Did you know there's no traffic at 4am?

I've recently received two videos of my nephew laughing, and I knew if I didn't see it in person as soon as humanly possible I wouldn't be able to survive. So I scheduled a trip home for Presidents' Weekend (this weekend, for those of you who don't get bank holidays off).

My hometown is in upstate NY, so while they didn't get the worst of Nemo, they got about a foot of snow dumped on them. Naturally, my first thought was "how will this affect my running?", and the answer was "quite negatively". I don't own yaktraxx because I'm a soft Marylander now and Amazon Prime didn't even have them in my size. My YMCA membership does give me access to a treadmill there. So that left me either slogging through 20 miles of deep, icy snow or running 20 miles on the treadmill.

After a dream where I ran back and forth across the living room for three hours and called that my long run, I decided I needed to create option C. 

Running 20 miles before work. I've done that once before, but that was in August during the week given to teachers to set up our classrooms, meaning I could work at my own pace, take a break if I needed to, and most importantly wouldn't have people calling my name every single second. This was my longest run before actually teaching. 

All things considered, this was a pretty good run. The weather was decent, there's minimal traffic at 4am, and I listened to some hilarious podcasts and my audiobook. Surprisingly my legs felt fine even though I'd done another 20 miler 3 days ago. I even felt energetic at work, I wasn't dragging at all (probably all that meat) - but I'm sure that will come back to haunt me sooner or later.

To make things extra interesting I had four interns watching me all morning, and I was really concerned that I wouldn't be able to put together a coherent sentence, much less teach children AND model my profession for college students. 

Even more concerning was my outfit choice. Sometimes I look through old pictures for the blog and realize I'm wearing clothes that I've had for five years. 

Or ten years. 

I finally got some new clothes this weekend, and even though my fashion guru friend Casi helped me pick them out (and told me "no" like 37 times when I picked up lame crap that looked good to me), I was still worried about using them to create an outfit by myself.

I had a vision of these young college girls showing up and me thinking I was all fashionable but in their eyes being all Dr. Evil - "I'm hip, I'm cool!"


GIFSoup

So I had to spend Monday night texting pictures to Casi and my sister and get the fashionista approval.

The final selection.

In summary, I don't really know how I came off to the interns but in my mind I nailed it.

I listened to a hilarious two part podcast series about how delicious McDonalds is this morning which led me to take a brief pause during my run to investigate whether or not Shamrock shakes were finally out at the location nearest to us. They were. Game on. Then I stupidly drove home and sat down on the couch and completely forgot to get one. Somehow I convinced myself to walk over and get us some anyway because they would match my pants.

Yeah, not so much, but I'm pretty sure I made the right choice. 

Are you good at dressing yourself or are you like me?

What's the craziest thing you've ever done to get a workout in? This was nuts but 100% worth it for extra baby time this weekend!