Guess what it's doing outside?!?!?

The camera on my phone is absolutely awful, but yes...it is snowing. I'm currently on the third floor of PWPL doing some homework and I wish I had a better camera! The Front street clock looks awesome through the snow! I'll be wrapping up here in about a half hour and be heading to the gym. No outside exercise for me, I had too much junk to do while it was light out.

128.5

**Edited to add: I just saw kids skate skiing down the street. Granted, I see people skiing down the street all the time, but SKATE skiing requires a lot of snow. I <3 the U.P.

Old habits die hard

...the real purpose of running isn't to win a race. It's to test to the limits of the human heart.
-Bill Bowerman

I've been heartless for 3 and a half years...Grand Island didn't count since it was an off the couch marathon....time to find my heart again.

Joys

Last night, we went to dinner at L'Attitude and then to a Teaching Family Homes benefit at the UpFront in the banquet room. Got to hang out with some friends and some folks from work as well. A good time was had by all until we got home and realized that it was 57 degrees in our house...and the heat was set at 64....

The culprit? We have radiant heat, so yes, it was frozen heat pipes We had an issue with a water pipe earlier in the day, but that was a quick fix (relatively). Sam cut a hole in the wood downstairs, warmed it up with a blowdrier, and reinsulated areas around the pipes. This was not such an easy fix; my guy stayed up all night buying a few electric heaters and worked to warm up the areas in our crawlspace. Around noon, success! The pipes began to thaw....and revealed that they had cracked when they were frozen! Awesome...but then a lightbulb went on. We pay for this darn homeowner's insurance; now is the time to use it! I called my agent (a friend from Munising) and it turns out if we called a plumber in the first place, it would be covered. So now I'm just hanging out, waiting for this guy to finish his job. :)

Good run this morning with lightly falling snow. I needed to do a few miles at race pace, but I wanted to head down and see if there were any decent trails to run on. There are a few down by the Dead River. I took the road less traveled by.

51 minutes (20 minutes easy pace, 20 minutes race pace, 11 minutes easy pace)

129

What's in a name...

The first time I heard "lucky loser" at a ski race, I thought it to be derogatory, however, it really is someone who has been given another chance to succeed. We all have our bad days. Matt and I were talking today and I said, "This is the year." Even if I said that last year, there is always a second chance....so here it goes, "This is the year."




A lucky loser is a sports player who loses a match in the final qualifying round of a knockout tournament, but who then enters the main draw when another player withdraws after the tournament has started because of illness or injury. The lucky loser then enters the main draw, normally in place of the withdrawn player. This can only happen until all players in the main draw have started their first match in the tournament.

It's not common in male tennis within Association of Tennis Professionals tournament that a lucky loser wins a tournament, Christian Minussi did it in 1991 in Sao Paolo and Sergiey Stakhovsky in Zagreb 2008 In total 5 people have done it since 1978.

http://www.reference.com/search?q=Lucky+Loser

Accessed January 16, 2009

90 minutes spinning/abs.

20 min easy pace on the treadmill.

129.

130

My love affair...

Looks can be deceiving...

It is a beautiful day in Marquette! Unfortunately, it is also FREEZING! So much so, that I actually got the call about school being canceled around 10:15 last night. It was awesome being able to sleep in this morning. Usually, on snow days, I am like a kid on Christmas; I can't ever fall back asleep because I am too excited! Anyhow, the temperatures are below zero still. It was -9 when I woke up around 8!

That being said, I went to the gym this morning instead. I don't want this blog to turn into gloom and doom/me complaining all the time, but I do need to vent about one thing. Last Friday, on my day off, I went for a pretty tough ski out at Forestville. It was especially tough because I had my first asthma attack in over 10 years. It was crazy. At first, I thought it was me being out of breath and out of shape, but at the top of a hill, I stood for about 10 minutes and was unable to catch my breath. My lungs were on fire and I was shaking and gasping for air. It was so strange! This morning on the treadmill, the same thing happened. My lung capacity is not what it used to be, which is all the more reason for me to take on this fitness endeavor. I'm not going to use that as an excuse. There are no excuses in this endeavor. I'll keep you posted on that.

AM Workout
45 minutes treadmill, built during run to 7:30 pace, ran 7:30 pace for about 4 minutes and then slowly went back down.
15 minutes of abs

The Race of Life

I was thinking today about how a 10k race is like life. When you start out life, you all start out in a big pack. The pack begins to thin out after a few Ks and you find your groove. In finding that groove, you begin to run the same pace as others around you. When you're near those people, you tend to chat with them a bit and get to know them. Somewhere mid-race, you kick into gear and meet up with a new pack of folks. Some of them want to chat, but now everyone is getting more intense and concentrating more on even breathing; talking only gets in the way. The last 2k are off the hook; you are in the zone and no one exists except for you. After the finish line, the group becomes homogeneous again; slow and fast runners intermingle and tell their stories again.

The point of this whole vignette? I was thinking about training partners and groups. I've had many in my day, and I feel that this blog is the start of a new sort of training partner. Today, however, I would like to concentrate on someone that I ran a lot of that race of life with.

I had the most amazing training partner in college. We started training together in the summers. We spent hours on the track and in the gym. My training partner made our workouts something to look forward to. We sang through our runs, made crazy shirts and sports bras, and spent summer mornings laughing together. Along the way, we fell in (and out) of love, so we cried together. Then we laughed together a little more. My training partner and I didn't always run the same speed for intervals, but our lives were on the same track. My training partner became a life coach. Then, one day, our paces changed. Eventually, we began to enter separate races and we ran across the globe, away from each other. Now, we probably aren't running races of life....maybe we're playing rugby or lacrosse or something that doesn't even look like a running race anymore. I wave at my training partner from the sidelines from time to time...but hopefully I'll join her team and we can play together soon.

Until then, I run this trail alone...everyone else is focusing on breathing and running their own race...

PS. Actually, I didn't run at all today. I'm sitting on the couch, drinking hot chocolate. :(