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By kilax, July 17, 2015 8:59 am

Ooo, Christina got me good.

I was unpacking my suitcase Sunday night and… wait a minute… what is that hidden between my clothes?!

Ha ha ha. I die. The ‘ole MBP* bracelet.

So last July, when Steven, Rachel, Mom and I were in Kansas City, and we were about to start the drive back home, Christina pulls up next to us in her car and motions for us to roll our car window down. We do, figuring she wants to say one last goodbye, but instead, she throws something in the car, laughs, then drives away.

What the heck? We looked at what she threw in, and sure enough, it was this bracelet. Which she received at a bachelorette party.

Instead of throwing it away (like a normal person), I held on to it. Later that summer, Steven and I left it hanging somewhere in my parents’ cabin. Then my mom snuck in back in to my snister’s place later in the year. Then the two of them TRIED to hide it in my coat on New Year’s Day, but I found it and had Will hide it in Christina’s makeup bag. Muah ha ha.

And then I forgot about it. Until now. Like I said, Christina got me good!

Now the bracelet is back at my house, but lucky me, I am seeing both my mom AND snister next week. So it won’t be here long!

Aren’t family shenanigans fun?!

*male body part

Comments (26)

By kilax, July 16, 2015 6:24 am

• I’m still knitting! I haven’t dedicated time to learning any new skills, so I’m still just knitting lots of washcloths for my mom and her mom. However, Mica sent me some DPNs (double pointed needles), I still want to make those cacti for my snister, and I just received these fun knitting books! So I have some ideas for what I want to try when I get around to it. And I want to start holiday gifts soon. Keeping them secret while I work on them is going to be hard for me, ha ha!

• Have you ever had to take one of those personality tests for work? The one where they tell you your strength and weaknesses in areas like leadership, influencing others, working in a team, etc.? I always score low in the area of influencing others/selling ideas, because I HIGHLY DISLIKE TRYING TO INFLUENCE OTHER PEOPLE. Especially when I don’t have the authority to do so. I don’t want to be a sales person, period. I am more of a “live and let live” person – in all areas of life. (Ha, that doesn’t mean I don’t often wonder why people do the things they do, just that I don’t want to tell them how to do things, myself.)
• We had a beautiful lightning storm here Monday night! I could have stayed outside all night watching it, but… that’s not safe! Ha.

• One of my goals for the year was to take a swim lesson (to see how my form is) and I have it scheduled for this month. I am excited about it, and hope that I am able to remember all the things the coach is bound to tell me are messed up with my form. No, I am not doing a triathlon. A few people have asked me lately “Why don’t you just do one?” since I run and bike, and sometimes swim. Eh, just not interested in it right meow. Maybe someday though!
• Oh my gosh, talking with a coworker yesterday about her daughter coming back home from a three week summer trip reminded me how mean I was to my mom and sister when they picked up me and my dad from the airport on our return leg from Spain in 2002 (when I was 17 years old). I did NOT want to be coming home. And they were so excited to see us, and I think even made “welcome back” signs. And I was just like “eh, whatever.” Sigh. I still get this hurt feeling in my heart when I think about how I treated them. But… that was thirteen years ago! Ha! Hopefully they don’t ever think about it.

Link to Random Thoughts Thursday 73

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By kilax, July 15, 2015 6:13 am

I received Meb for Mortals as an early birthday gift. YAY!!! I am ready for all your “secrets*,” Meb! Ha ha.

So far, I’ve only read the first chapter, on the importance of setting goals (basically, using the SMART criteria). I like that Meb emphasizes that goals DON’T have to be pace based and I especially liked what he said about goal sharing:

I’m not advocating telling the whole world your goal. Stick with a small group of people who you know will care enough to want to help you reach it. With everyone else, underpromise and overdeliver.

When I read that I was hoping he’d go in to more explanation behind his thought process on underpromising and overdelivering, but he didn’t. Obviously, I get that you should share your goals with people who actually care about your progress and will help you be successful. But with some athletes being more publicly open about their specific goals (see Shalane Boston 2015), I wonder what it is that tells Meb to keep some things to himself – is it an innate feeling or something a coach advised him on?

I wonder because that’s how I am – I share very little (if I have a goal at all). It just doesn’t work for me** to publicly announce a goal and have more than those few, caring people know about it. I hadn’t thought about it as “underpromising and overdelivering” with everyone else though. That’s interesting. I wonder what other things I’ll read in the book that make me go “hmm.”

Who would be in your small group of people you share goals with? Or does broadcasting them work for you?

*Which he specifically says aren’t “secrets,” ha ha.
**And I am not denouncing this method for other people! I just know what works for me. 

Comments (24)

By kilax, July 14, 2015 12:30 pm

Mother Nature was working against me Friday and Saturday!

Or rather, Mother Nature has been working against Kansas City since… May. Ha ha. And we just got to experience some of the aftermath.

It started at the Royals game Friday night. Last year, when Rachel and I traveled to Kansas City for the Psycho Psummer Trail Run, we ended up dropping from the 20 mile to 10 mile distance because the race was taking us longer than we thought it would, and we didn’t want to be too wiped out to enjoy the Royals game the night of the race (priorities!).

So this year, we REALLY wanted to do the full 20 mile distance (two loops on the course), and decided to attend the Friday night Royals game, so we wouldn’t feel like we had to be anywhere after the Saturday race. Perfect planning – attend the game, get to bed by midnight, and get six hours of sleep – that works!

Only… not so much. Ha ha. A storm started coming in right before game start, and then it POURED rain. For almost two hours.

We had fun hanging out and goofing around (and complaining about how much our feet and legs hurt from standing so much) while we waited for the game to start…

Steven and his dad were there too

… but it didn’t start until after 9:00! Eek!

We watched as much of it as we could, but left after the fourth inning so we’d still get a decent amount of sleep before the race. Bummer. But – the Royals won! Woot woot!

Before we got to Kansas City, I was wondering how all of the rain they’d been getting would affect the trail course for the race (and even more so after the pre-race night of rain!). The race organizers (the awesome Trail Nerds!!!) addressed it on their Facebook page and in a race email. They changed the course a bit so less of it would be in the mud, and gave us a warning that the first two miles would be mud, and it would clear up after that.

I was thinking, “Wow, only 2 miles? How is that possible?” followed by “Well, I can deal with it for two miles.”

No. No I can’t. Too much of the course looked like this:

I love trail running, and I love getting dirty – running through puddles and mud, and falling in them doesn’t phase me. I expect to get dirty and fall on the trails, and laugh about it.

I don’t expect to walk, at a 25 minute per mile pace or SLOWER for most of the course (it took us 4:14:30 to cover 10.2 miles – last year it took just under 3 hours). I don’t expect to lose my shoe (ha ha!). I don’t expect to feel completely demoralized. I don’t expect to run only about 10% of the course.

Sigh. This was hard, guys. Mentally, not physically (I wasn’t even sore from the race the next day).

Within the first two miles, yep, Rachel and I were both thinking about dropping to the 10 mile distance. But who was going to say it first? I am happy she did – I thought I was just being weak-minded, but I wasn’t.

And guess what? That mud didn’t stop at two miles (how could it? and could you imagine what a second loop would have been like?! even worse!). I would say 60% of the course was like that. Just when you’d get going, you’d come across more mud. How do you run through this?

That’s not safe for us non-local runners (I really shouldn’t have even stopped to take pics – that alone was dangerous – you could totally fall and hit your head on one of these rocks!) who aren’t good on the large rock terrain to begin with to TRY to run on.

Of course, I am happy the race was still held AT ALL! They could have canceled, due to the trail conditions. And Trail Nerds did a ton of race prep to clear the path (brush, etc) so we could make it through. They had awesome aid stations, amazing volunteers, and a rocking DJ. And race photos included in your entry fee!

I like how deceiving they are about the conditions of the course, ha!

Trail Nerds put on an AWESOME event. Why else would we be back, wanting to go for the full 20, another year? It’s just too bad the trail was like this.

But we felt better when we heard other people coming up behind us (the 10 milers started at 9:00, an hour after us, so they did catch up – HOW DO PEOPLE RUN THROUGH ALL THAT MUD?!) and cussing about the course. We felt better when we saw that TONS of people dropped from the 20 to the 10, and from the 50K to the 20 or 10. We felt bad when we saw posts of people who DNF’d (did not finish) because of the conditions. But… even those people were cheery about it. Trail runners are a happy bunch!

Although I do have to say, I had a very whiny moment on the trail. During mile 2, my right shoe decided to stay behind in the mud when I was walking through it, ha ha. So I fell in the mud and was trying to pull my shoe out (it felt suction cupped in!) to put it on my muddy sock, which took longer than I thought it would. Then I was walking through the mud, when a slippery muddy sock in a muddy shoe.

I looked at my watch and saw that we were almost to an hour and I hadn’t eaten anything since race start. I pulled out a Clif gel to eat and when I tried to open it, the top ripped off but left the package closed, with the gel squirting out the side. My hands were covered in mud, and now the package was too, and I just started whining. Rachel asked what was wrong, probably thinking I was hurt or something, and when I whined “My Clif gel didn’t open right and is coming out the side!” she was just like “… um, why don’t you eat it out the side, then?!” So logical, but I was all EFF THIS CLIF GEL I HATE YOU!

Sigh. Not my best race moment. I was surprised to see myself go to such a dark mental place. That rarely happens to me at races. But, I don’t think I have done a race before that mentally beat me down so much. Rachel and I just wanted to run, but couldn’t.

It was either like this:

or this:

Okay, we did get to run in some spots:

But like I said, we MAYBE ran a mile the entire time. Ha ha! We went out for a (dry paved trail) run on Sunday to make sure we were still runners and get our runner cards back. Luckily, we were successful with that run.

And luckily, we were laughing about the race and making fun of ourselves shortly after. I was surprised though, as someone who almost always tries to put a positive spin on my “athletic” endeavors, that I did not hesitate to tell anyone how horrible this was. But! It made us stronger runners, and we got to bond with other people on the trail. And I know Rachel still wants to be my friend after seeing my crazy clif gel frustration. Ha.

Oh, and maybe all that mud is good for our skin? Not. It dried out and felt itchy. As do all the mosquito bites we got on the trail. Hmm, what else can I complain about? The heat? Nah, with this being mostly shaded, it was no big deal that it was 86º with a feel like temperature in the high 90s. I mean, we were soaked, but had no issues other than that!

Now to decide what to do for next year! I love visiting Kansas City with Rachel, but maybe we’ll have to send a scout over to check out the trails before we register for this race again. Or, pick a new race. The I-35 Challenge is calling our names…

I hope this didn’t come off as me complaining about the race organizers, because I am not, at all. They rock. What control would they have over the trail, and rain? They did an amazing job with what they were handed. I could really see myself doing more of their races and hanging with this group if I was local – they seem like a lot of fun. And how amazing would it be to train on those hills and terrain? I would come back to the trail races I do where I live and find them much easier!

And I LOVE the race shirt and cup we got this year. We got a medal too (same one as last year). It may take me awhile to wear that shirt though, ha!

The rest of our day and visit was FANTASTIC! We spent Saturday prepping food with my snister for a cookout, then the three of us went to a local pool (which felt amazing!). After the pool, my in-laws came over to my snister’s for the cookout and games. On Sunday, Rachel and I ran, went to a big cat sanctuary and hung out at my father-in-law’s place before flying back to Chicago. It’s funny, we flew (instead of driving) this year so we’d feel like we had more time there but it still felt SO short! Maybe next year’s trip will be a bit longer!

Dessert recipes here
OMG, this whipped cream is DA BOMB

Comments (5)

By kilax, July 13, 2015 12:16 pm

Highlight of the Week: Running with Rachel, and laughing about how miserable Saturday’s race made us, and how whiny I got at one point.

Monday | July 6, 2015: 5 m run + teaching strength class
Loc: hood, Temp: 78°/80°, Time: 47:59, Pace: 9:36 avg, Difficulty: medium/hard, Felt: hot
Strength: Body Bars & One Dumbbell, Difficulty: medium, Felt: still out of breath
Tuesday | July 7, 2015: 6 m run (incl. 3×800, 3×400, 4x:30)
Loc: hood, Temp: 64°/64°, Time: 56:05, Pace: 9:21 avg, Difficulty: medium, Felt: decent, but out of breath at the end
Wednesday | July 8, 2015: 3 m run
Loc: Millennium Trail, Temp: 60°/60°, Time: 27:48, Pace: 9:16 avg, Difficulty: easy, Felt: good
Thursday | July 9, 2015: 10.3 m ride
Loc: Millennium Trail, Temp: 68°, Time: 44:36, Pace: 13.9 mpg avg, Difficulty: easy, Felt: good
Friday | July 10, 2015: 5 m run + teaching strength class
Loc: hood, Temp: 59°/59°, Time: 46:47, Pace: 9:21, Difficulty: easy, Felt: good
Strength: AireX pads & medicine balls, Difficulty: medium, Felt: good
Saturday | July 11, 2015: Psycho Psummer 10 Mile (w/Rachel)
Loc: Wyandotte County Lake Park, Temp: no data°/86°, Time: 4:14:40, Pace: 24:57 avg, Difficulty: medium, Felt: mentally demoralized
Sunday | July 12, 2015: 9 m run (w/Rachel)
Loc: Indian Creek Trail, Temp: 73°/78°, Time: 1:42:09, Pace: 11:21 avg, Difficulty: easy, Felt: good but hot!

Notes:

• I was tired, tired, tired this week. Not physically – just so sleepy. I tend to stay up later in the summer due to there being more daylight, and, well, duh – it just makes me tired when I try (emphasis on try, ha ha) to follow the same wake-up schedule! The good news is, I am getting much better at running in the middle of the day heat! I hope I get more sleep this week.
• Rachel and I traveled to Kansas City on Friday to give the Psycho Psummer 20 mile trail race another go. And dropped down to 10 miles, AGAIN. Ha ha. It took us an hour and 15 minutes longer than last year to complete the 10 miles, because at least 60% of the course was straight up mud. Needless to say, the race was NOT the highlight of the weekend, but we had super fun trip, overall!

Link to Training Week 298

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By kilax, July 7, 2015 6:23 am

Doing an Independence Day race isn’t a tradition for me. We’re always* in Guttenberg, Iowa for the holiday, and the neighboring town of Garnavillo has been putting on this race for 28 years, but this is only my third time running it! I ran it for the first time in 2009 (and it was my PR for a few years!) and last year with my dad, and that’s it! Oops!

Do you usually do an Independence Day race?

This year, my epic plan for the race was to ride our bikes to and from it. Which doesn’t seem like a big deal since it’s just over 12 miles each way. But then you consider that the race starts at 7:00 am and you need to leave the house at 5:30 am, and, oh yeah, go up this big hill to get out of town:

Ha! That was fun! I actually didn’t have to switch out to my smaller gear until I stopped to take this photo at the overlook:

Then realized, duh, it’s really hard to clip back in and get going UP A HILL on your bike. Lesson learned – don’t stop on a hill!

But the rest of the ride went great. It was early in the morning so there was hardly any traffic, and the highway had a very wide, smooth shoulder for us to ride on! There was no wind and it was in the high 50s! Great riding temps!

When we got to the race I told my dad I’d be happy to run it in 25 or 26 minutes. I was still having breathing issues because of my cold, and the course is kind of hilly. And… I just biked 12 miles to get there. Ha.

This race is SMALL! Maybe 40 participants?

When we started though, I didn’t feel like that pace was possible.

It wasn’t my legs that felt trashed, but yeah, my lungs. I watched quite a few people get ahead of me and felt dumb for starting in the front!

But something crazy happened. As I focused on running the tangents, having good form, and pumping my arms, my pace started to get faster. My watch said I was running 8:30s at the start but my first mile clicked off in 7:58. I was surprised to see a split under 8 minutes!

There was a lady in front of me for the first mile, and I managed to pass her and two other people in the beginning of mile two. Not wanting to get passed again, I tried to keep the pace going, even on the uphills, and ran my second mile in 7:47!

After that, I had my eyes on the only other woman I could see. She had been quite a bit ahead of me for most of the race, but I was gaining on her. I didn’t think I had a chance of passing her though – this course has a loop in it you run twice, and the end of the loop is an uphill I was sure would slow me down. But I caught up to her on the uphill, and passed her on the last downhill, running the third mile in 7:37.

The last bit of the course is uphill. After passing that lady I didn’t want to look like a total idiot and get passed in the last tenth of a mile, so I booked it and ran the last tenth at a 6:47 pace.

I finished in 24:02 (which is a course PR for me!) and she finished right behind me in 24:03! Eek! After the race, I thanked her for being my rabbit and keeping me on pace**. The lady I passed at the beginning of mile 2 came up to me and said something similar when she finished.

Ha, immediately when I finished though, I stopped and went over to my dad, gasping for air. He laughed and said “Why’d you run so fast?!” I told him I really didn’t know. I never know how competitive I am going to feel at a 5K! Since I could see that woman in front of me for most of the race, and knew the race was so small, I wanted to see if I could pass her.

Passing her didn’t really mean much though (since we are in different age groups… this year). They only do age group awards*** for this race (not, overall awards) and the age groups are kind of big – mine was 19-30! And I was first of four in the group. Small, small race. That lady was first in the 31-45 age group. I was second overall (a 10 year-old girl ran it in 22:54)!

They put the names on the wrong certificates – ha ha

I was truthfully very surprised to run the race in this overall time, and ESPECIALLY with negative splits. I am not someone who negative splits 5Ks. EVER. My first mile is usually the fastest, and my last, the slowest.

Dad and I hung around after the race, talking to other runners, then listening to the awards ceremony. I think it’s so fantastic they use the money that this race brings in for the Sheriff’s K9 program! The race shirt logo reflected that:

We had an easy ride back. Riding in the beautiful Iowa countryside got me really stoked for the two days we are doing of RAGBRAI this year! And we had a blast going down that huge hill to get back to town. We were going 30 mph… and that was with using the brakes! Crazy!

I really cherish this time I get to spend with my dad… and am happy he goes along with my crazy ideas!

*Except those two summers I missed it and it felt so very wrong
**Which sounds like a jerky thing to say, but I didn’t mean it like that – she was hundreds of feet ahead of me for most of the race – I wasn’t using her as a rabbit to block the wind
***The awards are a free pancake breakfast. Three other people gave me their awards cause they didn’t plan on using them, so we gave them to our family and they used them when they went to Garnavillo for the parade at 10:00 am.

Comments (8)

By kilax, July 6, 2015 6:22 am

Highlight of the Week: My last run with Kelly and cycling with my dad to (and from) a 5K!

Monday | June 29, 2015: teaching strength class
Strength: Mixed Mode: Body Bars & One Dumbbell, Difficulty: medium, Felt: out of breath talking and working out
Tuesday | June 30, 2015: 8 m run (w/Kelly)
Loc: Millennium Trail to Nippersink FP, Temp: 64°/69°, Time: 1:19:06, Pace: 9:53 avg, Difficulty: easy, Felt: better!
Wednesday | July 1, 2015: 4 m run
Loc: Millennium Trail, Temp: 54°/54°, Time: 35:37, Pace: 8:53 avg, Difficulty: easy/medium, Felt: strong
Thursday | July 2, 2015: 15 m run
Loc: Around Round Lake, Temp: 62°/61°, Time: 2:33:36, Pace: 10:14 avg, Difficulty: easy to medium, Felt: pretty good!
Friday | July 3, 2015: teaching strength class + 5 m run (w/Adam)
Strength: Mixed Mode: Body Bars & One Dumbbell, Difficulty: hard, Felt: shredded
Loc: Grayslake, Temp: 51°/55°, Time: 48:36, Pace: 9:43, Difficulty: medium/hard, Felt: tired
Saturday | July 4, 2015: 12.5 m ride (w/Dad) + Firecracker 5K + 12.2 m ride (w/Dad)
Loc: Guttenberg to Garnavillo, Temp: 57°/59°, Time: 59:29, Pace: 12.6 mph avg, Difficulty: easy, Felt: good
Loc: Garnavillo, Temp: 59°/61°, Time: 24:03, Pace: 7:46 avg, Difficulty: hard then easier, Felt: good
Loc: Garnavillo to Guttenberg, Temp: 61°/69°, Time: 51:08, Pace: 14.3 mph avg, Difficulty: easy, Felt: good
Sunday | July 5, 2015: 5 m run (w/Dad on bike)
Loc: Guttenberg, Temp: 65°/68°, Time: 52:38, Pace: 10:31 avg, Difficulty: medium, Felt: like I was going so much faster

Notes:

• Since I was sick last week and most of this week, I was totally expecting my runs to feel horrible. But besides a few bouts of coughing, I actually felt really energetic. I don’t know if it was the two days off running (Sunday and Monday), the amazingly cool temps on Wednesday and Thursday, or the Mucinex in my system, but I’ll take it!
• However, I felt totally zapped teaching strength class this week. My lungs hurt and it’s really hard to count or speak in class, while doing anything (I even cut back how much of the workout I am doing). I hope this week is better.
• I saw so much wildlife on my runs this week! A vulture eating parts of a carcass, a deer with a bird resting on its butt, donkeys, horses, and countless birds and bunnies. And that was all around my house in Illinois!
• Kelly and I had a fabulous last run together. I’m really going to miss starting out my days with a run with her. We’ll have to be virtual training partners now.
• I got to workout with my dad this weekend when I was in Iowa for Independence Day! I brought my bike so we could ride to the next town over to do their 5K… which involved going up a giant hill to get out of town! Ha! It was a lot of fun and made me even more stoked for RAGBRAI! More on that when I get the race report up!
• June recap time! If you’ve been reading my blog for a few years you know I cut back on running in the beginning of the summer, and this year is no different! In June, I ran 136.9 miles, and cycled 92.8 (two outdoor rides, three indoor… sigh). I taught nine strength classes and went swimming once! I am excited to see that biking number DOUBLE in July!!! And I need to get my running back up a bit if I want to make my 2000 miles for the year goal. I am on track and don’t want to fall behind!

Link to Training Week 297