SuperBowl Sunday

Swim the Suck

So yesterday was like a workout bonanza that just ended up getting a little out of hand if my hunger by the time the SuperBowl rolled around was any indication.  With Boston looming in 2.5 months, I am trying to run four days a week.  After a long run like Saturday, we all try to do a recovery trail run on Sunday morning.  So, I popped up early and I actually looked forward to getting up, because I am deeply immeshed in my new favorite thing.

I am having a love affair with hot chocolate mix in the bottom of my nespresso coffee cup.  I live for it and I need to let the 5 AM sugar fix go, but I am enjoying it too much.  SO, solid 7 mile trail run, 9.5 minute miles, one rolled ankle and one hard fall and easy enough. Once home, I morphed into hard core get to church on time mode.  Did I get to shower?  No I did not, but I feel like this was cancelled out by my appropriate church attire and bit of Chanel #5.

After church, I took a nap and then and then was invited to a SuperBowl Sunday swim where we swam 4900 meters in celebration of the 49th SuperBowl.  Now that I am writing it down, it all seems a bit extreme, but it is also part of my social life problem.  I live to run trails on Sundays to catch up with my trail running friends.  I like to swim at the SportsPlex on Sunday afternoons to catch up with my swim group friends, and every once in a while everything comes together on the same day in a big way.

Needless to say that by the time I got home from swim I was in full on hunger meltdown mode and I ate a significant portion of guacamole.

Needless to say, after yesterday, today was a light day.

Ahhh Boston Training

You know, whenever I get a marathon on the calendar, I sort of look forward to the training and everything that swirls around it.  I enjoy planning the runs and running a bit longer and spending the time with my running group.  I like all of it.  This is my first marathon to train for however, where I also have busy children.  So trying to balance 20 milers with swim meets that start at 8:00 AM is more of a challenge than in years past, and there is a chance that I may learn a hard lesson during this season of marathon training.  Family First!!!


Anyway, today I got to sleep in until 6:00 AM.  Now I say that, but here is the rub.  I heard the TV at 5:00AM and I wondered fitfully what it was, but did not move from my slumber.  When I did drag myself from the bed, I realized that it was my 6 year old.  He had gotten up and begun puttering about the house in the middle of the night and when I found him he told me that he had watched Puss in Boots, THE MOVIE, two times (from the DVR, which he knows how to work) .  TWO TIMES.  He was watching an episode of Good Eats with Alton Brown when I found him.   Who does this???!!!  I thought about it and I realized who does this:  a 6 year old creature who cannot quite tell time and does not have a time telling device in his room and has not been instructed that there is a clock in the corner of the guide function of the television.  He just knew that he woke up and was not allowed to wake up Mommy and Daddy (because you can be SURE that I taught him that early on), so he thought he would watch some TV.

Well, let me tell you, I marched straight out and bought a digital clock that I set beside his bed, and we had a tutorial about 6:00 AM.  No one gets out of bed or turns on a television or lights until the digital clock says 6 AM.  That is the new rule.  I did not know we needed it, but apparently we do.  So we have had a lot of discussion and practice and hopefully we will have a full night's sleep tonight.   I think what I experienced early this morning is maybe the hardest part of parenting: the things you have to catch on the fly, the unexpected stuff that you have to think through while you are tired.  I hope our discussion worked and tomorrow will be a brighter day.

Today, our 6 year old was the walking dead.  He had watched Puss in Boots TWICE when I found him at 5:00 AM, so that means he was up at 2 AM.  Aaaah, Lovers, 2 AM is only for the sleeping.  And 2 AM wakeup means 1:00 PM nap time, no matter how incensed you are that six is too old for naps.

Anyway, because of the unfortunate earlier than intended wake up for me and an 18 mile run to boot, I was a train wreck of sleep deprivation.  I climbed into bed when the children went down for a nap and slept for THREE HOURS.  Oh Goodness, I will never be able to go to sleep tonight.  Somehow, everyone tiptoed around me and let me sleep for way too long.  I guess that after we get over this early morning hump with my 6 year old, I will have to teach him how to only let Mummy have one sleep cycle of approximately 1.5 hours so that we can preserve the 8 hour night.

Trail run tomorrow and Superbowl swim.  It is going to be a fabulous day

Iris and Will are Cooler than Me

You know, I get it.  I'm 38 and I don't do a lot of cool things anymore outside of making creative lunches for my kids and trying not sound sound redundant in the reports that I write for work.  Though many times their lunches are not creative and my reports are quite redundant.  Those two previous sentences may be the most boring things that have ever typed from the ends of my fingers.  Good grief!!

Anyway, last night my husband was keen to attend a lecture given by two hikers who had crossed The Continental Divide.  The Continental Divide Trail goes from Mexico to Canada, crosses 5 states and is only 70 percent completed.  So 30 percent of the time, you are just wandering about with a compass hoping for the best.  The lecture started at 7:30 and my husband and I wanted to make a night of it and grab a quick dinner beforehand and I will just let you know that I planned an outfit.  That is how excited I was about my evening.

So, I had gotten a babysitter a week in advance and planned my whole day around having everything perfect so that our new babysitter had the minimum of work to do when she arrived at the house.  I needed her to focus all her efforts on bedtime to that the children would be asleep by the time we got home.  I threatened everyone within an inch of their lives if they did not go straight to bed and I hopped into the car with my most fabulous scarf, boots and a silver cross body bag.  Dinner went well until our first call from the babysitter.  She told the boys to go to bed and they said they did not want to go.  This seemed to me a solvable problem as she was bigger and had more authority, but I will stop all this as I am boring myself and will just say to you that we had received five phone calls by the time we arrived at the much anticipated lecture and I was so worn down that I just felt like we needed to go home.  Nothing like sitting through an event that you had really looked forward to attending while the phone buzzes with calls from the babysitter and your ability to listen and involve yourself is tainted if not ruined.

Anyway, while I am clearly not cool even if I was wearing a great scarf and a fabulous cross body bag, Iris and Will, the speakers were so cool that I could feel the breeze in the back row where we had to sit so that frequent calls from the babysitter did not annoy the VERY SERIOUS hikers who were in attendance.  Literally, we were the only people there without previously earned trail names.  Trail names are things you earn on serious hikes and mine would be "Bitter Mummy" just so you know.

Anyway, Iris and Will met on Instagram two years ago, and Will had apparently already done the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Coast Trail.  They quit their jobs and decided to take 6 months to do this hike. They assembled these massive boxes of food that they mailed to remote post offices to be picked up when they arrived.  They camped by the side of the road, got some sort of awful water poisoning from drinking out of reservoirs, hitchhiked to a doctor's office and then hitchhiked to a Walmart TWO HOURS AWAY to pick up antibiotics.  They talked about trail magic and people who helped them when they ran out of water.  Iris went through 6 pairs of shoes and even carried mascara in her pack. They hiked 80 miles most days, and had no cell phone reception and relied heavily on a compass. They went to sleep after the campfire burned out and slept late in their tents every morning. It was a tale of wonder which we did not get to hear the end of, because we had to leave and settle things with the babysitter and the children.  That is just the way it went.

Anyway, I did get up at 4:45 yesterday and take a spin class and then ran afterwards.  Today, I again got up at 4:45 and had a great swim!!  18 miler tomorrow to train for Boston!!!

Someone Looks Like Mummy Feels

Yes Mr. Sloan, I too feel the same!

Who got back in the saddle today??  This girl!!  I arrived at the pool at 5:25 AM only ten minutes late.  Many pats on the back have I given to myself.  Many times have I mentioned to various people in unrelated phone conversations that I worked out at 5:15 AM (which is the time that I should be in pool.  no need to mention that I am NEVER EVER punctual).

Things went pretty well following my early morning workout.  Everyone got to school on time and three year old G-Money and I got to story time at the library at a respectable time.  We checked out many books with ridiculous titles (Walter Kitty, for example). We ran many errands before I began to suffer the unavoidable consequences of the early morning workout.

Irritability and nap desperation hit me hard at about 2:00.  I was able to rest for a about half an hour before the frenetic firedrill of evening sports began swirling about us.  At 3:40 PM, I generally have to start running about the house rolling out orders like a drill sergeant while my children look at me in confusion as if it is the first time that they have every heard of a swim team.  It is ridiculous.  They ask me all sorts of questions, like "when does swim team start?", "where is swim team?" and "when will we be home?".  The answers to all of these questions are the same as they were in September when we started this mayhem, so it is a constant enigma that my children always respond to my innocuous "hop in the car for swim team, boys!" with suspicion.  Herding them into the car takes so much effort and stuffing of bags and snacks into the car that by the time I hit the driver's seat I am craving something that we Americans just can't have behind the wheel and it makes me feel terrible about everything.  After getting everyone to the pool, into the pool, goggles located, spare goggles located since the favorite goggles have been lost, and found place to sit, I am one spark short of a toaster.  The noise reverberating off the walls and the million times that I am splashed make life rather unbearable.

BUT, a great triumph that I had two hours to myself before the sun came up.  At 5:00 this morning, I was sane.

It Is Time

Who is up at 5AM??  This Girl!!!

Oh goodness, my three year old is halfway potty trained and I have a bit of free time in the evenings, and there are lots of goings on.  The biggest going on that I would say I am trying to incorporate into my life right now is the 5 AM workout.  Did I do it today?  No, I did not.  Am I going to do it tomorrow?  Not a bit.  However, I have done it the past 5 mornings, and it has been going on since September.

I usually take Mondays off from any sort of workout, and tomorrow, I have a day off so can work out a run in the middle of the day while the children are at school.  And, I will say that the 5AM workout puts a damper on life as I know it.  It is a re-envisioning of life.  It is going to bed at 8:45 and trying to figure out where your next nap is.

Sometimes I think that what the 5AM workout really means is that I am old or that I've given up.  Maybe in some way I was hanging on to the me in college that liked to stay up and watch David Letterman.  Those days might come back.  At present, however, there isn't really anything to stay up late for and there is A LOT to be said for riding to the gym and home from the gym in silence without my children yammering at me or each other for the entirety of the trip (I have great children; I really do).  I drink a solitary cup of coffee from the nespresso machine that I traded my neighbor for my juicer, and I put a bit of hot chocolate mix that I pilfered from my husbands camping food supply.  It is all rather lovely in the dark.

In fact, when I think in retrospect, what wasn't lovely was staying up rather late and being wailed out of bed by one of my two children tattling or fighting or sprinting into our bedroom and leaping into the middle of my deep morning sleep.  Staggering into the kitchen for coffee that I already wished was a stiffer sort of drink after the wake-up I had received and running about the house throwing the children into the car and hurling my messy self out the door in workout clothes was all more than slightly stressful.  This whole organized early morning workout works well for me.  I get back to the house and the children are up and drinking their Ovaltines.  I get nicely dressed and organized for school.

The fire drill of getting out of the house in the morning is not completely eradicated, but it is better I think.

I don't think that I will have to get up at 5AM forever.  I think, however, that right now, not schlepping children to the gym in the middle of the morning is the most productive thing I can do for the productivity of my days.  I am assuming that one day when my children are older and in school and have different activities that I don't have to be involved in intricately at all times I can work out with a later set of sleepers.  


Here is my 5AM schedule:

Sunday:  Trail Run - 6:20
Monday: day off
Tuesday: Spin and Run and weights
Wednesday: Swim
Thursday: Spin and Run and weights
Friday: Swim
Saturday: Long Run

New Shoes: Practically Perfect in Every Way-New Balance Fresh Foam

Tasteful Gray with a pop of color: totally on trend

Do you ever have that feeling that you need a shoes that will take you from the trail to the road and back to the trail and maybe a bit in-between with colors that aren't so obnoxious and a footbed that is light yet substantial? Then I would encourage you to grab a pair of New Balance Fresh Foam trail shoes that will go the distance.

One of the hottest Saturdays of the summer went very well on and off the trail!!  I met up at 6:00 AM for a four mile loop.  Met back at the trail head to hit the road for a 6 mile loop, then ran into old friends and power walked another mile and a half.

It was my inaugural run in a new set of shoes and I covered it all, the trail, the road and the power walk.  They stood the test.

Confession:  They stood the test so well, that I am wearing them on the plane tomorrow with turned up boyfriend jeans, a white t-shirt and a leather jacket.  The gray is so chic!!

#seemyrun #freshfoamtrail

Sadness: 11 miles in the YMCA Parking Lot in Old Shoes

So here is the thing:  I had to get in a long run.  Normally this happens on Saturday, but it was necessary to change up my routine so that I could get in a long swim on Saturday.

NOW IT GETS COMPLICATED.  I wake up at 4:45 multiple mornings a week, and I had a messy allergy day that involved medication and for all these reasons, I knew that I was going to be unable to wake up at 4:45 and run until 7:15.  I knew this was no going to happen.  Now, my older son was in kindergarten but I still had the two year old with me for the day.  He was not going to stay in the jog stroller for the long run, it was sweltering outside and I just don't do more than three miles with the jog stroller, nor does my two year old for that matter.  SO, my options were running thin.  I decided that the YMCA was going to have to make it happen for me and they did, albeit I feel we all did it begrudgingly.

SO, after dropping my youngest at the nursery, I ran a long 6 miles on a treadmill that had spotty television reception and sound that faded in and out while I watched Kelly Rippa interview Kerri Russell about the second installment of Planet of the Apes, which is a film that I probably will not see.  All in all, very dissatisfying.

But it gets worse.

After 6 miles on the treadmill, I was worn thin with my indoor workout.  The YMCA has a policy that if your child is in the nursery, you can run in the parking lot, but not leave the premises, lest some emergency unfold with your child.  I get it, I can't just leave my child at the YMCA and go galavanting off into the sunset while somewhere in the distance chariots of fire plays and my hair blows in the wind.  So it was, that I ran in the parking lot.  I told myself before I started that a lap around the parking lot was probably like half a mile and the run would not be that bad.  HOWEVER, like so many things I have told myself over the years, this turned out to be an exaggeration concerning the former and a lie concerning the latter.

A lap around the parking lot turned out to be 1/8 of a mile, the temperature in the blacktop parking lot was just unbearably hot and it felt like much more of a death march than a five mile run.  It was just terrible, and it will go down in the history of my exercise routine as one of my more foolish endeavors.

I remember reading an article in the New Yorker about a man with one leg who climbed Everest and the article, brief and somewhat scornful, begged the question "why"?  "Why" in terms of the danger, the risk to other climbers, the arduous nature of the trip; but it was a triumph in the face of a particular man's life tragedy and I don't know that it is for the New Yorker to ask the question "Why".    I feel, however, that it is within everyone's purview to ask me the question "why".

And I will say that I should have just let it go.  Lesson learned.  I should have been more flexible and thought of a different routine or just taken a nap and eaten a cookie.  Aahhh, long run.  Why did I let you guilt me into the silliest run I ever ran?