Let's Get To It

I would say that in general, I dislike Mondays. However, today was a productive day that began with a beautiful night of sleep. Very necessary. My biggest accomplishment of the day was changing my name at the social security office. I had to wait an hour and a half to get through the 10 people in front of me (yeah it's not the most efficient place), and I got the pleasure of hearing more than one person yelling at the people who work there (for things that are very clearly out of their control). Remind me not to quit teaching to work at the social security office. Now I have to wait 48 hours to change my license so it can get in the system, so that delays that. What a terrible process. Why is their not a creative and smart woman out their simplifying this process with some kind of computer program?

So, ready for my exciting announcement?

Eric and I are going to run a 5K!!!!

Yup, you read that right, I am going to run again!!!!! For new readers, I had to stop running over a year ago because I had patella tendonitis in my left knee. It has continued to hurt whenever I run for the past year so I have tried basically every other possible work out instead. However, lately it seems to be a lot better and I think it's time to start running again. Eric even agreed to do it with me, which is also amazing since his feelings about running are... it sucks haha.

The 5K we are going to run will be at my alma mater, Boston College and it's called the Red Bandanna Run. This run is special for a couple of reasons. #1- it is the run that Caroline did last year for her first 5k! and she'll be doing it with me too! (though by with me I mean like 5 minutes ahead of me haha). #2- it's at BC, yay! #3- this race is in honor of a BC alum named Welles Crowther. He worked in the South Tower of the World Trader Center on September 11th. In addition to his job, he was also a trained firefighter, which came in handy that day as Welles selflessly lead a rescue effort on floors higher up than the official rescue workers were able to reach. He lost his own life that day, but saved many others and was identified by the red bandanna that he used to block smoke and debris from his mouth and nose. If you are interested in his whole story, it's available here. Obviously an amazing, amazing person.

Eric and I will be following my own version of the Couch to 5K training plan, which I used to train for my first 5K last May. I had to make some changes this time around because we don't have as much time, but I think it will be okay since neither of us is quite "on the couch" so to speak :) You can view our training plan here, which includes 3 runs a week starting with alternating timed run and walking, and leads us to running specific distances including 3 miles the weekend before the official 5K. I actually think I could likely run at least 2 miles right now without stopping, but I really want to start slow and hopefully keep my knee happy in the process.

Today was our first official training. We'll be doing ALL training on the treadmill or the cork track, another strategy to satisfy the knee. Today we did a track day so we could run together. We started with a ton of foam rolling (well I did, don't think I've sold Eric on the foam roller yet) and some stretching.







Then we started the walk/run alternation. Today our plan was to do 90 seconds of jogging, followed by 2 minutes of running. It ended up being about a half a lap (lap = 1/4 of a mile) of walking, half of a lap of running. I love the walk/run alternation because the time went by SO fast, before I knew it 30 minutes was over.



When I got home, I stretched and foam rolled again (yup I'm going to be a little psycho this time around) and then iced the knee. So far, no pain... though I did feel it slightly when I was running, but I think it will be okay.

Tonight I'm on a thank you note mission. We got our first batch of thank you notes in the mail today, they came out awesome...



Our second batch is going to have our rainbow picture from my amazing photographer (seriously amazing- if you need a wedding photographer around here, talk to her)...



See the double rainbow in the background? Very awesome. At least having cute thank you notes will make me more excited about writing them. Okay, it's back to productivity for me...

What was the most productive thing you did today?
Do you like training for races? What is the best race you've ever ran (or biked, swam etc)?