Tag Archives: twitter

Easter Was My Lucky Day

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Happy Monday!

(I wrote everything below this morning, before the day started.  I will say that the day took kind of a weird turn, not for me specifically except for spilling an entire 32 ounce glass of water on my lap at work and having very wet pants all morning, but the day wasn’t so good at all for other people I know, and I was in a funky mood all day. Seriously, Monday.  You win yet again).

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I don’t know about you, but I am STILL pretty full off of the Easter feast.  We started off Easter right at a buffet brunch with my family and we ate A LOT. Like, pancakes, prime rib, eggs Benedict, 3 little mini pies, and 3 trips through the line a lot.  Obviously I am unconcerned about Operation Anti-Jiggle.  And obviously Coach Aaron will make me regret trips 2 and 3 through the buffet this week.

Then, just a few hours later, we went to dinner at Aaron’s aunt’s house, and more food was eaten (though considerably less).  The food was wonderful!  But feeling like Violet Beauregard, the girl turned blueberry from Willy Wonka who has to be rolled around, made me realize why I can’t eat like that all the time.  Yucky doesn’t even begin to describe it.  I actually woke up today excited to eat a boring amount of healthy food.  WEIRD.

I also had a rather lucky Easter, and I’m not just talking about my Easter Basket winnings including chocolate and a bottle of mimosa (THANKS, MOM!)

Yesterday, we took Giuseppe to my parents’ house for a Puppy Easter Egg Hunt! (my mom hid doggy treats around the backyard for the puppies to find).

Both dogs knew that they were searching for something, and they played along, even if they had no idea why.

While they were running around looking for treats, I was looking through the grass, and happened upon a patch of clovers.  In my childhood, I used to find 4 leaf clovers in my parent’s yard pretty often.  I haven’t found one in years, so I figured my luck had pretty much run out.

But then yesterday, in a tiny little clover patch in the middle of the lawn, I found…a FOUR LEAF CLOVER!

If that had been the only thing to happen yesterday, it would have been a good Easter.

But better things were in store.

Last night, after rolling myself back home from my second feast of the day, I participated in #runchat, an hour long Twitter Q & A that takes place every other Sunday.  I’ve actually found a lot of new Twitter runner friends on #runchat.

Each bi-weekly #runchat has a different giveaway sponsor, and 1-3 lucky participants win a prize just for twittering along.

I NEVER win stuff like this.  Sometimes I win at the “everybody wins” drawings, but not always.

Well, thanks to the powers of Easter and my clover, I WON last night! I was selected as the winner of a Medi-Dyne RangeRoller.  I don’t know too much about the stick or Medi-Dyne.  It looks a little different than my massage stick.  We’ll have to see how it works when it arrives in the mail! But regardless, I’m just so excited that I won!

Anyway, I hope your Easter was wonderful.  It is possible that we are all in need of some serious boot camp (or maybe I was the only one who thought trying every dessert was a good idea?).  And I hope your Monday went ok.  I’ve always thought the Monday after Easter should be a holiday.   Then we could have ALL day to work off the Easter feast.  Or, you know, party like a puppy.

Could I Hate Hills Any More? And Misspelling Tweets to Olympians

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Hills. I hate them.

At least I hate having to run up them (they are fairly nice to look at though).

Unfortunately, hill sprints are one of the necessary evils of a training program, especially to get faster.  And I need all the help there I can get.

I live in a city situated right next to a mountain, so hills aren’t hard to come by.  And basically any run we go on has some uphill.

You would think I would be more accustomed to uphill running.

But I’m not.  My hill pace is drastically slower than my flat pace.  And this past week, I’ve felt so low on energy anyway (my pace per mile times definitely confirms that).

Yesterday we did hill sprints in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. The foothills themselves are very scenic and very hiker/mountain biker/runner friendly.  I really don’t like hanging out in the foothills during the summer months because I have an irrational fear of rattlesnakes.  I’ve never actually seen one in the wild, but I know they’re there, and I run much slower because I’m convinced that one is going to drop on me and inject venomous poison into my bloodstream.

But right now it is too cold for rattlesnakes, and I have no good excuse for running as slow as I did.

Because the sun sets just shortly after I get home from work, we’re having to do our intervals the day after our long runs (not so fun) on the weekend when we have daylight.  Luckily, next weekend we can go back to doing hill workouts during the week in between recovery runs.

This is my Garmin elevation report.  If you’ll notice, Albuquerque is pretty high above sea level.  This makes it an ideal place to train.  I think it makes hill sprints more miserable than they should be.

I registered for Daily Mile a couple of days ago, and I was really hesitant to put in my workouts this week because I feel like I usually put forth a better effort.  I’ve actually been running a lot the last couple of weeks, and somehow I’m getting slower.  Even my tempo run (on a treadmill) had me at a 9:35 average pace when I felt like I was maxed out.  This doesn’t make too much sense to me.

I don’t really know what’s going on, but it better fix itself fast.  I can usually run a race at a minute faster per mile than I do in training, but I don’t know if I can run two minutes faster.

At least Daily Mile tells me how many donuts I can eat per week!

In other news, the USA Indoor Track and Field Team headed to Istanbul last night.  I tweeted my BFF Sanya Richards Ross, wishing her good luck (Yikes…I spelled Istanbul wrong in the tweet.  Embarrassed.  This is why you don’t tweet famous people after hanging out at the winery all afternoon.  I thought my phone was supposed to prevent me from doing something like this!).

At 4:12 am this morning (presumably from Istanbul) she responded!

As if I needed a reason to be more obsessed over this lady. Hopefully she doesn’t judge me for not being able to spell foreign cities correctly.  She has enough to judge me about with my hill sprint pace.

Twitter Road Race and Swimming Lesson #1

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About a month ago, I saw something on Twitter about the Twitter Road Race. 

After looking more into it, I found Doug Cassaro’s blog and his movement to organize a virtual 5-k.   Turns out some 700 people around the world signed up!

The Nike Women’s Marathon organized a virtual half marathon last weekend that I was thinking about joining.  Since I was running a half marathon anyway, why not run a 2nd “virtual” one at the same time?

For the Nike Women’s, it was a $40 fee ($10 went to charity and you got a bracelet and a chance to win an automatic entry into the lottery process real Marathon in October) AND you  had to have a Nike plus GPS system.

I’m a Garmin girl.  I didn’t want to buy the Nike thing. So I decided not to participate.  Plus, adding $40 to the RnR fee just didn’t seem economical. But I thought, hey, a free virtual 5-K  that helps me connect with other runners sounds pretty cool.

So I signed up for the Twitter Road Race.

This week, after the Rock n Roll Arizona half marathon, has been very relaxing.  I went on the elliptical once and I have been happily indulging in all the food, beer, and wine I desire.  I feel gloriously fat and out of shape. Aaron also busted his knee last week in Arizona, so he hasn’t been able to run.

 I had to run my virtual 5-K on a treadmill at the gym so Aaron could hang out on the elliptical. 

My problem with “virtual races” is this: I like to win.  When running, being able to pass people keeps me going.  Not having those people around makes me much less motivated to go faster.  Add the whole running without going anywhere to the equation, and I pretty much never had a chance to meet my PR time of 21:05 .  Plus, running fast and hard on the treadmill is noisy, and other gym people look at you like you are a complete nuisance to the gym world. I don’t like gym people looking at me like I’m a complete nuisance to the gym world.

But I started out fast anyway. My calf tightened up, I started feeling seriously ill 1.55 miles in, and had to walk for 3/4 of a mile.  So I didn’t have my best race (virtual or not) ever.

26 minutes and 13 seconds.  Just about how fast I ran first ever 5-K.  But hey, it was fun anyway (except for the whole feeling violently ill part).

Since we were at the gym anyway, I asked Aaron to give me my first swimming lesson.

If you read my 2012 bucket list, you may know that I want to do a triathlon this year and you may also know that I don’t know how to swim .  And by don’t know how to swim I mean, if you dropped me in the middle of the deep end of the pool, I would drown. I live in the desert, so not knowing how to swim hasn’t really affected my life too much.

Aaron on the other hand was a champion high school swimmer in addition to you know, the THREE Ironman races he’s finished. So I’d say he’s qualified to teach me.

My first ever swimming lesson made me realize how far I have to go.  I have an irrational fear of drowning. For example, it took me several tries before I was able to snorkel without having a nervous breakdown and on those occasions I had a floatie vest and a breathing apparatus.

I don’t know to kick.  I don’t know how to move my arms.  I don’t know how to breathe.  Putting my head underwater is terrifying. And Aaron let me know a sprint triathlon is 400 meters….I did about 100 today and thought I was going to die.  Even being a runner, swimming wears me out.

But I am still determined.  This was only the first lesson.  I imagine after about 5 more I will be able to at least make it across the pool without stopping to rest. And someday I will be able to stick my head underwater without thinking that I will die.

At least let’s hope.