Time to spend a few minutes in the blogging confessional:

Pardon me for being Goofy…

Yesterday I made a critical error.  I wrote a blog earlier in the day and added my mileage for the night.  7 miles.  It was a tempo.  I had ZERO desire to do it.  And I predicted how I’d feel.

7 Miles
Meh

Whoops.

Just goes to show, that no matter how bad you feel, you never know when a good run will creep up on you.  I anticipated 7 tempo miles, then thought, “Maybe I’ll just do 10 easy” and slipped into the neonest compression socks you’ll ever see.

Nothing says “overcoming ninja running [dressed all in black] tendencies” like head to toe day glow.  I set out and found myself clipping along and repeatedly hitting 7-7:25 second miles.

Until around 4.5 miles where I remembered why I hate running and seriously contemplated why in the world I was training for a marathon and thought about all of the fun things I could be doing instead of running longish tempo runs right then – at the skate park with the kids, buying Girl Scout cookies in front of the grocery store, casually riding my bike down the trail.

Until I saw these two strolling along.

Skinny Runner & Monica

To be honest, I hardly saw them because I was petrified of that beast of a dog SR was walking [pictured above].  Yeowzas!

After a quick little chat I was able to pound out not the 10 slow miles, but 7 really fast [for me] miles and finished with a nice average 7:23 pace, including a cool down mile.  Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.  Forget my tired legs, my craptastic attitude and general mental apathy going into the run…like a bad cold or a Lifetime movie, sometimes a good run just sneaks up on you.

What was the last really good run you had?

Do you often see random people you know on your run?
Other than SR and Monica today, my usual random run ins include squirrels and people I know driving by in the car dropping their kids off/picking them up from school.

6 miles
Speedy Strides

The last 6 months have felt like a series of constant derailments in my running.  Sure, I’ve had a few big PR’s, but as far as my training it feels two steps forward, one step back.    Twisted ankles, tweaky feet, sick kids, have all stood in the way between me and my goals and feeling okay about my running.

So last week I had an internal mental tantrum that rivaled any two year old, which resulted in me mentally screaming – NO MOOOOOOORRRRRE! and laying down the gauntlet in my mind.  I was putting my big girl panties on and buckling in for the wild ride that is 10 weeks to Boston.

But apparently life has other plans….

Me wearing a Tinker Bell shirt.  No seriously I send this sick kid pic to my mother, who’s response is, “What’s happening?  You’re wearing a  Tinker Bell shirt”.   (not that there’s anything wrong with that, I’m just a sports shirt, solid v-neck wearing kinda gal myself so my attire was more surprising than the deluge of sick kid pics I’ve been sending her).

But seriously the week has included:

-One case of stomach flu

-One case of influenza

-One case of strep

Luckily this is with my kids at the moment, and I’ve already had the influenza bug they have.  But stomach flu and strep – notsomuch.  We’re usually a pretty healthy bunch of people who hardly get slapped with evil viruses and bacterias of this sort.

So in lieu of clothing and running clothes this week, I think I’m going to just hang around wearing this fabulous getup this week.  Cover my goals in prayer, hope and a lot of Lysol and see what happens.

What do you do when your training is derailed?