Pirates and my 7:18 mile

Some years ago, actually way less than you would guess from looking, the world was graced with the greatest mother it had ever seen:

She is the best gift giver ever, and the hardest person to buy a gift for ever. She even already has a giant spatula.

Showing off the bling when we were the only mother daughter duo who were both engaged.

 

Looking beautiful on my wedding day.

 If you want to read all about some of the many reasons she's awesome, check out my Mother's Day post. Happy birthday, Mom!


Our friend John also had a birthday this past Saturday, and we celebrated in the best way anyone could ever celebrate a birthday.

 An urban pirate cruise. Basically a bunch of grown ups pretending to be pirates while a pirate ship takes them around Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

I had a little trouble with my pirate face. My first attempt looked....special.

 And it didn't get much better.

 It didn't help that Eric was so good at it.

 They give you pirate clothes.

 And tattoos for the guns.

 As you can see, I gave up on attempting a pirate face and just went with looking scarily angry.

The pirates running the ship would yell things like "we're under attack! Man the canons!" And then you'd get to squirt landlubbers on shore with nasty water from the harbor.

 Here I am with the birthday boy.

After the cruise we sung a little karaoke, then took a cab back to John and Carolyn's apartment. Eric got a little tired when we arrived.

 We eventually convinced him to lay down on the air mattress.

 But in the morning he fell off while we were eating breakfast.

 Carolyn and I ate breakfast, hung out a bit, and went to the pool for nearly two hours. We came back up at 1:30 pm to this.

After all that excitement, I was still supposed to do my timed mile for Kari's "Proof you didn't peak in high school" challenge. I couldn't put it off any more since I'd already waited until the last day. To give it my all, I had wanted it to be my only workout of the day, but it was tough to fit that in during July, what with my second 50K, a half marathon, a duathlon, and training for and resting from all these events.

Before I even got out of bed air mattress that morning, I'd emailed Kari to say I completely sucked at life and was too hungover didn't think I could do it. But, I did want to work out yesterday, so I figured a workout that would only take (hopefully) 7-8 minutes was my best bet. 

After living it up the night before, I was pretty nervous.  Also it was about 96 degrees out, and I'd run 16 miles the previous day.

Oh delicious almond tequila, why did I drink so much of you?

I warmed up a bit, then randomly ran a mile around my  neighborhood (too lazy to drive to a track). I surprised myself by finishing in 7:18! Which was creepily my bib number!

 Sweatastic beauty was how Kari described me. That was nice of her. I would probably go with nasty sweaty beast.

I guess I didn't peak in high school, since when I tried to run the mile then I had an asthma attack after 3 laps, and the gym teacher forced me to finish, and then my asthma got so bad my mom had to come pick me up. Yup, I was awesome then too.