Baby it’s cold outside. I don’t know about where you are, but here it’s been blustering and cold all day! The white stuff started to come down around 6:30 and hasn’t stopped all evening.

So this weekend was the weekend of the Eggnog Jog 10.8K race! Matt’s brother Neil and girlfriend Jessica came into town from Kingston for the weekend because Neil was running too, so we got to spend some time with them, and had a really really great time.

So I know I’ve totally neglected my Training Logs page lately (I’m totally getting back on the horse this week – scouts honour), but I did manage to get in two decent runs in preparation for the race this weekend. I ran for 30 sweaty minutes on Wednesday before my Pump class and I did another 45 minute run on Friday night. Both were traditional treadmill runs, but I felt really strong in both of them, and it gave me a bit of confidence going into the weekend.

One kind of weird thing that I’ve been dealing with ever since the Quarterly Workshop a couple of weekends ago is this strange tingly numbness in my right foot whenever I do any type of high impact activity for more then half an hour or so. It’s so bizarre, and not painful at all, but I’ve been finding that towards the end of my high impact classes (or my few and far between runs), my second toe has started getting numb and slowly spreading out towards the rest of my foot. As soon as I stop the high impact stuff, it goes away, and I’m fine…until the next time I workout for longer then about 30 minutes…….it’s been weird, and I’m trying not to get too freaked out about it, but it’s been in the back of my mind for sure.

Anyways, numb right foot aside (who needs the right foot anyways, that’s why we’ve got two right?), my two runs were really good. It was hard on Wednesday night to be at the gym and watching the BodyStep class start from the treadmill. It’s so strange to be at the gym when a class is going on and not be in it. But me and my treadmill got along just fine, and I was proud of myself for sticking it out and getting my run done (even though I would have rather been hopping around a bench!!).

Saturday morning (the day before the race) I was scheduled to sub a BodyPump class, and also run a dryland training session for a friend of mine’s AA ringette team. I’ve been helping out for the past little while with some of their dryland training, and they had asked me weeks ago to do a session on Saturday after their game. Ideal to be doing two hours of working out the day before a distance race? Hell no. Do-able? Hell yes. It’s all about perspective really.

With Pump and the dryland workout out of the way, Matt, Neil, Jess and I drove out to Georgetown (the host town for our Eggnog Jog) to pick up our race kits and drive the course so we had a heads up for what to expect. My mom and I had googled the Eggnog Jog race course ahead of time to get an idea of what we were up against, and were absolutely horrified to find this elevation graph:

The words your looking for are “Holy Crap”. Or something more vulgar if you’re the type.

My mom gave me a good smack upside the head when she saw this graph because I had coaxed her into doing her very first 10K (didn’t mention that it was really 10.8K but that’s beside the point), and this was far from a “beginners” course.

Anyways – point being, we wanted to drive the course and get a feel for these nasty hills that we were going to be negotiating the following day.

We had a crazy time in the car trying to figure out the winding country roads, we were all over the place!! Probably the highlight of the drive was when Matt crested this absolutely ENORMOUS 90 degree hill that we thought we had to run up the following day, and we all just completely lost it and started howling laughing (not quite sure what was so funny, besides our impending doom of course, but we were just howling). Anyways, we finally found the run course and were very relieved to find out that we didn’t have to run up that monstrosity of a hill, although we did have to run by it. I made a mental note to take a look at it as we ran by the next day and thank my lucky stars that they hadn’t made the course a left turn instead of a right turn, or we would have been running straight up it.

The course looked ugly, from about 3km onwards it was pretty much all up hill, except for about a kilometre and a half at the end of the race that was down hill. It was here that the boys decided that the race strategy would be to conserve energy on the uphills, and then ATTACK on the downhills.

And I’m not talking about BodyAttack.

We went back to Matt’s house and ate enough spaghetti and garlic bread to choke a horse (nothing like carb loading before a race – it’s like permission to eat as much bread and pasta as you’ve ever dreamed of with only minimal guilt because you know you’ll be running your butt off in about 12 hours anyways) and then called it a night.

When I got home, I found my mom in a bit of a state of panic. She had gotten a phone call saying that family was coming in from out of town to stay at our house because someone in our extended family was going to be at Toronto General Hospital for an unplanned surgery. Our family member was going to be okay, but my mom was beside herself at the idea of having to get our house ready for family showing up at a moments notice during the busiest time of the entire year. I was really proud of her for sticking to her guns and insisting that she was going to do the race, even when it would have been easy to bail on it.

Sometimes I think it’s easier to do for others then it is to do for ourselves. And my mom really deserved to do this for herself, I’m so glad that she stuck it out.

We went to bed with the typical pre-race day jitters, with our bibs laid out at the front door and running clothes picked out. The forecast was caling for -3 degrees the following morning, and we knew it was going to be C-O-L-D.

I’ll leave it here for tonight – and stay tuned tomorrow morning for race day recap!!

Sleep tight!!

• Uncategorized