...a Christmas run, that is!
With Chica hosting family at her home this year and with me having kiddos at home anxiously waiting to open Santa's gifts, we decided that we would meet at the track at 5:30 am. Yes, your beautiful little eyes did indeed read that correctly. We.Met.At.The.Track.At.Five.Thirty.A.M!
What were we thinking? It's f-ing Christmas day... Speaking of...not thinking is what helped me get through our run today. Last night the hubs and I had a an all day wrapping, cleaning, stocking-making, baking day at Casa Bella and ended up going to bed at 2am. At that point I am having a ping-pong type head debate about whether I should try to go to sleep only to wake up only a couple of hours laters and be groggy as hell or pull an all-nighter and risk literally pulling an "narqui" (totally, making up this word...) and falling asleep right there on the track. That little debate and mulling over some unsettling news kept me up for another hour and a half, and when my brain finally decided to shut down and my eyes finally closed, my two year old princess walks in the room. Grrrr! Luckily, I have the best husband in the world and without even hesitating got up and tended to our little girl. (Sigh and sigh again, for all those husbands in the world that do sweet things like this!) So an hour and a half later, my alarm goes off and somehow, don't ask me how, I got in my car, drove and ended up at the running track.
Chica arrives, punctual as usual, and she looks about as excited as I am rested. Again, I have to wonder, what were we thinking? I put myself in auto-pilot, only allowing the most minimal and primitive brain waves to travel through and head towards the track. We do a warm-up lap and we start our run. I use an iPhone app, called Runkeeper, and it is how I track our runs, our pace and times. Since I started running with Chica I have been tracking our work outs using this app, but now that we have entered the part in our training where that walking has been eliminated (other warm-up and cool down) I decided that I would only use Runkeeper to track our stats during the running portion. I wanted to see a true average pace and not an overall average pace taking into account the walking we do at the beginning and the end. Today we had an overall average pace of 12:45 min/mi. At some points of our run we were running in the 10 minute pace! Super impressive, if I say so myself. Today's workout was a 25-minute run and while I can not say that we "rock it", I will say that we completed it. Even as tired as I was, I really felt like I could have gone longer. Not saying that my muscles weren't getting a workout, believe me I could "feel" it, but I really felt like I could have gone another 5-6 minutes. This has to mean that my endurance is increasing and even though I can't really tell, I am indeed improving in all aspects of my running. Even as tired as we were, we did a pretty good job. Go, us!!!
These, behind-the-scenes improvements, has me pretty excited thinking about what the next couple of months hold for Chica and I. For lack of a better word, I am exhilarated just thinking of our next run, exhilarated for next week and the weeks after that. This is sooooo, so, so, so becoming my addiction. While this is, in my humble opinion, a great addiction to have, my new found love for running will just have to wait a day. After a quick Christmas evening visit to Casa de Chica and while saying our goodbyes, I hesitantly suggested to Chica that we skip tomorrow's run . After over 12 hours today of non-stop "go, go, go" I knew I needed to make tonight an early night and try to sleep for as long as I can the next day. As soon as the words left my lips I literally saw Chica sigh a sign of relief. Apparently, Chica went non-stop too and was all pooped out!
Christmas was a success, good food was had, friends were hugged and plenty of love was shared and we even managed to squeeze that run in. Hope YOUR Christmas was just as wonderful!
Tonight, I bid you an early goodnight, tomorrow...I rest!
Love&Hugs,
Bella
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