welcome to my mind ...

On top of the activities previously mentioned in the prior entry, I forgot to include last Monday and Tuesday's dinner plans. Monday was sushi, Tuesday was a belated birthday dinner with the best friend. Both of those evenings were quite enjoyable. It always helps when you hang out with super chill people.

Today was the most involved plan of all the activities I'd had planned: the Hot Chocolate 15k. I've never done anything more than a 5k, and the best time I ever had, I think, was 42 minutes. I was also overweight during each of those. It's definitely more involved when doing a 15k (9.3 miles for those of us here in America) and I'm already feeling it. Luckily, the only really steep hill was right at the beginning and it was going downhill. The rest of the hills were decent inclines, but nothing steep; just seemingly never-ending. The good thing about the inclines is that it would eventually become a decline, and those are much easier. You have gravity working in your favor. It doesn't do nice things to your joints, but it helps with speed.

My goal was to complete it in under 2 hours. I finished it at 2 hours and 9 minutes. Which, in all honesty, is better than I expected to do considering I really didn't train. I was on top of it for the first 3 weeks of the 8, and then went to the gym maybe 3 times over the following 5 weeks. It averages out to about a 13:51 min mile. I definitely couldn't jog the whole thing, but I alternated between walking and jogging. There were several people still behind me when I finished, which made me feel better.

It was incredibly cold and I didn't realize it was possible to be warm/sweaty/swollen AND cold at the same time. I understand that we sweat to cool our bodies down, but the wind that was blowing wasn't just a light breeze, and whenever the sun dipped behind the clouds, it got cold. My fingers were numb for at least half the time I was outside. My toes finally warmed up, which was nice. It made moving forward a little easier.

I'm quite proud of the simple fact that I followed through. Getting up early this morning, going out in the cold, and jogging/walking 3 times farther than I've ever gone in a run before was not an easy feat. But I have the finisher medal and the record online (along with super sore joints) proving that I accomplished this and I'm proud of the fact that I did.

February of last year, during the vacation bidding period, I knew that I'd wanted to do this. I requested off March 6th in anticipation of needing a day to recover, and I'm really thankful for past me for thinking ahead, even though I didn't actually register for this run until 10 months later. On top of needing an extra day to allow my hips and knees to heal, tomorrow is the first official day working for Kaiser, now that they've finally acquired Group Health, and I'm glad I won't be around for the chaos. I'm still going to be sore on Tuesday, but at least I can go back in to work and ask everyone what I have to do, rather than learning with tomorrow's trial and error day.

Alright, I'm going to zone out and probably head to bed early tonight. When I wake up tomorrow morning, and get up for the first time, I already know that just going to the bathroom is going to be a bitch. But I have Advil and bananas so I'll just take it easy and work through it.

Until next time. . .