Weekend Awesomeness

First off, I want to thank you for your sweet supportive comments on my last post - you guys rule for 1.) listening to me whine and 2.) making me feel so much better!

Let me back up to Friday night. At the last minute I invited some great friends over to swim and grill out. We had such a relaxing night (even though we had a ton of basement work planned, which I effectively said "fuck it!" to) and it was just what I needed. Great food, even better company, and even the kids all had a blast (when they weren't trying to kill each other). Success!

BUT...towards the end of the evening, John and I both commented on how hot it was getting in the house. All along, we'd chalked it up to the kids running in and out and in and out and leaving the door open. But after our friends left, we realized that OUR EFFING AC WAS BROKEN. Sweet. Really. On a friggin' Friday night, so there's no way in hell I'm waiting til Monday to fix it. I called them up, but it was already getting dark, so the fix would have to wait til Saturday morning. Lovely - this meant sleeping in our 90 degree house.

Honestly, as weird as it is, this turned out to be a blessing. I was stressing about my run, and hot. I slept like crap, and was up at 3:30am. Yep. Insane. But I figured, I might as well get up and get running before it got super hot outside. So that's exactly what I did. I filled up my handheld, tucked a vanilla bean GU in the pocket, and chose orange GU chomps to try out (the vanilla bean was backup in case the chomps sucked). I set out in the dark in my neighborhood, with the goal of survival.

After thinking about it lots, I really wanted to run this SLOWLY. I've been averaging 11:15 or so paces on my runs, but in reality, that meant 10:40 pace interspersed with walk breaks while I tried not to die. So my goal pace was between 11:30 and 11:40 for this run. I started off right in my goal pace, and stayed there for a good 7 miles. I FELT AWESOME!! I actually kept smiling because I was feeling so good! This was fantastic!!!! At about mile 6 I'd swung back home to pick up my water, and tried a chomp. HORRIBLE! It was too sour, and I felt like I was gagging it down. So I aborted the chomp and went with the GU. I just don't think I'm meant to chew anything on a run, but I'm still experimenting (I've heard good things about the strawberry).

I won't lie - the last couple miles were harder, but not nearly as hard as I expected. And the reason they were difficult was honestly due to all the butt-clenching going on. Not fun. And I almost made it home in time. Almost. Ahem.

All in all, this run served as an amazing confidence builder for me. I proved that not only can I do it, I can do it and FEEL GREAT. YAY!!

I took my first ice bath when I got home, and while my legs were a bit sore, it wasn't anything major. I ran 4.5 this morning, and once I warmed my legs up, I could FEEL that I had used them hard this weekend, but they didn't HURT. That was a pleasant surprise - I honestly was a bit nervous about that.

So I'm back in it!! And I'm down to 2 kids this week (basketball camp for my older 2) so hopefully, I'll be posting a bit more. Have a good one!