Oh Garmin, How I Want You

Hey Y'all!

As Katie reminded me this morning, only 46 days til Disney! I am so excited to have her counting down with me...and she's just as pumped as I am! Of course it's for kinda different reasons, but that's ok;-) She is excited to SEE a princess, while I'm excited to RUN with some!

I spent yesterday afternoon looking at training programs that will work for my 7 weeks until the Disney Princess Half Marathon March 7th. I have the advantage of already being in the pattern of having one long run a week, and several other shorter runs but I wanted to tweak it a bit so that 1) I don't get injured by overtraining, and 2) I am adequately prepared physically and mentally. I don't want to take the distance or the experience for granted.

So I found an intermediate schedule on Runner's World and I'm pretty much going with that. I started working backwards from Race Day, putting the runs into my calendar until I got to today. And lo and behold, today was a 8/9 mile long run...yippee!

So after church today, my mom took Katie and I headed to make myself a quick lunch and head out for my run. It's 60* here today and I was SO PUMPED to get to run outside! Now I don't know about you, but long runs are harder for me mentally than physically I think. I tend to over-obsess about them and totally psych myself out. So with this being my first outside run in quite a while and an 8/9 mile run looming at me I decided to let myself off the hook.

I told myself "Just run as far as you can, don't push too far, you did just have surgery 5 weeks ago. If you can go 5 miles, go 5 miles."

Well I went 5 miles TIMES TWO!!!! Yep, 10.5 miles and never hit a wall!! I got into a good pace pretty quick and just kept going. I felt like Dory "Just keep running, just keep running, running, running, running...." LOVE NEMO! And then toward the end when I was looping around by the car and was considering stopping because it had been 'long enough' I heard Caitlin in my head saying,

"Pain is temporary...Quitting is forever."

Thanks, Caitlin. I don't know where you came from...but thanks;-) So I just pushed ahead. I also saw my brother-in-law and his wife out running, training for the Komen Race in STL in June so I got the pleasure of cheering them on as they did the same for me. That was an unexpected surprise, and a NICE one at that!

So it was an amazing day! The only gripe I have is the fact that my highly-praised RunKeeper app for my iPhone failed me today :-( Yep. According to it, I went 3.94 miles in 1:42:46. Um, right. I KNOW BETTER. I guess it lost signal somewhere and never picked it back up. I was so disappointed, but I just kept pushing because the timer WAS still working and I know that outside I tend to run just a hair faster than 10:00/miles, plus I've run in the same location so much I pretty much know the mileage without looking. BUT STILL! I looovveeee seeing that big ol number when I finish! Not to mention all the other cool stuff it can do. Dang it! I want a Garmin Forerunner. A PINK GARMIN FORERUNNER. Badly. I'm hoping my hubby will read this and get me one for my birthday that's 2 weeks from tomorrow. And the link could help him *wink, wink*

Ok, so now I'm relaxing at home on the couch. I feel much better after my shower...there's was enough salt dried on me to have done tequila shots...I'm just sayin' ;-) I'm moving only to get food for the rest of the day. Have a great evening, friends!

xoxo