The Mommy Chapter

Tuesday’s run was the 2nd on my schedule. My alarm went off, I got myself and Ruger out the door, did a quick warmup walk to the end of the block and Ruger pooped like clockwork. Then we started our scheduled 5 mile run being chased by a not very nice black lab, so that was fun…..not. My sweet little Ruger who loves all dogs actually got irritated and finally growled until the lab decided to give up and leave us alone. I don’t have a gps watch (but I’m working on that!) so I use mapmyrun on my phone to log miles. It’s not completely accurate and sometimes it just stops; which is what happened yesterday right after mile one. Probably when I was trying to take a picture of the moon over the fire station. It ended up just looking like a giant street lamp. Worth it!

When I noticed that we were past where I had expected to hit the 2 mile mark, I checked my phone and it suddenly decided that I had run a straight diagonal line across the entire neighborhood. To do that, I would have had to either run over the rooftops or straight through houses. Neither of those things are possible. I ran on feel the rest of the run estimating that it takes me 45 minutes to run 5 miles. It actually doesn’t. Once I entered my correct route at home, it was only 4.74 miles. At least this is only the first week and my cumulative training will be more important than missing a quarter of a mile one day.

In other news, the boys decided that they love cooked carrots so I stocked up on the biggest bag possible at Costco.

You can probably tell from the picture that we don’t eat enough carrots. Tucker wasn’t sure what to do with them.

They both took turns peeling and I cut the carrots into the pot.

Pretty soon, they’ll be fixing dinner while I relax on the couch!

And, Jackson started climbing lessons this week!

He loved it so much that he even took off his homemade fingerless gloves for the hanging test.

He is in a group of about 6-7 other boys and all but one seem to be just as active as he is. Jackson was the only one who spilled the teacher’s chalk though. He was good about cleaning it all up before jumping right back into climbing.

Yesterday’s run was a warm up jog to the end of the main street in our neighborhood and then working my way back home running hill repeats on each cross street. I started out running up at a moderate effort and slow jogging down, moved to running up and running back down then walking or slow jogging to the next hill, and finished with sprinting up the last hill at a hard effort and walking down. I ran and walked the last hill 2x.

Because the Steamboat marathon is quite hilly and has a net elevation loss of 1,415 feet, my running should focus on not only running up hills well, but also running down. Something that I didn’t respect as much as I should have going into the race last year. I found a good list of marathon elevations at mymarathonpace.com

Also, it was snowing while I was running but not slippery at all until I left for work. The roads were terrible by that time and it took me an hour to drive what normally takes half the time.