A Great Long Run + Snapping Turtle

Well I guess that title kind of gives away the content of this post, eh? Saturday I was a wuss. I didn't run. I had a fast 4 miles planned and just did not want to do it. It was raining and cold and windy. And a friend wanted to get Mexican food. All sources were pointing to no, so I skipped it. I feel bad because it's the first run I've intentionally skipped (meaning I wasn't too deathly ill to complete) since I started up training again in early January. Oh well, the amazing fajitas I ate made me forget my remorse immediately.

Saturday night we went to our indoor football team's game, which was awesome. I don't know why, but I love going to the Storm's games. It doesn't hurt that they're ridiculously good (4 peat nat'l champs I believe) and that we have no real pro representation for local sports. Because we got to the game insanely late, the game was sold out. Luckily for us, there was an Army recruiter there who had a bunch of kids not show up, so we got their tickets fo FREE!. Unfortunately these seats were in the nosebleeds. Meaning row 30 of a 30 row stadium. Hah. You could still see the game really well, but jeri+beer=many trips to the bathroom up and down those stairs. My calves were soooooooooore.

Sunday I had a 6 mile long run scheduled. Well technically it was supposed to be a 7 mile, but because I was sick 2 weeks ago, I didn't run, and last week's sixer was horrendous, so I was giving myself a do over. :) I didn't have any internet access to map out a run, and there was no way in hell I was going to do the horrible, horrible 6 mile route from last week, so I decided I would just jump on the trail and run to a street that would be easy to map out after the run, and go with it.

I'm a super super competitive person, especially with myself, so it was really strange to not have any mile markers to check my splits to see how I was doing, but it was strangely liberating. The first time I looked at my watch was 24 minutes into the run. Usually I'm checking it obsessively. I ended up running 35 minutes in one direction before turning around to come back home, so I knew I was running a lil over 7 miles, and was surprised at how great my legs/lungs/everything felt.

PLUS I saw a snapping turtle next to the river. I was pretty excited, because I've never seen a live snapping turtle before. My dad has caught a couple fishing, but unfortunately, they had "expired" by the time I got to see them. I felt all nature/woodsy girl running by the river. It was great, and an awesome change from running on the sidewalks and having to be overly cautious of getting hit by a car not paying attention. I'm super excited to get my garmin so I can just go on the trails for all (or most) of my runs.

Speaking of the garmin, the countdown is on. As I've said before, if I PR in my next (or next-next) 5k, I'm breaking down and buying one. My race is Saturday. Whoo! Granted this is just a "tune up" race for the one in 2 weeks, I'm still thinking I can PR. So fingers crossed everyone. Also, I just checked the weather for this weekend, and there's a big sunshiny orb on each day EXCEPT Saturday which shows rain, clouds, and lightning. Waaah. Oh well, that'd just make a PR that much sweeter.

I ended up running 7.2 miles in 1:07:06 for a pace of 9:20. Tonight I have a yoga session and some ab work in the works, followed by watching Milk. I'm super excited for it, so I hope it's good.