in April) and the rest is history.

That's about it for today, tomorrow we're going to do a 12 or 13 miler, hopefully the weather will be as nice as it was today!!

Rachel

Exercise-
Fri - 1.5 mile evening walk with Pippin and Brent
Sat - 6.4 mile am run, 20 minutes yoga/pilates (focus:abs)