Wind and Hills

Thank you all for your condolences. It does mean a lot to me.

Life goes on and I have a marathon to train for. Today I ran 18 miles in incredibly windy conditions. Bunny ran with me and we pushed the pace a little bit. When it got really hard, I thought about all my cousin Gwen had to deal with. When I questioned why I put myself through this, I came up with three answers: because I can; because it makes me tough; because if I can do this perhaps I can handle anything life throws at me.

The wind came from the Northwest, and although it was supposed to be 12-15 miles per hour, we had very strong gusts. At one point I told Bunny it felt like I was running backward! Last week I ran 16 miles along the coast and ran into the wind (and rain!)for the first half, so that the wind would be at my back on the return. Today we considered doing that, but that would have put us at Starbucks in the middle of the run and we wanted to finish there. So we had the wind at our backs as we ran up the hills, then battled it when we were already tired. I was very happy to be finished with this run, although I did finish strong.

Last week's total mileage was 35.5. So far this week, I've run 24 miles. But a 10% increase would mean 38 miles, so I have another 14 miles to go. I'm running tomorrow, but depending how I feel, I may only run 4 miles. If I can do 5 on Thursday and 5 on Friday, I'll hit my goal. I'm not used to running 5 days a week, so that will be a challenge, but I hope to get up to 50 weekly miles so I'd better get used to it.

My sister, Deni, came to visit over the weekend and she brought her new dog. He's approximately 1.5 years old. I haven't run with a dog in decades, but she let me take him on my training run. He did pretty well, and it was fun to have a four-legged running partner. We ran 6 miles of hill fartleks, so it was a good workout for both of us. I imagine he slept well on the 3-hour ride home. :-)