Tuesday’s workout: Stand on my feet at work for 12 hours. Look longingly out the pharmacy window at the end-of-January 55 degree day. Sneak away for a few minutes to grab a sandwich at Subway, eat it in the car with the window down, sigh about the short-sleeved run you’re missing, and sulk when it’s time to go back inside.

Wednesday’s workout: Yet to be determined, but morning showers coming to an end + getting out of work at 4pm + sunset at 5:26pm + a high of 43 degrees can mean only one thing – I am NOT getting stuck on the treadmill this afternoon! (That’s a lot of math for so early in the morning. Sorry.)

I think part of my mental issue lately has been boredom; I hate being stuck on the treadmill. Music is fine, and TV is great, and all…but there’s only so much running in place I can do without feeling like a hamster on a wheel. Also, Tom hasn’t been running much in the last few weeks; he came down with a nasty virus and is still recovering. I know a lot of you run solo, but for me, the support of running with someone else is huge, and even when we have to run individually on the treadmill, knowing he’s going to ask “How far did you run today?” “Did you run today?” “How was your run today?” makes me less likely to slack off. When the weather cooperates and we can actually run outside together, it’s even better.

I’m working almost every day but tomorrow this week, so my free time is limited, but I need to run at least 20 miles. I slacked off big time last week, and I really want to have a solid base going into half marathon training.

Not that I’ve committed to a training plan or anything yet…

But I know it’s coming soon. It’s already February, for crying out loud.

January’s training report, brought to you by the trusty Garmin. Not bad, but I know I can do better. You can click to enlarge the image, I believe.

So, after evaluating January (just now, for about 30 seconds – such dedication), for February I’d like to:

1. Run at least one double digit long run.
2. Break 100 miles for the month.
3. Run at least one 30 mile week.

And there you have it. New month, fresh start, renewed mindset. Something like that. More coffee.

I’ve only managed to run twice; a treadmill 5k on Monday and five miles on Thursday. I may run later today, but I’m just not feeling it. Last week was mentally tough for me, so I’m thinking maybe my body and mind just needed a little bit of time away. I’m hoping to start back at it with enthusiasm this week. I’m still on track for my goal of 1000 miles this year, with 86 miles so far this month. (Man, the way I talk, you’d think I just took a month off. I took four days off this week, five if you count today. Not the end of the world, Erin. Chill.)

I’ve also slacked off on the photo-a-day thing; I’m still taking lots of pictures, but not every single day. It’s just tough on my long work days; I find myself coming home, flopping on the couch, realizing I haven’t taken a picture yet today, pointing my lens in the direction of a cat, and calling it good. That’s lazy, and it reinforces your already firm opinion that I’m a crazy cat lady. Not good. I’d still like to post pictures often, but I don’t want to feel forced. This blog is supposed to be fun, after all.

We slept in this morning, made a delicious breakfast of pumpkin spice pancakes with homemade-by-a-friend maple syrup, maple raspberry breakfast sausage, eggs and homefries, and french press coffee.  I took some shots of the birds at the feeder with my new lens, and I intend to order my seeds for spring today. Maybe some baking, too.

See ya in a bit.

Thursday was sort of a forced rest day, because it was a 12 hour day at work and I can’t seem to get myself out of bed early enough to run most days.

Friday I did 3 miles on the treadmill, and it was tough. Saturday was another 4 miles, also tough. Of course, I should take into account that I did both at a 9:05/mi pace.

Sunday I decided to do six miles, because if I did six miles I’d hit 25 for the week. Not that the number is important, but it was like a dangling carrot that got me through the run. 6 miles at 9:23 pace. Not bad, right? Except that my pacing was all over the map. Even with a Garmin, I can’t maintain an even pace.

This is my pacing fail face.

Realistically I know that I’m doing better and improving all the time. Maybe I should step back and run at an easier pace this week to recharge my brain? (I tell myself this, but then I get all competitive with myself and go fast anyway once I get going. Meh.)

Post-run, I did dorky things like pulling over and taking pictures of the sunset…

And so begins a new week. Happy Monday!

Today’s workout: 8.0 mi., 1:16:01, average pace 9:31/mi.

I ran 8 miles on the treadmill this afternoon. EIGHT! That’s a personal treadmill distance record (PTDR – yes I just made that up).And the scary part is, it was pretty easy. I didn’t get on with a specific time or distance goal, I just started running and assumed I’d figure it out as I went. Popped the iPod on random, set myself up at 6.3mph and just went.

And went.

And…went.

To be honest, I didn’t even feel like I was doing ANYTHING until I hit mile 5 or so. Then I figured, okay, I’ll do six.

And six felt too easy.

I decided at that point that I’d be happy with seven, or anything above that. The longest “long” run I’ve done in the past few months was eight miles, twice, but both times were outside. The treadmill is a whole ‘nother beast, with its own set of issues. For me, it’s mental. I typically watch the numbers tick away and psych myself into stopping way before I physically need to.

But today, everything clicked, and I even kicked up the speed for the last quarter mile. No aches and pains, no nagging boredom/antsy “get-me-off-this-thing” feelings…nothing.

So eight miles it was.

And I’m pretty darned happy with it.

I really want to work on getting faster, at this point. If I can easily run 8 miles at a 9:30 pace right now, I’m not terribly concerned about adding 5.1 miles to that in six months (Lake Placid is June 10th). I’ve completed a couple shorter runs (4-5 miles) at or below my goal pace of 9:09, and it’s hard to maintain. I know I couldn’t do it for an entire half marathon at this point.

But I’ve got time.

Sometimes when I have a couple of really crappy runs in a row, I forget what it feels like to have a good one. I want to remember this feeling.

Okay, full disclosure…I’ve failed. This photo wasn’t actually taken on the 16th; I took it over a week ago. I came up short for Monday, so this is what you get. This is our stray. He (or she) has been hanging around for awhile now; terrified of people, but hungry. So we’ve been putting food on the porch every night, and every morning the bowl is empty. I wish he’d let us get close enough to make friends, but I’m okay with letting him hang out on his own terms, and get a bite to eat here and there. Marvin isn’t a big fan; he’s tried to drive him away several times. Apparently, he isn’t being very successful.

Why, no, of course I wasn’t bribing Lionel to sit still for a picture with cat treats! I would never do such a thing! I have no idea why he’s fixated on something above the camera.

Noooope, no idea whatsoever. *whistles*

Another spectacular country sunset in winter.

Congratulations, it’s your lucky day; you get another crappy cell phone pic for Saturday. After work, Tom and I went to see Contraband (not bad!), and then met a bunch of my coworkers for dinner and drinks at Applebees in Geneseo. After leaving the restaurant at midnight, I ran into Wegmans to grab a pack of sushi for the next day’s lunch, and couldn’t resist grabbing a carton of this.

If you can’t read the description, it’s coconut rum ice cream with shredded coconut pieces. It’s the stuff dreams are made of. I remember getting it as a kid and then it sort of disappeared. It’s a commemorative edition marking the anniversary of the Blizzard of ’77, so I wonder if it’s only available certain years?

This is what Sunday morning at -4 degrees looks like, when your neighbor has a hot air balloon. I’m sure I was a sight in the driveway in my bathrobe, snapping pictures. The cold, thin air meant that his balloon disappeared into the distance *really* quickly.

Monday was a day filled with errands, including a haircut, groceries, Petco, the dry cleaners, and various stops in the mall. I thought for sure I had failed the photo-a-day challenge barely a week in, until I remembered that I took a few dorky self portraits on my phone while sitting in traffic in a vain attempt to capture my new haircut.

PS: HTC Incredible, for having an 8mp camera, you sure do a crappy job. How many months until my iPhone upgrade?

PPS (or is it PSS?): Sorry for hurting your feelings, HTC Incredible. You’ve been a good phone. *pats*

Long day at work Tuesday; just had to prove my previous comment that Jed doesn’t like to share his chair. Rude, Smooch. Rude.

Wednesday was a beautiful fall day here in WNY…oh, wait. Well, at any rate it was warm enough for the chickens to get out and explore. The girls are in the background, up by the road, but our rooster was being a good rooster and coming to check me out and assess the situation for danger. He found it…what you don’t see is Smooch,  directly beneath where I’m crouched with the camera, purring and violently smashing into my arm looking to be petted. This is the best shot I was able to get before Mr. Rooster lost interest and went back to the barn.

In a somewhat drastic turn of events, this was my view for most of Thursday, and consequently, I was a Lazy Piece of Crap (TM) for much of the day. I did a little cleaning and a little running, but mostly watched TV and surfed the web. The afternoon cleared up enough, though, for me to catch this little guy at the suet feeder…

I ordered a great little zoom lens this morning for my camera (the Canon EF-S 55-250); I can’t wait until it gets here so I can take better bird/wildlife shots! My sister-in-law has the lens and I got to play with it some in Ohio, which led to a bad case of lens envy, hence this morning’s order. #noselfcontrol

Friday was another long day at work. When I got home, Tom had (mostly) prepared us a dinner of steak and mashed potatoes. Well, he cooked the potatoes and put me in charge of mashing them. I can handle mashing. Apparently, though, someone else thought it was HIS dinnertime, too. Don’t stare directly into his eyes. I’m warning you, just don’t do it. “Feed meee…”

More later. Work time nao.

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?

Today’s pace was tough; I was able to finish (and probably could have gone a bit farther) but I felt like I really had to focus to maintain the pace throughout the entire run. I know it’s good to push outside of my comfort zone, but…woof.

Spent a bit of time today sprucing up the blog; it’s still not where I want it to be, but it’s MUCH closer. I have very limited knowledge of any sort of “coding” stuff, so everything takes me eight times as long as it should. I’m going to try ONE MORE TIME to upload a new header, and then I’m going to bed before I throw this laptop. I don’t seem to have enough memory to run a browser, Photoshop, and my other usual programs (AIM, iTunes, etc…) without things getting severely bogged down.

In other news, I ordered a DODOcase for my Kindle, and it arrived today! I’m in love with it – it reminds me of the Moleskine journals I love so much. Each one is handcrafted and the attention to detail is really fantastic.

It warmed up to a balmy 10 degrees this morning. Needless to say, all birdwatching activities took place from INSIDE the house.

“You don’t seriously expect me to go OUT there, do you? Stupid human.”