Where did the weekend go??
First things first – I need to catch up on daily photos.
I grabbed my camera off the couch as I headed out for a 12-hour shift on Friday, thinking there wouldn’t be any photo opportunities in such a long day. Well, I walked out the door and captured this sunrise before I even started my commute! The sunset was equally impressive, but I wasn’t able to take any pictures as I was still at work.
On Saturday morning Tom and I went to a semi-local park to get our run in and then do some map work with an old orienteering map, since things like “taking a bearing” and picking the most efficient route to a control are like a foreign language to me.
Well, the run sucked. For starters, most of the roads in the park were closed due to snow, so we did five miles on one little stretch of road; I think we did the same loop five or six times. I could tell you for sure if I looked at the map on Garmin. Also, it was just one of those runs where my legs did NOT want to cooperate. Afterwards we hiked around in the woods for a bit, and (with a little help) he let me “find” three or four “controls” – I use quotes because the controls weren’t actually there anymore, but we went to where they WOULD have been. We’d have continued but we were both getting cold, so we headed home (with a pit stop at Tim Hortons for cocoa).
Dinner Saturday night was an old favorite, New England fish chowder. I love the recipe from Simply Recipes; I actually don’t think I made any modifications. I’ve made this three or four times now. No pictures because we inhaled it. Post-dinner we had some blueberry ice cream (seafood and blueberries, it’s almost like being back in Maine!) and settled in on the couch to watch some football.
We took the couch because, obviously, the chair was taken…
That’s Jed’s chair, and he doesn’t share well. (As you can see, I need more practice shooting in low-light conditions.)
Sunday brought our weekly long run at Letchworth; I did 8 miles, Tom did 12.5. On long runs (a new-ish concept to me), I struggle with going SLOW enough. My “normal” pace seems slow, in my head, so I think “why would I want to go slower?” I did my best to reign it in yesterday, though, and it really did seem to help. I was about 10 seconds slower per mile than last week when I did the same run (9:41/mi. yesterday) but it really didn’t feel bad at all. Yesterday was also the first time I noticed any correlation between heart rate and the way I feel when running. Bear with me, I’m still new at this. I noticed that every mile felt pretty good except mile seven. When I looked at my splits afterwards, during most miles my heart rate was between 160 and 165 – except mile 7, which was an average 0f 170. So, maybe I need to set the heart rate alarm on my watch to go off (on long runs) when I hit, say, 168? I’ve been trying to focus on pace, but maybe I need to focus on heart rate instead?
I headed to the falls to snap a few pics while I waited for Tom to finish up – just a few, though; my fingers were freezing! I’ve decided I need a tripod. (Not that it will help with the frozen fingers, but it’ll make my photos more clear when I’m shooting with a slower shutter speed. Though a tripod that somehow incorporated hand warmers would be pretty great.)
We made a quick stop for the Sunday paper (gotta have my coupons; I’m cheap), more hot cocoa (this is becoming a tradition, this “cocoa post-run” thing), then headed home for hot showers and homemade pizza. And more football.
So yeah: running, cooking, football. An uneventful weekend but in a good way – just the way I like them, sometimes.
On the list for today: a long-overdue haircut if they can squeeze me in (it’s been five months!), errands, and maybe a quick 3-miler?
