Trying this Blogging Thing Again

Still running - in every sense of the word.

Life at the office is Pleasantly Hectic. I feel like I'm just barely keeping up, but don't feel like I'm about to go under either. It feels good to get to the end of the day and know it was productive.

Life at home is BUSY. House-sitting for a co-worker, and his cats take great delight in getting my dog in trouble. Also planning for a big push to get some painting done upstairs and the floor refinished soon. My goal is to have that done in time for a party mid-November. The week house-sitting and enjoying my neighbor's Cable has been great for morale because I get to watch entire evenings of HGTV! The dog and I are enrolled in the Huntsville Obedience Training Club where we are learning good things (and un-learning bad things) and going through lots of bits of hotdogs in the process (my dog will do anything for a bite of hotdog). And as if that wasn't busy enough, one night a week I'm going to RCIA through my church in an effort to get myself Confirmed.

Life on my feet has Been Building Up according to plan. I'm registered for the Rocket City Marathon on December 12th. In the mean time I have a personal training plan with running 3-4 times a week and I'm signed up with a training group Saturday mornings. The theory there is that if I know someone is waiting for me Saturday morning, I'm more likely to get out of bed and go running (those that know me know how very much I dislike getting up early on the weekend).

I ran the Monte Sano 10K last weekend. My goal was to finish in 1 hour, but I came in at 1:11:50. However, it was pouring rain the last 15 minutes of the course, so maybe I would have come closer to my goal if I wasn't swimming the last mile and a half. (Personally, I loved running in the rain. Having been a swimmer for years, getting all pruney doesn't bother me in the slightest. But I would never have guessed my socks could hold so much water!).
I also tried to do some interval pacing. 60 seconds running, 60 seconds fast walking. All-in-all it worked pretty well, but I have a competitive streak in me which is about a mile wide and it was really really hard to let people pass me when I was walking and I pushed myself too hard running to try to cath up to everyone that had passed me. *roll eyes*

My next planned race isn't for another 6 weeks, but I think I need to find at least one more race between now and then just to challeneg that racing instinct. But in the mean time, I have new shoes and new orthopedics to keep me happy! I'm still running with the Vibrams, but only short training runs because my ankles are still pretty weak and I don't want to blow my training plan with a half dozen twisted ankles like last time!