Day 5 - Day 10 of 100 - Snowed in with comfort food!

I love North Carolina.  I like most of the people, despite the huge influx of Yankees and I love the weather.  I am a hot house flower and the summers of over 100 degrees and humidity into 90% are a little slice of tropical heaven to me.  I even run in it and much prefer it to running in the cold.

Imagine my horror at the SNOWMAGGEON that nature inflicted onto NC last week.  We get snow (an inch is a lot) maybe twice a year.  The world as we know it stops for days - no school, no leaving the house, sometimes no power... it's a zombie apocolypse minus the zombies.  But, last week, it came so hard and fast that Raleigh was literally gridlocked for hours. 

It went from a few flurries at noon to 1 inch sticking to the roads at 12:30pm.  My daughter was at a friends and we tried to go get her, but traffic was at a complete stand still.  She ended up stranded there until the friend's Yankee dad (with front wheel drive - I guess this is good?) and Vermont driving experience brought her home on Friday.  People were abandoning their cars all over town and this photo of Glenwood Avenue happened just about 7 miles away from my home.  Yes, that is a car on fire, and no, none of that pic is photoshopped.  No one could make it up that hill and people just left their cars and walked to hotels.  CRAZY, right?

I should not have let the kids being home from school for FOUR DAYS interfere with my training.  But, I did.  UGH.  I did do my Chemistry so I am perfect for my 100 days on that goal.  Working out, not so much.  And then it was an endless buffet of comfort foods while we were snowed in.  Mac and Cheese?  Oh yes.  Valentine's chocolates?  More, please!  How's it going on the "no microwave popcorn" front?  Very poorly indeed.

And speaking of Valentine's Day - it was depressing.  Like, "you are alone and no one will ever love you, you middle-aged fatso" depressing.  Worse still, I was halfway expecting flowers or a card from my semi-boyfriend in California, but got NADA.  No recognition of the day at all.  To be fair, we are not talking much lately, but this pretty much cements that he's not what I need or want in a partner.

So, as the snow melts and I see the beautiful Carolina blue skies again, I gotta shake it all off and get back to putting training as a priority.  No more excuses.  I may or may not be prepared for this Half Ironman in June, but I have until April 17th to figure that out.  I will lose about $200 if I pull out, but I just can't go into something that big under prepared.  I don't know... gotta figure it out.

I WILL run today.  <--- my commitment to you.  Because you read my silly crap and I really appreciate that!  So for you, I will run today.  Maybe tomorrow it will be for me, but today it's for YOU.  Thank you for leaving comments and encouraging me.  Thank you for making it through the posts that aren't all chucklefests.  Just thanks. 

Can you feel wonderful and like you're agonna die at the same time?
This is how I feel right now.

So, I ran Week 1, Day 1 of C25K and for the first 10 minutes I was wondering if I needed something more remedial... say "Couch 2 Driveway" maybe. For those of you unfamiliar, you walk 2 minutes and then run for a minute. This seems easy, right? IT IS NOT. AT ALL. Especially if you are as out of shape as I appear to be. However, I ran most of the one minutes and when I couldn't do 1 minute, I did 45 seconds at least. This was not full on running, mind you. Just light jogging. But it felt like torture. If zombies were chasing me and I had to maintain that run, I would have just stopped and offered them my brains willingly. (That's a little tip of the hat to today's Halloween celebration. Normally, I will not be discussing zombies in great depth).

So... how did I do?
I covered 1.63 miles in 30 minutes.
My run pace was a 16.02 minute mile.
My walk space was a 19.13 minute mile.
My average pace was a 18.59 minute mile.

This is TOO SLOW for the Princess 1/2. They require a 16 minute mile. But for day one, I am closer to the 16 minutes than I thought. So, that is not all bad. And hey, my run speed was a slow jog and that was in the 16 range. I am not too displeased and more than anything, I am thrilled I got off my butt to DO SOMETHING.

Here's the best part, my darling daughter Zaine, age 9, went with me! She thinks it would be fun to train with me and I am so excited!! She has off school today so we went running in the AM, but for the future, we will go after she gets home from school. She has musical theater on Tuesdays and Fridays, so we will run on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. I think I will repeat days in between. Like tomorrow, I am going to try W1D1 again to see if I can do all the minute runs without stopping at 45 seconds.

Supposedly, it gets easier. That was what I read on the interwebs and you know what you read online is always the truth. Actually, Jeff Galloway, the coach type person for RunDisney, says this - so I really do believe it. I think showing up is more than half the battle, so if I just keep getting out there I'll have to make progress.

So yay me! And yay Zaine! We are moving in the right direction!!