Snowquester

As I mentioned yesterday, the treadmill has been set up, and not a moment too soon. Today is a snow day, and if we didn't have a treadmill, I would have actually had to go outside and run in the dreaded Snowquester.

Terrifying, right?

But thank god that wasn't the case. Instead,I got to run in style, while finishing the first episode of Downton Abbey on my Kindle. I wouldn't say I'm hooked yet, but it wasn't bad and I've been told to stick with it.

I swear I was actually running, not walking.

I thought you could see the sweet display from this angle, but I guess not.

It has buttons 1-10 for speed and incline, so you can just push the button to choose your speed, you don't have to hit the little up arrow a million times. I didn't even know this existed.

Since I might actually run on the treadmill more often now, I set the incline at 1.0 since that's supposed to be the minimum where no one can accuse you of cheating. We also set up a double layer of mats underneath it, and Eric said he couldn't feel the vibrations at all even when he was right next to me taking pictures (as opposed to before we had them when the whole freaking place was shaking).

So that's good since it means:
1. I can run in the morning without being that neighbor that everyone hates.
2. I'm not a fatty who will knock things off the walls with my running impact.

I returned to my handy dandy training plan and did yesterday's workout, 5 miles with 2 at marathon pace. The treadmill only tells me speeds in mph, so I did the 2 miles at 7.0, which turned out to be an 8:34 pace, so a little too fast, but whatev. 

Unlike a normal snowday, I was actually able to be ever so slightly productive. I worked on grad work for most of the morning. I made Eric take a picture to prove it.

And here it is.

He did apparently take a real one, after all.

#studying #proof

Now I have to get ready to go to my second job, and having to leave the house is really killing my snowday mojo. Being a grown up is hard, having to put on real clothes and have a job and all. Rough stuff.

What would you do if you got a snow day tomorrow (aka no work or leaving the house, whatever your job may be, it's imaginary, ok)?

Sleep trumps running - version 2.0

Last night, I moved all sorts of heavy stuff that I had no business lifting because Eric was going to the gym until late and I was determined to run on the treadmill Tuesday morning. I moved a whole bunch of stuff around to set the treadmill up in its new home (did I mention we live in an apartment and have no room for a treadmill?). I was in business for a morning run without having to deal with any of the nasty wind and other crap weather likes to throw at us runners.

Kari is coming to visit this weekend to run the marathon with me so I decided to that that opportunity to carry out my long term plan of SWF'ing her.

OMG, remember Livejournals? My roommates and I had an amazing one in college.

So, I started a book that Kari recommended (Gone Girl) and finally followed her advice to take melatonin before I went to sleep. 

That's nearly a year of killer sleep, right there in my hand.

That stuff is amazing, probably because of science, and I slept great. 

When it was time to run I got up, made the bed, and brushed my teeth. As I was brushing my teeth, I started thinking about how great it was going to be to run on my very own treadmill. Then I started thinking about how going back to bed would be even better. So that's what I did. Eric was pretty confused. 

I'm not too worried though, because as soon as everyone stops bitching about the cold it will be time to bitch about Maryland's horrible humidity, so I'll have plenty of time to develop a close friendship with the treadmill.

I posted a while ago about running 20 miles before work. That was fun and all, but you know what's a really good time? Going to work feeling nice and rested. I recommend everyone try it.

I am nailing this taper so freaking hard.

My morning was already off to a great start with all that extra sleep, and then my friend sent me this tweet, and that really sealed the deal.

I plan on implementing this first thing tomorrow.

Even with a three hour lecture on analyzing accountability data in grad class after school, I'd still rate today as a solid 8 out of 10. Maybe 7, because after dinner I made the unfortunate discovery that the special box of unseasonable Thin Mints that my parents gave me last weekend only had two left. 

Who would you want to SWF? 

You know you need a rest day when...

Here's a little inspirational tale of my night last night.

I finished my early bird special dinner around 4:45 pm, ate some ice cream, then settled in to do some much needed grad work. I could barely keep my eyes open, so I decided to call it a night, and was in bed by 5:30. And that, my friends, is how to push through adversity and truly succeed in life. 

In a cruel twist of fate, I couldn't even fall asleep until the more normal time of 9:30. Actually, it wasn't cruel at all, it was awesome. Like the level of laziness when you are sick, but without all the discomfort of actually being sick. 

Even though I was going to bed with the majority of my to-do list undone, I figured it would all even out, because with such an early bedtime, I'd surely wake up at 5am, raring to go, right?

Um, no. I barely mustered the energy to shut off my 5:30 alarm clock and kept sleeping until 7:30 and still felt wrecked. Marathon week is now upon us, and in my opinion, once you make it here, sleep trumps running. At this point you aren't going to really get any more or less prepared for the race, but you can still easily screw yourself by showing up at the start exhausted. So this will be the one week where I don't follow my training plan, and who knows, I may not even run at all until marathon day!

I wasn't a complete and total sloth yesterday. On the contrary, we had our first football game! We are playing in the same social league that we played Broomball with this past winter.

Our team color is "Daisy". Watch out.

Eric is really, really serious about football - he was captain of his high school team, went to college on a football scholarship, coached high school football, and plays in a minimum of like 5 fantasy leagues each year. I....tried to read the league rules Saturday night, and got bored after less than 10 minutes. 

I get serious anxiety about sports with balls because I'm always terrible at them. Right before the game, Eric told me that he'd bragged about me being a marathon runner to everyone on the team. In my vast experience of this game plus that one other one I played that time, this leads to two things. 
1. People thinking that means I will be able to help out the team by sprinting fast.
2. People being disappointed.

While it does appear on the surface that marathon running and football may be related, as they both involve running, actually training to run 26.2 miles is about as helpful knitting or scrapbooking. 

Still, the game was fun, although we lost, and I "tackled" a guy (it's really two hand touch) and successfully stopped a play, so I sort of helped. 

Even though I played for a whopping 40 minutes, I'm sore in weird places. All the more reason for a rest day. Plus, I have a problem with patience, so even though Eric told me he'd move all our stuff around and set the treadmill up tomorrow, I couldn't wait and rearranged all sorts of heavy stuff after work. 

Do you ever let sleep trump running? Probably not, most other bloggers are majorly hardcore.

Have you ever played any rec sports?

My March Madness

It's FINALLY March! I have been waiting and waiting for this month for a variety of reasons.

1. Today is Harrison's 7 month birthday! Ok I haven't been waiting and waiting for that, but it's still exciting.



2. This year's standardized testing will finally be over.



3. Spring break begins! Only 25 more days. But who's counting?

4. The Host comes out! I only know one other person (my work BFF, Kristin) who is excited about this or even knows what it is, but that's enough for me. The Host is another book by the same author who wrote the Twilight series. Obviously Twilight is on it's own level and this can't be compared to it, but I listened to it on audiobook in the car and it was pretty good. So I've really been looking forward to the movie, especially since all my other young adult dystopian novel events (Catching Fire coming out, the third Divergent book, the Divergent movie, etc) are much too far in the future right now.

This one is about aliens, not vampires.

5. Game of Thrones, season 3 begins. In exactly 4 weeks. Again, not that I'm counting down the days or posting trails excessively on Facebook or anything.

I'm about to make a really bold statement, and I've given it a lot of thought to make sure I truly stand behind it. 

I'm looking forward to GOT season 3 just a tiny bit less than I was looking forward to the Hunger Games movie at this time last year. If HG was a 10 on the anticipating scale, GOT3 is like a 9.8.

The downside is that we caught on to Game of Thrones late in the game, so for seasons 1 and 2 we watched the whole thing back to back over just a few days. Now we'll actually have to wait a week in between episodes, which sounds horrible.

6. It's marathon time.

Just one week left until the Lower Potomac Marathon and the nerves are finally starting to creep in. I've only ran 25 miles this week (5 are on the schedule for later today). Another way to put that would be that I've run fewer miles over the course of this entire week than I will be running all at once and it was still hard. 

Monday: 5 miles

Tuesday: NOPE

Wednesday: I ran 6 miles. It was supposed to be 7 but that damn snooze button got me. It was also supposed to be 2 at 10k race pace (7:50) but that was another fail, those two ended up being 8:15 and 7:55. 

Thursday: NOPE

Friday: supposed to be a 5 mile morning run, ended up being a 4 mile evening run at 8:35 on OUR NEW TREADMILL (more on that once we get it totally situated). 

Saturday: 10 mile run at the pathetic pace of 9:50, pathetic because it actually felt hard.

So as you can see, the theme of this week is run less and run slower than I'm supposed to. I'm not trying to make excuses, but honestly I felt that stress and grief hit me hard and it wasn't my best 7 days all around. But my new motto is "WWGD" (what would Gram do?) and she'd turn it around and focus on the positive. 

Yikes, that was cheesy, but I'm allowed to have my moments in between all the sarcasm.

What are you excited for this month? And if it's Game of Thrones or The Host I will be emailing you to talk about it.

Our new addition

10 days until marathon day! Also known as - let the weather stalking commence!

I would ordinarily be starting to get super nervous at this time, but in what I have yet to decide is a stroke of genius or total idiocy, I'm running a marathon right in the middle of Maryland schools state testing. So far, it's looking pretty good, since I'm so constantly stressed about testing that the idea of even being able to command my brain to stay focused on any other subject at all, much less long enough to become stressed, is hilarious. 

I had to add Gifs to this post because everyone was doing it.

The downside is that I don't deal with stress well. I'm not one of those lunatics that can't eat under stress, don't worry, nothing like that, but good sleep is pretty much out the window. 

Not exactly relevant but....PACEY.

Now, I know as a nearly 30 year old non parent complaining about lack of good sleep is grounds for tarring and feathering, but this is my blog and I'll do what I want. Last night, I couldn't fall asleep, then had nightmares about testing and the like, then woke up at 3:30 in a panic and couldn't fall back asleep. This last part was particularly upsetting because the one way in which I feel I am even somewhat equipped for someday keeping an infant (any myself) alive is that I am extremely good at immediately falling back asleep no matter what wakes me up in the middle of the night. I just can't afford to lose that skill.

All this has me really wondering how people who have jobs that are truly stressful manage. Doctors, nurses, anyone in the medical field, police officers, air traffic controllers, President Obama, Katniss - please weigh in.

But all is not lost. First of all, my life is slightly less of a mess now. When I came home from selling running shoes at 10pm last night, Eric had folded and put away all the laundry that had been covering the living room. More importantly, he made me brownies. Which are now gone. And I "only" had three. Do the math.

It gets better. When I came home today, this was happening.

Can you tell what it is?

A TREADMILL!!!

We'd been talking about getting a treadmill for awhile now. It was on a long list of things we were waiting until we bought a house to do, and we've pretty much decided screw the list, because that's not happening anytime soon and we ain't getting any younger. 

Right before Valentine's Day, Eric texted me (a big deal in and of itself) telling me there was a groupon for half off a treadmill, and we decided that would be our Valentine's Day gift, even though we never even get each other Vday gifts. Cost, justified (plus I'm quitting my gym). 

I've ranted about hating the treadmill before, but that was before I knew the joys of watching movies on the treadmill. Plus, spending my last two weekends in a hotel was quite an eye opener about how much easier it is to get motivated to run when it's cold and you don't have to go outside at all. And of course, the number one reason we wanted one is for down the line when we have little copper colored friends who need constant supervision. This is in no way a pregnancy announcement, but, just saying. 

How do you handle stress - I'm not just curious - I seriously need some ideas. Drinking and chocolate are great and all but they really only get you so far.

Edited to add: This just happened.

"Do you need help?" "No I'm good".

My life is a hot mess

I've been mentioning here and there that it's taper time, and I forgot to include a little definition for my loyal non-runner readers. The taper is the weeks leading up to a big race where you run less and eat more. (The run less part is the accepted definition, the eat more is my own personal interpretation. Sometimes you need to read between the lines.) The point is to calm the hell down on the crazy mileage and let your legs get super rested so that come race day, you have nothing but energy.

This taper is highly exciting. I've run 8 marathons, but only tapered for 3. 4 of the others were done back to back during ultra training, and when I ran the Lower Potomac Marathon last year (the same race that I have coming up) it was because I unexpectedly got a free bib. Ideally, the the taper will help me run faster during the race. Hopefully that will be the case since I won't have the "oh, whoops, couldn't run fast because I'm really training for my 50 mile race!" excuse available this time.

More importantly, I need this freaking taper because my life is a hot mess. Not overall, but in all sorts of minor ways. Our living room is covered with laundry, my desk at work is covered in papers, I just returned library books ridiculously late, I'm super behind on my reading for grad class, and even worse, Eric and I are weeks behind on all our TV shows (and we don't even watch that many). The DVR is 83% full, which means the situation is really getting dire. I obviously shouldn't even be writing this blog post, but most of those things are really boring and unpleasant and I've already had a long day of work and class. 

I only have to run 30 miles this week, so theoretically there should be time to get my ducks in a row. This is why I never get why every blog is all "it's the taper, what am I going to do with all my free time?". In my case it's always crystal clear - you do all the crap you've been putting off and really needing to do for god only knows how long. That might just be me though, as I tend to be completely disorganized and great at procrastinating and avoiding every other task in order to get my run in.

Source: stumbleupon.com via Nicole on Pinterest

This is my life.

In other news, Sunday night, when Eric and I got home from Pennsylvania I somehow managed to prep this Tortellini Sausage crock pot soup before getting on my robe and refusing to move from the couch until bedtime. I actually followed the recipe and only added frozen red peppers, onions, and garlic because making soup without onions and garlic is just a gigantic waste of everyone's time. Never mind, change "making soup" to "making anything other than dessert". It was really good (and there's still lots left), so my public service announcement is to make it. You're welcome.

Is your life a mess or are your ducks in a row?

New celebrity crushes

We're in full on taper mode for my upcoming marathon (less than two weeks to go!) so running may be a little boring (today was 5 miles at 8:51 after work). Luckily, I have some new celebrity crushes to talk about.

I'm not real hip and with it, I've literally never once been to Perez Hilton, and I'm just generally embarrassingly behind and out of touch with celebrity gossip. Therefore, when I actually branch out and learn who new celebrities are, much less develop crushes on them, it's kind of a big deal. 

Ladies first: my new girl crush is Jennifer Lawrence.

How can you not love this?

I didn't really like her at all, at first. It wasn't really her fault. Once an actor is cast in a really important role (which I define as "they are in a movie or show that I watch over and over"), I really don't appreciate them breaking character to portray other roles or do personal interviews. Example: Tom Hanks is, and will always be, Forrest Gump to me, end of story.

Example 2: I specifically remember my mom taping an interview with Mr. Big for me, and I mean really taping, as in with a VHS cassette. Old school. 

To find this google image, I typed in Mr. Big - I don't know his "real" name.

I had to turn it off when he started referring to conversations with "Sarah Jessica" and not Carrie. Let's not even get started on him discussing Law and Order. You may be picturing me as a teenager with my mom taping things for me, but I know it was when I lived in Baltimore, so I was old enough to have graduated college and have begun my career. 

So I didn't truly dislike Jennifer Lawrence when I first discovered who she was, I just didn't like her being all non-Katniss in interviews and stuff. But I've managed to move past that and now I kind of love her. I saw some cute clips of her on the Today show this morning so I was all excited to watch more interviews tonight. Unfortunately, my joy was short lived when I quickly discovered that her best actress Academy Award wasn't for Hunger Games? I was really busy watching How I Met Your Mother reruns for the 10th time each last night, so this was a total shock. I've heard that's a good movie and all, but from what I understand Peeta isn't even in it, and there's no arena or anything. 

Just go to the bakery and I'm sure Peeta will hook you up. 

My new male crush: Nev Schulman, host of MTVs Catfish, which by the way is my new favorite show. If you've seen it, yes I am aware he has ridiculously excessive body hair, but the crush stands.

This picture made me suddenly realize that he looks just like an old Starbucks coworker that I used to
have a crush on and now I'm kind of freaked out.

I have concocted a detailed plan in which I will end up on the show and meet Nev, but unfortunately I cannot reveal it here, as he is a master internet sleuther (that's the whole premise of the show - he gets to the bottom of internet dating stories where one party is using a false identity, a la Manti Te'o).

That about wraps it up for my celebrity crushes, except that I just want to make it clear that I still love Katy Perry, Jillian Michaels, and The Rock.

Did you watch the Academy Awards? The acceptance speeches make it unbearable for me. And not seeing any of the movies. And not knowing who anyone is.

Who's your celebrity crush?