Let the taper begin!!

Hey guys! I hope you all had great weekends. Why is it the weekend seems to last about 15 minutes while the week seems to last about 15 years? Tomorrow will be a particularly dreadful day as my boss will be back at work. Ugh. Two weeks without him has been relaxing bliss. He's a total dork who complicates EVERYTHING and drives me insane. I can't stand to be micromanaged and he is a total micromanager and needs attention from me and his boss at all times. Blah, I'll deal with that tomorrow.

Wed night after I blogged I did some yoga/pilates to stretch everything out. Before I had gotten into mammoth marathon training I had actually started to become somewhat flexible, and now a lot of that is GONE! It's sort of sad, but I know I'll be back there soon. During the taper I'm going to increase the yoga again, but not do anything crazy.

Our weather has been nothing short of bizarre lately. It's hot one day and we're out in T's and shorts and then freezing the next. Last week Sun, Mon & Wed were warm while Tues, & Thurs-Sat morning were cold. Go figure. Thurs night Brent wanted to go to the gym so we headed over there after week. New Year's resolutions have obviously not kicked in for our coworkers. Our gym has 5 treadmills, we got there right before 5 and I was the only person using one until about 5:30 when one of my coworkers showed up! Before Christmas there were usually 3 people on the treadmills at any given time (99.9% of whom were walking at about a 30 minute mile snail pace.) I ended up running 6 miles on the treadmill while Brent did some weights and the bike. I was SO glad I remembered my nano this time - the "rockin' " gym station was playing "Janie's got a gun" - not something I look for in a good cardio pumping moment.

Friday was a rest day - the first all week!! We ate at a new restaurant about 2 miles from our house - Jim n Nick's. It's an upscale BBQ place that makes all their food fresh every day - they literally don't have a freezer. Most morning I can smell them smoking their BBQ from our house as I walk Pips. Brent got chicken fried chicken and I got BBQ chicken w/ a Greek salad. It was SO good. We'll definately go back. We came home and the plan was to relax and update the songs on our mp3 players for Sat am's long run. I spent about an hour going through some cardio/running mixes Itunes had recommended (most of which was CRAP!), but I found a few new songs to download onto my running mix. I got my nano in October for my birthday, and ever since then I've spent a lot of time creating various playlists for my runs. I have a 5K mix of all my fave songs, a half marathon mix, and for a while now I've been working on my marathon mix. I put some of my fave "pump me up" songs at the front, then arrange the songs in the order to best keep me motivated. Towards the end of the list I put some of my fave songs on there again to help me motor on when I'm the most tired. Well......as I was trying to add the new songs Itunes locked up - and deleted every last song on my Nano. Every last song, every playlist, all of it. It was about 9.30 and I had wanted to go to bed around 11 or so to get up early and have a nice (fairly) early long run. It took Brent and I about 2 hours to load songs back on my nano. Something happened to it when Itunes locked up and it was "corrupt" - anytime you would load songs onto it they wouldn't be there when you disconnected. We thought it might be our laptop so we tried my work laptop and the same thing happened. We ultimately had to reformat it by downloading all the data files for it from apple.com. What a frustrating pain!!

So, we didn't go to bed early, at all. I still set my alarm for 8 hours of sleep, and headed out for the park around 9.30. It was ass cold - 38 degrees to start. And really, that's not THAT bad compared to what a lot of you guys have to put up with. (And none of our snow stuck, at all. And I never even saw a snowflake that was not microscopic. I think it was probably more of a sleet/snow mix.) I think I was more annoyed because just a few days earlier I'd run in a tank and shorts outside. I geared up and off I went. Brent had decided to meet me 1 hr and 15-30 minutes later, that way he'd end up with 10 miles and I'd have 19. I didn't have all my songs in my preferred order, but I was thankful just to have a functioning ipod! So, off I went. I was going to do 3 one-mile laps around the park and then off to the national guard until it would be tome for me to turn around and meet Brent. My creaky legs are starting to warm up with Disturbed and then Disturbed again....huh? I hit 'next' on my nano and....the same song. WTF? I had to stop and I thought maybe there might be a weird setting on my playlist so I turned the "shuffle all songs" setting on. Off I go again......great song.....then - the same song again! Grrr!! I stop and go through all the settings and for whatever reason the default repeat setting where you reset the nano goes back to: Repeat: One Song. Who would want to listen to the same song over and over and over with no option to listen to any other songs? That's just strange. So finally off I go listening to a multitude of songs. There were several walkers (and a few runners) at the park that morning. I think the walkers were all New Year's Resolutionists as they were bundled like Eskimos and managed to sprawl completely across the trail making it nearly impossible to get around them. One lady had a little stroller for her dog! It was more of a doll stroller so it would never work for running with Pippin. At the start of my third lap I saw a large amount of cameo off in the woods to my right. At first I was a little startled then I realized it was the National Guard group doing some sort of training hike. They were carrying their packs and even had a flag with them, I wish I had had my camera! It was really cool, I was hoping I'd catch them walking towards the Guard after my lap but they weren't taking an early morning stroll - they were marching. I headed out to my turn around point and everything was going great. All of the nano struggles coupled with the chill in the air didn't make me a very happy runner, but I was glad to be moving at a decent pace. The sun was out and at times I was burning up and at other times I was very glad for my gloves.

When I got back to the meeting place Brent wasn't there yet, so I went ahead and did one more 1-mile loop. He was waiting for me when I made it around again and was also very glad to know I was up to 9 miles and he'd only have to do 10. We did two more 1-mile laps around the park. On the second lap two little hoodlums were sitting on a park bench eating a big bag of Chex mix. I saw them throw one at a lady in front of us. He did hit her, but she never felt it with her big Eskimo coat on. I wasn't in the mood to have processed salty snacks tossed at me, so I gave him a death stare and mentally communicated to him that I would personally drag him behind my tired body for the next 9 miles if he even attempted to toss a Chex at us. He put his hand down, I'm guessing I looked like evil with a running jacket and grandma running pants on.

We headed out towards the lake with 8 miles to go. I was thinking we might not have to go the whole way, but I wasn't sure. Our turn around ended up right at the entrance to the marina. There are still a ton of "Greenway Closed due to Construction" signs all over the new part, but since we've never actually seen any construction we totally ignore them each week. I can tell they do work during the week since dirt has been moved and stuff like that, but we've never seen any work on Saturdays. Well, this time we did. Ever wonder how they get hay on the newly spread dirt? The route back from the lake is always the toughest, every week. It's uphill for a mile and a half and the wind is ALWAYS strong. Saturday was windy to begin with, so I knew the return trip would be exhausting. When we turned around and were at the top of the first hill we saw a big work truck smack on the greenway, with hay swirling EVERYWHERE. We looked at each other with an "Uh-oh" look. There's really nowhere to go, the road next to the greenway is extremely busy with no shoulder. The other side is a big, chain-link fence with all kinds of "US Govt Property-No trespassing" signs (part of the base). So, it became a game of chicken. They were using this massive blower thing to blow hay onto the freshly spread dirt, and of course they weren't going to stop for us since the greenway was technically closed. We turned our heads, closed our eyes, and ran through. At least I did, Brent had his camera phone out snapping pics.












As nice as it was to have something "exciting" happen it was a bit exhausting. The wind never would stop, even when we made it past the end of the hills the wind was gusting from every direction. I was also a ninny and wasn't making myself eat Clif Bloks as I should have. I had taken some around mile 6-7, and had planned to take some around 14-15 but the hay incident distracted me and I decided to just tough it out. Stupid!! My energy was totally waning and I just wanted to quit running. But, I knew if I quit I'd still have to make it back to the car and running is quicker than walking so I stuck it out. We were just starting the last stupid hill back to the car when I heard something quickly approaching through the grass on my right. I thought this was strange since the road right there is EXTREMELY busy and the shoulder is small and steep. I looked over and a guy was running - totally booking it. I looked over at Brent and said "Look at him! I hate him SO much right now. TAKE HIS PICTURE!" Brent saw Evil Rachel and quickly got his camera phone out. It turns out he was running back to grab a bag of trash that had flown out of his truck and onto the major road, so he was hurrying not to get run over and not to have his trash run over. But I still hate him for running so quickly as I was fading into nothing. We sprinted to the top of the hill and watched my Garmin count down those last few feet until 19!! Yeah!! I had measured it perfectly and we were VERY close to the car. I ended up doing the 19 miles in 3 hours and 9 minutes, an average pace of 9.57. I felt like I was going quite a bit slower than that so I'll take it! The #1 lesson I learned yesterday was to eat my snacks!!! More than once I've decided I "only" have a few miles left so I can skip the Bloks but that's just stupid.

So, that was 19 and today, three weeks before the Marathon, the taper begins!! Yeah!!! I bought a pink Nike tank a couple of weeks ago and last night I bought a pair of Nike shorts that have pockets for my Bloks. One day this week (prob at the gym!) I'm going to try out running in THE outfit!! When I was trying on various shorts last night I felt like I was shopping for my prom dress or something! I'm also looking forward to shorter mileage these upcoming weeks. Last week I ended up with 45 miles, this week's 12 mile long run sounds heavenly!

Bonus points to Simba's mom for being the first (regular) reader to hear Steve Runner's shout out to me during his 1.01.06 podcast! If you haven't listened to it yet he said some really nice things about my training that literally made me cry while listening at my desk at work. Too cool!!

Before I forget I absolutely have to leave you with the strangest "keyword" search hits I've had lately. I always get a ton from people looking for pictures of people running into brick walls and all kinds of weird things related to brick walls. I also get a lot of people looking for info about chef Rachel Ray, and quite a few hits for reviews of local restaurants we've eaten at. Around Christmas I got a few looking for "bad holiday sweaters" (none here!) and one person looking for "what to write in my wife's Christmas card" (buddy, if you're coming here looking for it I think you're in trouble!). One person wanted to know 'what first annual means'. I've gotten one search for a 'redhead shore turtle', and someone came looking for 'danny farkas' the other day! I did get one for someone looking for "hot wife pics" - that person came to the RIGHT place! Then they start getting stranger......like the person looking for 'teaching my wife to pee', 'best potty for boys', 'running while puking', but the absolute winner lately is 'best ways to kill my wife'. Yup, I'm a little concerned about that person, but fortunately they didn't live around here so I know it wasn't Brent! It's always amusing to see how people end up here every day!

That's it for now! Hope you all have a great week!!