Recovery Week Training + Weekend Shenanigans

Monday and Tuesday I spent foam rolling and eating all the food. That's how you recover best right? Good. 

Wednesday my legs felt great so I decided to give my speed work session a go at the track with Jenn J. 

We had 800s on the schedule, and I was excited to do some real speed work. We did our one mile warm up, stretched, and set out for our first 800. My legs felt like LEAD. I realized 200 meters in that I didn't do my dynamic stretches and hoped that was why my legs were so heavy and my hips so tight. After the first 800, I stopped to do those stretches and then got back to work. The next 800 caused pain in my left hip, so I threw in the towel after that one. No sense getting hurt with marathon training just around the corner!

We may have spent more time stretching/talking/race planning post-workout than we spent *actually* running. Oh well, you need those sorts of runs sometimes, right? We both left the track feeling defeated, but made promises to do the same workout + an additional 800 the following Wednesday as punishment!

Saturday I had to run to get my car after I had two beers too many to drive my vehicle home the night before. Thank goodness we chose a spot that was only a couple of miles from my place instead of a long run's distance away. Uff. I had a headache and Jenn telling me to hustle up and come hang out with her. Without realizing it, I was hauling and just kept pushing it. I let myself cooldown the final quarter of a mile.

Friday I counted down the hours until 6pm when I was done with work and could meet up with Jenn and Megan. We met for dinner and drinks and lots of catch up, and Otto snuggles.

Photos taken 10 months apart, from not even yet an inkling of a bump to a fresh new baby!

My favorite ladies.

Me and aforementioned giant beer. Mmmmm.

Two of my favorite people, Jenn and Otto.

Saturday I met Jenn at the lake and met up with Megan shortly after.

We had fancy celebratory bubbles. And in classy South Dakota fashion, the price tag was written on the bottle in permanent marker. 

More Otto snuggles.

She couldn't be a more gorg mommy.

NBD, Otto just fell asleep holding my hand. *i die*

Can every weekend be a Megan/Jenn/Jeri/Otto weekend plz??!?!

It's Race Week Bitches

This may or may not have been an email subject to Megan and Jenn already this week.  :)

The countdown to race weekend is on.  But more importantly, runner bffdome and post-race celebration.  Once upon a time this weekend was sub 4 or hang up your running shoes, then it was ZOMG half marathon PR, now it's.... hmmmm.

The last few weeks I've done some decent speedwork to try to give myself an idea where I was at speed-wise for this race.  Unfortunately, almost all of these speed workouts were done with the addition of heat and/or humidity and/or wind.  Great extra training elements, not so great in helping me determine where I'm at.  After missing slash skipping my long run this weekend because I just could not bring myself to run 2 hours in 40 mph winds, I resigned to the fact that this weekend would not be a sub 1:50 PR party, glitter unicorn fart fest.

Monday I got to thinking about what my race strategy was going to be, mostly because Kyle's parents are coming to spectate and I wanted to give them good time estimations of where I was going to be on the race route.  I wrote down some times, breaking up the race in to 4 sections, progressively getting faster, and it seemed doable.  When I added up those times I realized it was only about 21 seconds off of my current PR.  Hmmm.

And then checking the weather, it was going to be in the 40s at the 7am start time.  Hmm....  flat course.  Hmmm....  Mental edge is rearing its head again me thinks.

We're going to ignore the fact that hours after having this a-ha! moment I started getting intense shin pain, making me realize that I had the world's worst knot in my left calf, and the world's second worst knot in my right calf.  Insert panic attack here.  Fast forward 72 hours of excessive foam rolling, biofreezing, allowing Kyle to take the rolling pin to my legs while I scream in to a pillow (I'm sure my neighbors think I'm quite the catch now), stretching, downward dogging, compression sleeving, crying, and they seem to be out, for the most part.  98% is a whole host better than they were on Monday.

So we'll see how things shake out on Saturday.  I think a 1:50-1:53 finish is likely, and that would put me at a top 3 all time race finish time.  Most importantly I'd like to keep my focus and not give up because it hurts, it's hard, or whatever lame excuse my brain tries to throw at me.  My brain is a whiny brat some times.

Post-race mimosas have already been obtained, so it's essential that these legs give me something to celebrate!

And just for funsies, here's a sweet pic of Jenn and Megan after dinner last night.  We grabbed a quick bite to eat after snagging Jenn from the airport (naturally, she looked cuter than me after 40 hours of traveling, good thing I heart her....), and before dropping me off at my car, we had to make sure race day outfit coordination was a go.  Why wouldn't you use the BK parking lot as your dressing room?  Duh.

The Lottery Results Are In......

After much funfare on Wednesday morning/afternoon, I was left not knowing whether I was IN for NYC marathon or not.  What I gathered from the at replies to @INGNYmarathon, there was some sort of major failure with the announcing, as we were to "check back later" yet the NYC marathon page said our profile logins would be down until Thursday at 10a.m.  Hmm... ok, so much for all that hoopla I guess!

I started to see that people were "finding out" via credit card charges so I logged on to mine a few times to see if there had been a charge.  Nada.  Interesting enough a few times the Capital One site stalled out on me.  I had to laugh thinking that hundreds of thousands of NYC marathon lotto peeps were probably doing the same thing.  (if not, whatever, just let me have my laughter!)

Later in the afternoon I got an email from Tom saying HE WAS IN! And that the login pages were back up and functioning.  I logged in, and wasn't surprised to see this:

Not sure what I expected the lottery process to be like, but with all of the hype surrounding the announcement I got pumped, and then royally bummed, without even knowing if I was in or not.  I'm sure the huge amounts of lotto entrants and then the number of people that flooded the site didn't help, but I feel like they should have a good guage on that based on previous years, right?  Hmm..  Anyway, by the time I found out I wasn't in.  I didn't really care anymore.  Hohum.

I emailed Jenn and Megan, that this was a dark sign for our Nike Women's Marathon selection that was to occur "sometime the end of the month."  Way to keep it vague Nike.

Imagine my surprise when I woke up to several texts from Megan to "OPEN YOUR EMAIL!  WE'RE IN!!"

HOLY CRAP!  That was the kind of lotto selection excitement I was looking for!  Too funny that they'd come within ~15 hours of each other.

I swear I didn't even ask that they do the graphics in green and gold... but I like it.  :D  So I'll be heading out west for the fall.  I can't wait for a re-do of Philly with two of my favorite girls in the world.  If I could've only gotten in to one of these races, things worked out just the way I wanted.  :)

Now that I have some answers about these two races, I'm left to decide the rest of my fall race schedule.  Suggestions?  Couches for me to come stay on??

Philadelphia Marathon Weekend

You're all thoroughly briefed on how the Philadelphia Marathon went down, but that was only a mere 4 1/2 hours of our awesome Philly Reunion weekend!  Come along for all the fun details!

Megan and I traveled together from SoDak to Philly.  We took advantage of the BOGO Starbucks offer from 2-5 in the Mpls airport, even though we had to visit two separate Starbucks to do so.  I think I would've gone nutzo on the cashier who tried to tell us we need a coupon if there hadn't been another one approximately 17 feet away.  Then I finally got to meet Shawn!  We've ran at least one of the same races, and have meant to meet up at least 4-5 times when I've been in the cities for fun or race weekends, but it just hasn't happened.  Go figure, he'd be on my flight to Philly.  That worked out quite swell.

Once we landed in Philly we set out to find JENN!  We were freaking out because the arrival signs weren't showing her flight, and the one that was showing a flight from Atlanta wasn't set to get in until 11.  GAH!  Finally as we decided to head towards baggage claim we saw her.  Lots of squealing ensued.  I mean... LOTS. OF. SQUEALING.  It was obnoxious.

We were all starving so we hit the Hard Rock Cafe that was right next to our hotel.  Starving girls order a ginormous sampler platter right?  Right.  But then our actual orders came out... and our stomachs started to cry.  I've never wasted so much food.  And because we didn't have a fridge in our hotel, I just had to wave goodbye to it.  

Not kidding, there wasn't a crumb left of the apps but I probably ate 2 bites of my burger.  FAIL!  I apologize to the starving children all over the world. :(

As we were having a grand old time catching up, a super loud rock band took stage.  Since we're not proficient in sign language, morse code or telepathy, we just awkwardly sat and looked at each other... and the stage... and then would hurriedly try to get in a convo in between songs.

We're just not that in to you... sorry.

We decided to hightail it out of there and enjoy some vino in our hotel lounge.  Because two bottles of wine on top of two beers is perfect marathon fuel.  It's been a while since I've laughed SO HARD.  I love these girls and it was so great to catch up with Jenn.  Just not the same to babble through email.  After some drinks we finally went to bed, but it was like a grade school slumber party.  We talked and talked and talked.  And after about an hour, Jenn and I realized that Megan was no longer participating in the convo.  Oooops.  Sorry sleeping beauty!  But of course we just kept talking.

After finally crashing at 2am, 9 came around pretty darn early.  And because we all assumed someone else had set an alarm, it's a good thing we just magically woke up at 9.  We got ready and hit up the expo.  We stayed about 1 1/2 blocks from the expo which was awesome.

Can you tell I didn't get enough beauty sleep?  Uff da.

I got 99 problems but a BIB ain't one!

That song was in my head... all week.  #annoying

#hashtaginreallife

Ready to rock Philly!

Who looks this chic for a race expo?  Jenn... betch.... ;)

Race bib EEEEEEEE!

Oh hai Hal!

Hey Jenn!  Go pose by those balloons.  YES! Perfect!

Photographer gold right here, no worries.

Yes, we'll take the escalator, thankyouverymuch.

I love that they're head tilting in completely opposite directions.  Makes me dizzy. :)

My baby niece was due the weekend of the race, and I just knew she'd make her appearance on race day.  I secretly thought she'd arrive as we were crossing the finish line, but she showed up a few hours after.  I found this super cute onesie, and had to snatch it up!

After the expo and a quick bite to eat, we hit the streets for a quick shake out run.  We wanted to run to the race start to get our bearings for the next morning, and see exactly how far it was from our hotel.  Jenn's garmin took 1200 years to find a satellite so it made time for a photo op.

And 900 stop lights en route to the start line also made time for photo ops.

Finish line pic!  Yes, I'm wearing some of the brightest clothes I own, why do you ask?

In case it ended with a photo finish, we were practicing our sprinter leans.

Ok, now I'm getting cold.

After our two mile run, we somehow ended up shopping.... in our running clothes.  We hit up H&M, Lululemon (I'd never been, shocker alert!), and a running store.  Somehow my bank account came away unscathed.  We walked back to our hotel but my legs were killing me.  We'd been on our feet pretty much non-stop since 9am.  Uh oh.  My calves were super knotted up, so I tried to foam roll them in to submission......  :/

Dinner time!  We had planned to order italian food to go from Maggio's across the street, but the wait on to-go food was a trillion hours, so we went to the restaurant in our hotel.  It wasn't anything special, but we did match for dinner so that's a plus.  

And I had to order dessert, because I wasn't in love with my meal.  And oh my goodness, it made up for the lackluster dinner.  Smores sundae... you have my heart.

And then we ran the race.  And my calves STILL felt like crap.  Super duper tight and obnoxious, and I kept waiting for them to cramp up during the race because they hurt SO BAD walking around the day before.  But nada.  Three cheers for the legs.

The past month and a half many many emails were exchanged about our training and this race.  And one of the main topics was post-race mexican food.  It's a Jenn & Megan tradition, and one I was happy to be a part of.  Somehow no photos were taken of the mexican food.

But no worries, shortly there after it was time for MOAR FOOD.  We were less than impressed when the sushi bar in the hotel told us they were closed due to low capacity in the hotel, because that meant I had to put on real shoes to trek around town for food.

Disgusting note:  I thought I had a monster bloody toe for the last hour and a half of the race.  My left pinky felt really wet and super ouchy.  I assumed my toenail finally came off.  When we got back from the race, I took off my sock and was surprised that it wasn't bright red.  But my toe... was not pretty.  It was blood blister on top of blood blister on top of blood blister, with only my tiny sliver of a toenail not engorged.  **shudders**  I immediately performed surgery, but it was throbbing.  Luckily Jenn let me borrow some shoes that had a little bit more room to try to make my toe happy.  Needless to say, the walk to the sushi place was.... not the most fun I'd had all day.

My purty dates for the evening weekend!

Mmm beer.

Some rolls.  I housed some sushi before I could be bothered to take a photo of that.

After stuffing ourselves silly, we stumbled (literally in my not-quite-properly-walking state) to an Irish bar.  The only other people in there were also wearing marathon medals, so we felt like we were at home.  I pooh poohed Jenn's request for a Blue Moon, and made her drink an Irish beer, because that's what friends are for. :)

A random photo re-enactment of our race finish.  We all were super careful about crossing all timing mats together so people who were tracking us would get exactly the same splits, yet somehow Megan finished a second behind us.  So Jenn and I are #1 and she's #2.  It seemed funnier/more clever after a couple of beers...

Marathons+beer.

These are a few of my favorite things........

The lovely ladies.

Me re-enacting how awkward I look in any self-taken photo (see above). And Megan showing off her awesome broken runner pose.  Possibly my fave photo of the weekend. Jk.

I miss her. Why'd we let her leave again???

Milk and cookies.   Mmm.

My friends are prettier than yours.  Fact.

We tried to make a night of it, but after a whole lot of not sleeping for the weekend, and a good 4 1/2 hours of running earlier in the day, we were out like lights.  Heh heh.  Jenn had to get up so early, I'm not 100% sure I gave her a proper goodbye, but thankfully she'll be back in the states for a bit for the holidays.

Buh bye Philadelphia!  Perhaps we'll see you again next year!