December 28, 2014

A date with my little man

I had this all ready to post yesterday, and forgot to hit "publish", apparently! Oops :)


Last night, Noah was invited to go to his friend's house to spend the night. Since Jerry was working, Eli was stuck at home with his mom on a Saturday night. He always gets jealous of Noah when Noah is invited somewhere, so I decided to have a little "date night" for just the two of us.

I told him we could go out to dinner, and that he could choose where we went--anywhere he wanted to go! He immediately picked Hawaiian Island, which has amazing Chinese food. It's not exactly the best "diet-friendly" place to go (well, I guess it could be, but not when you order sweet and sour chicken!). Eli was really excited to go.

When we sat down, we read the placemat that listed all the different animals that represented people based on what year they were born. I was born in 1982, which makes me a dog; and Eli was born in 2006, which makes him a dog also. Jerry was born in 1980, making him a monkey; and Noah was born in 2004, which also makes him a monkey. I thought that was kind of interesting ;)

Eli got almond chicken, and I got sweet and sour chicken. I was careful not to eat too much, because I hate feeling super full when I leave a restaurant. Eli was stuffed, and you can see he didn't even make a dent in his plate! (Their portions are huge.)


I ordered a carryout so I could drop it off to Jerry at work, and then we headed home. My mom wanted me to stop by and help her highlight her hair, so we went to her house first. I had never done the highlighting before, but it looked simple enough, so we worked on that for a little while. It turned out good! (Whew--I was nervous about that).

I asked Eli what he wanted to do when we got home, and he said he wanted to work on his Lego set that Aunt Jeanie gave him for Christmas. It was a huge set of about 900 pieces, and he had a couple of big chunks left of it. We got to work and about 45 minutes later, it was finished.


It some sort of Star Wars thing. I'm not a Star Wars fan, so I have no idea! I just love putting Legos together. It ended up being a fun night hanging out with just Eli. It's not very often that I get one of the kids alone.


I haven't been sleeping much at ALL the past week or two. I went to bed at a decent time (10:30 ish), but I was wide awake at 1:30, and even was texting a friend because I couldn't sleep. The only thing I can think of is that maybe it's because I haven't been running much the past couple of weeks?

I had plans to do a long run today (not long-long, but about seven miles) to test out my foot and see how it felt. When I ran the Santa Hustle Half, the problem started at around mile 6.5, so I hoped that I'd feel good through mile 7.

I had finally fallen asleep at around 2:30 and slept in late, until 8:00! (I usually get up between 5 and 6). As soon as I woke up, I got dressed to go for a run. Again, it was pretty warm outside (considering it's almost January). I just wore running tights and a long-sleeved shirt--no gloves or hat needed.

I chose to do an out-and-back route that was really familiar to me, so hopefully my foot wouldn't have any surprises in terrain. While I didn't want to put any pressure on myself to hit a certain pace, I was secretly hoping to be able to do a 9:30-9:39 pace. I'm thinking about trying a new running plan for the Indy Mini, and the long run paces are pretty specific...

When I was at the Runner's World Half in Bethlehem, Matt Frazier (No Meat Athlete) and I rode back to the airport together, and we chatted for a bit about running. He said that he followed the "Run Less Run Faster" plan, with a big modification, and he qualified for Boston with it. That plan has you do just three runs per week, and I've said several times I'm not a fan of those plans (I've known a few people, including myself, to get injured from them). He said that he followed the plan as written, except that instead of the cross-training, he did easy (very easy) runs. When I got home, I bought the book to read, and I liked Matt's idea, so I wrote up a plan and I'm thinking of trying it.

The plan has the long runs at goal pace +20 or +30 seconds (meaning if my goal pace is 9:00/mi, then I would run my long runs at 9:20 or 9:30 per mile (depending on the day--it varies on the schedule). To run a sub-2:00 half, my pace would have to be 9:09 (although I'd like to say 9:00, just for a little cushion). So today, I figured I'd aim for 9:29-9:39, and just see how I felt. If it felt way too difficult, I'd nix the whole idea.

The first mile was tough. At about 0.9 miles in, I saw my pace was 9:59, so I almost decided just to forget about it. But then I thought I should at least get the first mile down to 9:39, and then decide after that what to do. So I picked up the pace a bit, and managed to hit 9:39 on the nose. That pace actually seemed to get easier the farther I ran, too. I never felt like I had to slow down or quit, so I think that pace will actually work out.

I almost managed to get negative splits, too--I don't know what the deal was with mile 6, but if I had known, I'd have picked up the pace to make it a negative split ;)




My foot felt great! I had a tiny bit of residual pain in my calf, but that only showed up when I was running on a slanted shoulder. I'm going to take it easy on building up the mileage--increasing just a mile per week on my long runs.

It was probably due to the weather, but today was a really great run! I felt good the whole time, and my foot held up. I keep forgetting that it's December. It's so weird that on January 7 (Eli's birthday) the temp was 30 below 0! We've been going outside with no coats all week, and it feels awesome. I would love it if the whole winter is this mild!


Don't forget, tomorrow is Motivational Monday! If you have a submission, you can check out the details here.

2 comments:

  1. I just started the RLRF plan yesterday for Boston in April--16 weeks from today! I'm hoping not to burn myself out training for it this year like I did last year using a program that was way too aggressive for me.
    Also, there's a very cool app for that plan you can get to help with keeping track of the workouts and what to do each week, etc. I think it was $2.99. It's called FIRST RLRF
    Interesing that Matt subbed out easy running for the cross-training. I'm going to try to stick to the plan with the cross training but it's good to know he did ok with easy running, too.
    Yesterday I did the first workout--a track workout--and whew! hard! But in a good way. I'll be interested to see how it all goes for you. Good luck!

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  2. I raised two sons (now adults) and found that one on one time to be very special as well. Thanks for your blog posts and photos - been reading your blog (RSS feed) for a few years now and wanted to thank you.

    ReplyDelete

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