Am I Going to Make It Next Saturday?

Short answer is: I Don't Know! My well-laid plans to stop being lazy and "too busy" to run have come to naught thanks to Mother Nature and poor schedules. I had initially wanted to get out and run on Monday morning, however, it was pouring, literally pouring, down rain at 5:45 AM, which killed my motivation. I want to run, but there's no sense in running in rain at 38 degrees. Then I thought maybe Tuesday morning would work. However, getting to bed too late the night before killed me. Wednesday was another rainy morning so here we are, about 9 days from the Celtic Solstice 5 Miler and I haven't run since before Thanksgiving.

Am I going to make it next Saturday? I don't know but the weather looks to be good and cold so I'm going to go and get my $15 worth. It's a great race and I'm not going to let the craziness of the last two weeks sabotage my enjoyment of the race. I've got about 5 running opportunities between now and the 19th (tomorrow, Saturday, Monday, Wednesday and next Friday) so maybe if I can hit those targets, I'll be able to slowly meander along the 5 mile course and not flame out.

Or, I could run those five days and still limp across the finish line on the 19th heaving from embarrassment, not to mention exhaustion. We'll see how it goes, but as the end of the year approaches, a year where I seriously fell off the running wagon, I know I need to set some 2010 goals and map out how I'm going to get there. I think spending the first 6-8 months getting my mileage back above 10 miles, followed by a fall half marathon target and then late fall-winter races culminating in the 2010 Celtic Solstice is a good starting point. Finding new ways to stay motivated, however, is the big challenge and will probably be a determining factor next year.

For now, I just want to be able to run that 5 miler next weekend and then head to my grandmother's house in the afternoon for our pre-holiday feast!

Too Busy for Running Means Messed Up Priorities

This last two weeks have been incredibly hectic to say the least and my running has suffered as a result. The Thanksgiving holiday was much-needed but went by quickly and was itself busy. e picked out our wedding pictures and created our album...only 13 months after we got married! We just kept putting it off so finally made the appointment at the photographer for when we knew we'd be back in Cincinnati.

We had to get up at 4AM to make it to the airport for our 7AM flight to Chicago (connecting to Dayton) so we were pretty wiped out the next day, causing us to sleep in and ignore the $50 registration fee we had paid for the Cincinnati Thanksgiving Day race. Oh well. There'll be other races and it felt good to get the 11 hours of sleep instead. I think I would have felt tired all day had we dragged ourselves to the race.

Then after wwe got back, wwe picked up our newest addition to our pack, Teddy, a Shih Tzu/Lhasa Apso mix that we adopted from a rescue organization in Virginia, although he was being fostered by a woman in Reading, PA. We think he's between 2 and 5 years old, although we don't really know. We'll probably call him 4 years old because he's pretty calm and well-mannered, so he can't be too close puppy age. We brought him home a little earlier than e had planned because e wanted to take him for a test drive to make sure that Annie wasn't allergic to him. She's totally fine around him, which is great news.

So, since Tuesday we've been getting into a new routine with him for taking him out, at least two walks per day (one of those being a "long" walk of about a mile in the evening that zonks him out) and the like. He's adjusting very ell to living in an apartment in the city and we know we got lucky with his gentle temperament and independence. He's already housebroken. We tried putting him in the kitchen when we left for work a few days but he'd always find a way to knock the baby gate over or, when we put heavy boxes in front of it, he used his paws to scoot it to one side so he could squeeze out. But each time he escaped, he didn't chew anything or have an accident in the apartment, so e think he just doesn't like the kitchen because it's drafty.

Anyway, now that we're settling into a routine, it's time to add running back into the mix. Tomorrow I want to get back to running regularly so I can at least slowly complete the Celtic Solstice 5 miler in two weeks.

And with that short update, I'll sign off and update the rest of this blog since I've neglected it for a few weeks now.