Happy Holidays!

Christmas has come and gone, and I hope everyone had a great holiday. Marshall and I sure did. We traveled to Joplin on Christmas eve to spend Christmas with my in-laws. While there we got to meet up with my college coach, Jamie, and log quite a few miles with him on the trail.

This past week was mostly playing catch up. We were bad and didn't run on Monday or Tuesday. Therefore, we fit all our miles in with only 5 runs this week (ouch!). We are both fairly motivated right now, so we had to make it happen. Marshall signed up for Grandma's Marathon last week, so we will be headed back to Duluth, MN this June! Both of us are looking for a PR and planning on putting in quite a bit more miles than we did for this race last year. 

June 2014 at Grandma's Marathon. 

Week in Review:
50 miles
5 runs
13 mile long run
cold spectator at Run for the Ranch

Not a bad week, considering we played catch up. Marshall had a handful of athletes running at the Run For The Ranch Half/Full marathon yesterday. So I got to experience being on the other side of a race. Rather than racing myself, we simply went to spectate and take pictures of all the runners. It was pretty exciting to see all his athletes hard work pay off as they work towards their goals. He had several athletes that finished in the top 5 of their races. Awesome! Be sure to check out his website tomorrow for pics of the race. . . http://www.ultimatehealthrehab.com/#!uhr-race-day-photography/cm3r

Fall recap

Those of you that follow Marshall's blog, you know that we are finally back at it. We are looking forward to putting in some base mileage and logging a couple weeks of just running. We are determined to make this one of our best winter seasons! So far we are off to a slow but good start :)

Let's recap the fall racing season. After Grandma's marathon, I never took a proper recovery which caused the fall season to be very long and grueling. By the time late October and early November arrived, running became more of a chore and something "I had to do" rather than craving the run. Now that we've had a solid month of low mileage and full week of absolutely no running, the spring in our step has returned.

Exciting finish at plaza 10k

Fall season started off with an awesome 10k in Kansas City, where I ran (or maybe tied?) my road PR. Then about a month later I was ready to roll-out a decent half marathon in KC. Unfortunately, I took a spill somewhere around mile 4 and lost contact with the 3rd and 4th place women. This took me out of a top three finish. I managed to get up and finish the race, even running some sub 6 minute miles trying to catch back up. I had a little stinging and some road rash on the gluteals, but more concerning was that by the time we made the drive back to Springfield my ankle had swelled up. Even to this day, if I forget and sit wrong or move it in a certain way it gets painful. However, it is getting MUCH better every week. It was at a stand still until I had Marshall start treating me consistently the past two weeks.

Road rash

Two weeks after the KC half, Marshall and I were running the Bass Pro Half. My plan was to roll-out at KC and run Bass Pro with less aspirations since it was only two weeks later. However, after the poor performance, I thought -what the heck, I'm going for it. It was a super windy day, but surprisingly I felt so much smoother than I had at KC. I had company through 4 miles, in which I thought the other lead female was simply drafting and making me do all the work against the wind. Looking back now though, I think she was doing all she could to simply hang on. Once we hit the slightly uphill mile heading down town she got dropped, and from there on it was just me and the cyclist guiding me through the rest of the course. Despite the wind, I kept ticking off sub six minutes miles - feeling relaxed the entire time. I ended up with 1:18:35 and couldn't be more pleased.

So we took the entire week off after Bass Pro and have eased back into simple/easy mileage. When I say easy, I MEAN easy. Like 3-4 miles per day. Now completing our 4th week of running we've hit a couple of 7 milers and our first 8 miler today. I'm starting to get anxious, but with the cold weather, it's been easier to stick to the plan when only have to be in the elements for a short time.

On anther note. . . I gave up trying to find some yellow and grey curtains and made my own!

Curtains!