Training: Week 29

Week 29: Aug 1-7: 32.7 miles

Another week bites the dust!

It wasn’t the bigger week that I had planned on. Oh well.

Friday got away from me as I went in to see the dentist (Nate!), then spent ~5 hours going to/from and at our first designer appointment for the house.

We then picked up Greta from daycare, ate, and by that time I was exhausted. I also had read a blog post this time in my pregnancy with Greta and I realized how little, and how slow, I was running at that point. I thought to myself: eh, another day off this week won’t hurt! And… it probably didn’t :).

Saturday was the Dennison Days 5k. It is a VERY low-key race with about 20-25 participants. There’s a finish clock but no results are recorded. The race starts at “9 ish”.

It was a lot of fun. A few people there knew me, and it’s always fun to chat about running, racing, and training while pregnant. A few moms wanted a picture with me after the race; they were impressed someone “this” pregnant was running this “fast”. Ha. I look way more pregnant than I am, and fast is relative! I won for women in 23:46 with two walk breaks: one at half way, which was at the end of a good sized hill (I can not catch my breath after running a hard hill! So odd for me since usually I recover super speedily & have huge lungs!). The second was when my right leg began to burn with fatigue. I must be leaning on that side a little bit more now, so I’ll have to keep an eye on it. Since the lead guy had about 20-30 seconds on me at that point in the race, I took the liberty of a second walk break instead of fighting through the fatigue.

Nate ran alongside of me with Greta in the Chariot. She sang for most of the way, and Nate encouraged me along and tossed water on me to cool me down. It was SO MUCH FUN to do this as a family. Afterwards Greta “cooled down” with me. Her smile and laughter were too precious!

Pure joy – for both of us!

I was supposed to do a long cool down but instead enjoyed the race’s all-you-can-eat waffle and sausage breakfast (a part of the full Dennison Days Festival) and walked around the few small blocks of the town to hunt for garage sales (City Wide garage sales – also part of the festival). It’s sort of nice to have the option of being lazy! 🙂

Sunday I woke up super early to run before Nate left for his long ski. Pushing the stroller is so much more difficult now; I’d much rather wake up at the crack of dawn to run solo than slog through 10 minute stroller miles. I got in 5.5 miles before he needed to leave and was planning to push Greta for the remaining 2.5. When I got home I inherited a pretty fussy kid (who had real tears because she did NOT want to wear the dress I picked out!) and thought to myself: ugh, do those last 2.5 miles even matter? It seems like a lot of effort to get her ready & get out…

So I didn’t 🙂 Nate and I talked about doing a double in the evening instead, but of course, the evening came around and I decided doing house work and a little cross-stich work was much easier than getting out for another run :).

Mid-week workout was 10×1 minute hard in the middle of a 6 miler. That was fun! I ran a few miles with Craig and Leighton before they ventured off on their marathon-specific tempo run. It felt so weird to be running fewer miles than Leighton! I had a hard time pushing myself to run faster than 7:00 pace. I probably could have tried harder, but, eh… I had fun.

Other life updates:


New house stuff:

Friday we met with the designer for the first time! It was fun, but mildly overwhelming. Everything looked the same after a while.

What kind of carpet do you want? Um… I guess I hadn’t considered the kind, much less the color! What about door knobs? Wood floor type and finish? So many options!

I wish I was better at being able to piece together all of these things and imagine how they will look together, but I’m really not. So, I made it my mission to find and tour a few homes over the weekend. I’m good at copying, at least!

Decisions. Oh my.

Saturday afternoon after the race we all ventured north to check out a few open houses and to try to match the paint color of a house I fell in love with a few months ago.

Love the color combination – and lucky for us, we found a near-perfect match!!

We will add detailing like they have near the peaks and under windows.

It was great to look at the details of all of the different houses. Did we like this patterned carpet for downstairs? Did they use it in the downstairs bedrooms as well, or was that a different carpet? Did they use white trim, or wood? All white kitchen, white with a dark center island, or wood cabinets?

Our last open house was like winning the lottery. I immediately knew I wanted to copy most everything about the house. We snapped a lot of pictures in hopes to duplicate a lot of the colors and styles they used. Only thing: it was a $1.3 million dollar house. We are NOT building a $1.3 million dollar house. But, I’ve always been good about taking the look of something really expensive and creating something close to it for far less.

We are planning to have beams above our great room as well. I love that look!

Kitchen. Bad angle, but hopefully gives you a feel for the style and colors we are gravitating towards.

So many cute and unique details!

I’m just SOOO excited to have homes to use as inspiration for both our exterior AND interior look! Yay!

Current house stuff:

We have started to pull a little bit of the clutter out of our house and throw it into boxes to store, donate, or try to sell. It feels so good to be able to start doing that!

Not sure when we are going to list yet… that’s a little tricky with baby’s due date…

Coaching:

Things are going really well for the team!

K.B. notched a huge 5k PR recently out in the much-cooler-than-here state of Washington – 50 seconds off of her all-time PR and 2:45 off of her baseline 5k in March when she started with TNC. She broke 25 for the first time – and didn’t *just* break it, but ran a 24:20! How exciting!!

M.B. won the Her Tern 1/2 marathon (no small feat!!) despite a bum hip.

J.S. took nearly a minute off of her May 5k time, running sub 21 for the first time in years this July. She had been “stuck” in her training prior to joining in April, so it’s really rewarding for me to be able to help her break through that plateau. I can’t wait to see what we can do in longer distances this fall!

Quite a few current and former athletes participated in the TNC mile, a “for fun” competition among all of us. Everyone is given a seed time based on a recent race – the winner is the individual that can beat their seed by the most time. Because, why not? 🙂

3 of us after our TNC mile

—

That’s all for now! Stay tuned for another race entry giveaway later this week. Wa-hoo!


Your turn:


It’s about time for another “Ask the Coach” blog post, don’t you think? Comment below with any training/racing/fueling questions you may have. Two questions will be chosen at random to be answered in a future post!