29

Ha! I bet when you saw that title you thought 'Did she run 29 miles??' NO, not at all!! Sometimes I spend forever trying to come up with the best possible title. Today there were a few going through my head but I settled on 29. Why? Because today is the 29th. The next time my calendar says it's the 29th I'll be in Miami. And by this time on that 29th I will have (hopefully) finished my very first marathon. CRAZINESS! I can't wait!!

So, to answer a lot of your questions: No, I did not throw a stapler at the aspiring country music wanna-be the other day. However, we are now up to 3 bags of popcorn in 3 days this week. Usually things seem to go to pot around 3 in the afternoon. One of them must be having a rough day because the normal 3 pm matinee feast was moved to about 11 this morning. Gross. Yesterday the popcorn was popped and enjoyed rather loudly by the same woman I wanted to throw my stapler at on Tuesday. I was trying to get the last of my CPE finished up (through a self-study book) so I was REALLY not in the mood for crunching and loud talking. Not wanting to spend my New Year's in prison I put my headphones on and rocked out to the Killers until the smell of extra butter and salt was no longer in the air. As far as stripper fights go, yesterday was a quiet day. (And she's off the rest of this week.) However, she was wearing her Playboy T-shirt and baby blue sweatpants that her stripper husband gave her for Christmas. Some days I just want to take her by the shoulders, shake her and say "Seriously, he's a STRIPPER!! A 40-yr old stripper! It is TIME to get a real job!" With this year's bonus she is going to get a boob job. Seriously.

I've gotten back on track with running and my a.m. walks with Pippin this week. It's warmed up quite a bit so it's not too cold to truck him around the block in the morning. But it is SO deserted! There's hardly a light on in any of the houses and no one else is out walking. It's a bit creepy to feel like I'm the ONLY person up in the subdivision! We saw two cars this morning which is two more than we've seen all week.

Tuesday was a really nice day around here. The temps were in the 60's so when we left work we put on our running gear for an easy 8-miler. We actually wore shorts!! No jackets, gloves or head gear. I wore a long sleeve, thin tech shirt to held with the somewhat gusty wind. (But most of the breezes weren't all that strong.) We started out slowly and then increased the speed of each mile. It felt great, and I felt SO much lighter without 5 extra pounds of gear on. I can't wait for spring!! We finished in 1 hr 18 minutes, which was great considering we started out warming up in the mid/high 10's, and finished the run in the low 9's. I came across my old training log from my first half marathon earlier this year and my first ever 8 mile run was in 1 hr 33 minutes (in Feb 05). Talk about some improvement! If my legs weren't so tired to begin with our time would have been even quicker.

Yesterday wasn't nearly as warm but I was hoping to run 5 miles outdoors. When I walked out the door here I was immediately met by a LOT of wind. It was still 50 degrees, but some area storms left us with 26 mph wind gusts which made it feel much cooler than that. I love running in the rain/wind after a nice storm in the summer, but something about similar circumstances in the winter is a major turn-off. I decided to run on our treadmill instead, and pounded out 5 miles while I watched an old Blowout I hadn't seen on Bravo. (Personally I think all of Jonathon's stylists are a lot more talented than he is!)

Today is even colder (30's) & Brent wants to go to the company gym so for now that's the plan for today. For some retarded reason they're closing at 6 this week instead of 8 which is a total pain! My foot that's been bugging me is feeling a lot better. I need to be more diligent about icing, though. I've been staying off it as much as possible and leaving my shoes off at my desk. It's really my non-running shoes that aggrevate it. It rarely hurts when I'm running, it just seems that my left foot is a bit swollen and my usual heels/chunky shoes REALLY aggrevate it. Tennis shoes feel best, I guess because they're a size larger than my normal shoes. Yesterday I had two comments about "Whew, your feet stink." One of them was made by someone I like so I told him all the running was making my feet swell a bit and he was nice about it and interested in my training. The other comment was made by someone I do not like so I told her the following: "Hey, how about next month you run 150 miles and maybe then you can suggest some shoes that won't make my feet feel like they're about to explode. Deal?" Trust me, she deserves every snippy comment EVER invented and I'm pretty good about consistently delivering them!

Well, back to work!! Happy running everyone!