Hi There!

No, I haven’t fallen off a ledge into a dark cavern, I’m still here!

The last 2 weeks have been an incredible flurry of activity for me, and I have so much to update you on. Although I may not have fallen off a ledge into a dark cavern, I most certainly have fallen off the wagon when it comes to my triathlon training and am in desperate need of a hand back up into the wagon.

My last post finished up a recap of the Quarterly Workshop that I attended not this past Saturday, but the Saturday before. What I didn’t mention in that post was that in between 8 hours of group fitness, I was back and forth to my Blackberry checking messages from my real estate agent because I had put in an offer on my first house on the Friday night!

Matt and I have been looking at houses for a long time now; we took a bit of a break from the whole debaucle in the summer because the market was so hot that we were just getting eaten alive.

People are animals I tell you, animals.

It turns out that the buying market really cools down in November, and we felt much more relaxed looking at houses this time around. There was no competition, we didn’t get caught in any bidding wars, and everything was just much simpler.

Anyways, I’ll save you the long story: we found out on Saturday night that they had accepted our offer (after the appropriate amount of bargaining of course) and we had bought our first house!

This of course brought on a massive wave of anxiety for me (in addition to the excitement) because change scares the CRAP out of me. I get really jittery and uptight when they change the hour of my freaking TV show from 9pm to 8pm (I’m serious). So you can only imagine how an impending change like this one must have made me feel.

Are you wondering if I may have an undiagnosed case of OCD? Me too.

Anyways, it turns out that when you buy a house, your entire life becomes consumed with bureaucracy and paperwork and phone calls and emails, and so for the next 5 days I pretty much got totally slammed with all of that stuff, and ended up flat on my back with a nasty cold that I’m still kind of fighting off 8 days later.

I’ll go right ahead and give myself credit for being tough as nails when it comes to teaching when I’m sick. I pretty much have to be on my death bead or have lost my voice entirely (which happened on Thursday) before I’ll sub out one of my classes because I’m sick. When it comes to triathlon workouts on the other hand, apparently I’m a huge baby, and prefer to curl up on the couch with a blanket and feel sorry for myself then drag my butt out the door and workout.

Wah wah wah.

Anyways, excuse or not, the fact of the matter is I didn’t get ONE triathlon workout in last week. Not one single one.

And once again, I find myself in the ever familiar position of being one week out from a race and not having trained properly for it.

The Eggnog Jog 10.8K race is this coming Sunday up at Terra Cotta conservation area; I haven’t run since my epic race with the pizza delivery guy, but I’m still hopeful for a decent race. I’m planning on getting out for 2 really good runs this week, one tomorrow morning before work, and one on Friday night.

Aside from getting in those 2 runs, I’m planning to start doing some of the little things right this week. Things like drinking lots of water during the day, getting 8 hours of sleep, eating healthy carbs with every meal and using my foam roller at night.

Another thing that I want to do this week before the race is to sit down a couple of days out and make a race plan. I know that this one is only a 10K, but I’m getting kind of famous for just going out and “seeing what happens” in distance races. Although I’ve been lucky and everything has worked out to this point, it really is a dangerous, dangerous game to play.

So hopefully this one will get me in the habit of setting out roughly how fast I want to be, when (if at all) I’ll slow up for a drink or small snack, and basically the mind-set that I want to approach the race with.This race is kicking off my “official” training plan for Around the Bay in March, so it’s really important to me that it goes well!

The best piece of advice that anyone ever gave to me about running was from the Running God himself, John Stanton (otherwise known as “the founder of The Running Room”). We stumbled across John at The Running Room location in Winnipeg while we were there for the Manitoba Marathon/Half Marathon. I just so happened to be carrying around his book (aptly titled “Running”), and he was so kind as to sign it for me!

I politely waited until he handed back over the book and we got out of his sight before I ripped open the cover to see what he had written.

“Finish smiling”.

A reminder that while we may take all of this stuff so seriously, at the end of the day the reason that we do it is because it makes us happier then we would have been if we didn’t do it at all.

I did finish smiling that day John, and I plan to in every race I do for the rest of my life. Thanks for the words of wisdom!!

Have a great week and stay tuned for my “official” race plan coming up later on this week!! 🙂

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