Running Chick

Despite both Josh and I suffering through nasty colds and a migraine (me), our Christmas was relaxing and stress free this year compared to previous years. I attribute it all to the fact that we didn't travel this year as we did in years past. Traveling over the holidays is a royal pain in the ass - it's expensive, the weather usually is horrible, people are crabby and nothing ever turns out the way people expect it to. For those reasons, I highly recommend staying at home and doing what we've been doing - sitting on our butts, eating naughty food and watching reruns of Star Trek. You just can't go wrong!

Santa was good to us this year. He brought teapots and tea, sports equipment and booze, purses, jewelry and tools.

We also got a yummy plate of Christmas cookies from Mr. & Mrs. Dorf.


Josh and I both noted how the gingerbread man had a eerily familiar stature. Ginger Dorf?


Ginger Dorf has a tasty head!


Since I've been sick for pretty close to two weeks, I haven't done an ounce of running. I've been looking at my new shoes longingly, though. I am gearing up to participate in a New Year's Eve Fun Run with a few people. It should be a really good time and a great opportunity to burn some calories and ring in 2009 with some guilt-free boozing!

Happy New Year, everybody!

I think I might be dying. Or dead, I'm not sure which. 

After a 4-ish mile run, I decided to finish it off by tackling Sixth Street again.  Man, that hill is tough.  My goal was to not stop when I reached the top of each block, but rather do a little recovery jog down the street until my heart felt like it wasn't going to explode.  On Tuesday, I made it up three blocks, but stopped between for 30 seconds or so.  Today, I made it two blocks using a recovery jog and then I had to switch to stopping and did two more blocks before finishing up with a half-mile recovery jog back home to give me a five mile total for the day. 

I walked into the kitchen dripping in sweat, face beet red and utterly exhausted.  Josh looked at me and said "Holy cow, how far did you go?" or something like that.  What I suspect he really wanted to say was "Holy cow, you look like death.  What the hell did you do?" but he values his life too much.

Ugh, I'm exhausted and my legs are throbbing.  Time for drugs and sleep.

Despite my hip, I ran today. Also, despite my reasonably average pace of 11:15/mile, it was not a very good run. My hip was really bothering me and I decided to throw in the towel at mile 4 because I couldn't deal with it anymore. I wore my old shoes and my blisters seemed to be happier with that. Unfortunately, the bike trail was swamped and there was no way to avoid the water. My feet ended up soaked and that irritated my blisters. Also, hearing my shoes squish for the entire run was annoying.

The latest photo of my left-foot blister, in all it's glory. The left one looks about half as bad.



There's three weeks until the half marathon and I'm not feeling very confident. Not sure what to do at this point.

Stretching with Simon


Spencer in his box