I’ve had good and bad days with my injury. I certainly had not been able to train for this race like I would have hoped. I didn’t want to really mess up my IT Band so I decided to do intervals of running and walking for the race and hope for the best. I hoped to do a 10:00 minute mile pace. Nathan’s goal was to do a 12:00  minute mile pace. I wasn’t so sure that my goal was realistic since averaging that pace would mean running faster than that during my running intervals since I was planning to take walk breaks. Nathan didn’t do much training AT ALL

So, today was the big day! It was a chilly morning and I was happy to find my running jacket in the car. As we started running, Nathan stayed with me for a while until I told him how fast he was running. At that point, he decided to slow down and save some energy for later! I took my walk breaks and they ended up being more frequent than I was hoping, but I didn’t want to really hurt myself and I could feel the muscles tightening. I finished mile 1 in 10:04, mile 2 in 9:51, mile 3 in 9:44 and the last .12 miles with a pace of 8:11. I was very pleased with myself!  I had a finish time of 30:40 on my watch. My overall pace was 9:49 and that was with 8 walk breaks!

After I finished, I watched for Nathan. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but he crossed the finish line at 37:14. He beat his goal for the race and hardly trained at all! I was pretty amazed!

We have a nice little collection of race shirts now!

Here’s how I’m doing so far-

1. Finances.

11 days into the this year (oh, wow, is it 1/11/11 today? Woot!), we’re staying on track with our budget. It’s a little harder in January. We get paid monthly, but Nathan gets his check early in December. That means we go more than a month between paychecks. It should all work out in the end because we get the same amount of money in a two month time frame. I also made sure to keep this in mind last month when our salary came in 10 days before we usually get it. I kept a watch on our expenses to not tap into that until our normal pay day last month. Having a specific plan has already saved us money. Nathan is making less trips to the bookstore at work to buy things because he knows that it will count against his “play” money which he would rather use for electronics! We’ve also decided against going out to eat a couple of times because we want to save our “dining out” money for another time. And I am determined that McDonalds will be getting much less money from us this year. Last year’s amount was ridiculous.

2. Date night.

We had our Jan. date night last night. It was a planning meeting with some couples from church, but I’m counting it as our date night since we got a babysitter and had a fancy dinner and adult conversation at a lovely home.

3. Cut out eating after 7:00pm

I have done fabulously with this one! Last night was the only exception and that was out of my control because dinner didn’t start until 7:00. I’m positive that I’ve saved myself a ton of calories by sticking with this. I actually lost weight last week! (er…. RE-lost weight… sigh)

4.Running

I only did 1 mile last week. It’s been too cold to be outside and our treadmill is awful. I’m not giving up on my goal for 600 miles for the year though. I did the 30 Day Shred today for my cardio.

5.Memory verses

I did 2 verses last week.

6.Write a family mission statement.

Not done yet.

Nathan and I decided to head out a little early because of the snow. Marie had convinced her husband to drive her so she wouldn’t have to drive in the snow. As we pulled out of the driveway and had trouble making it up our little dead-end road, I started to wonder if this might be a bad idea. I changed my goal for the day to actually run the race without falling on my behind.

2 miles down the road, I was re-evaluating my goals again and calling Marie to see where she was and to tell her that the roads were bad. We kept going. Nathan increased our speed a little on Hwy 7 (up to a whopping 35-40 mph) and we immediately started sliding and ended up spinning around and facing the opposite direction on the highway. I prayed for our lives and we ended up safe- no cars around and we weren’t in the ditch.

There were more calls back and forth and Marie decided that she needed to be able to drive home to her kids this afternoon and with 10 inches of snow coming, we didn’t anticipate that the roads would be getting better. We opted to keep going east and because we needed to get to our own kids in Cottage Grove. Because we would be going the direction of Chaska anyway, we decided that if we could make it there in time and still drive very slowly and safely, Nathan and I would run the race together.

We arrived at the destination in one piece! Yeah! We got out of the van and into the elements and I knew beyond a doubt that we were insane. We picked up our packets of goodies and our t-shirts and killed a little time wandering around the school for a little while.

(stay tuned for Nathan’s account of the race itself!)

Looking through the completed pages gives me such a great feeling of accomplishment. One of the huge drawbacks with scrapbooking is that you can get very behind when it comes to putting photos in albums. It can be overwhelming. What I love about Project Life is that it incorporates the best parts of scrapbooking (journaling and eye catching pages) while eliminating the worst parts (not having the right supplies when you want them, feeling like every page needs to be a masterpiece, . . .) so you can get your photos into a place where you can enjoy them before they are 10 years old!

Early on, I gave myself permission not to have to take a photo every single day. It made the project more enjoyable. I try to get 7 photos a week that tell the story of what is going on with our family. Some times I take all those photos in one day because I want to highlight a specific event. The result has been that I have a current album that I can look through RIGHT NOW that documents the last 10 months (I started in Oct.). It has been a great investment!

I did my 5 miles this morning. It was so nice out. The sun was just coming up and it was a little cool. I could definitely feel fall in the air. I even noticed that the sumac on the trail is starting to turn red. I suppose it is the end of August. I just can’t believe our summer is basically over. Today was a speed work day for me. I did 1 mile warm up and then I had a goal of running a mile at 9:28 followed by a half mile recovery and then another mile at 9:28 followed by another half mile recovery. Then I finish off with a cool down mile. Instead of hitting 9:28 I actually finished in 9:16 and 9:14. Not bad!

I just checked the timer and it looks like Nathan should be back in about 20 minutes!

So, here’s my brief, belated blog boast.

I finished the race faster than Amy predicted. I averaged 11:20 miles for a total time of 34:59. There’s nothing like a clock ticking up to xx:59 to get your adrenaline pumping. I kept speeding up over the last block, ending in a near-spring, just so I could claim a speed faster than 35 minutes (even if only by 1 second).

I’m still not loving running, but I am getting to really enjoy the sense of accomplishment I get from doing it.

Unfortunately, probably because they were tired and sore, I tweaked a muscle in my back over the weekend and have been hesitant to run until it’s on the mend. But, since I cut a whopping 5 minutes off my last time, I figure taking a week off won’t hurt me much…

I started a new tracking sheet, though, aiming for mid November. The new goal is to run 125 miles and bike 250 miles by that time. We’ll see if I can keep on this roll. It’ll get harder as work gets busier, but running or biking is a nice escape from work.

I’m back to running. Training for my 2nd 5K, which will happen here in town in August. It’ll be fun to run places I know.

Today, though, I am quite proud of having run all the way around the lake. 4.3 miles in a 66 minutes. Not bad…

I’m up to 193.6 miles for the year. I’m actually quite a bit behind my lofty goal I had set at the beginning of the year. I still feel good about my progress though. On Friday last week, I got up and I ran 6 miles. It took me 1 hour, 13 minutes and 50 seconds. It wasn’t setting speed records, but I was proud of my accomplishment. I ran for 6 miles. Less than a year ago, I couldn’t even run a quarter mile. Now I can run for over an hour without stopping! When I set out on Friday, I wasn’t sure how far I was going to go. I took a route that went all sorts of crazy ways, but since I was wearing my Garmin I didn’t have to worry that I would have to remember every street because it calculates and maps everything for me. There was a point when I turned down one of the country roads that I thought to myself, “What have I done? I’m way too far from home!” I was sort of committed to doing the distance at that point. I suppose I could have walked home if I ran out of steam, but I had to get back in time for Nathan to get ready and leave for work on time.

I’ve decided to ramp up my running a little as I prepare for the 5k in August. I have 7 weeks. Nathan is going to run again too and he’s planning to take his training a little more seriously this time.

My weigh-in on Friday was good. I was down .4 lbs. That puts me a little more than 16 pounds from my initial goal and I’m half pound from being done re-losing weight I already lost. Even more amazing was that I managed to control my eating over the weekend after my weigh-in. I have a terrible habit of eating a lot on Friday and Saturday (and sometimes Sunday!). I didn’t do that this week. Yeah for me! I did have a high calorie day today though. I’m putting that behind me though. I’m ready for another good week. We have a family reunion coming up this weekend and I’m sure it will be more difficult to eat healthy with travel factored in. I want to have some good days before we go.

Looks like my photos are ready to add to the previous post. I’m off to bed soon since I have a run scheduled for early tomorrow morning.

I think I’m back “full-time” now. Or whatever you call it. I hope to run about 9.5 miles this week.

I set some crazy goal at the beginning of the year that I was going to run 720 miles. That’s about 14 miles a week. Hah! I’m not going to be anywhere close to that. I’m not sure what I was thinking. Here’s how I’ve done so far this year:

Total Miles- 148.7

High Mileage Month- February with 44.4

Low Mileage Month- April with 25.9

Average Monthly Mileage- 34.175

Highest Weekly Mileage- 14.4

Longest Run- 5.02

Fastest Run- 2 miles in 19:26 (9:43/mile pace)

1) My family, 2) Writing, and 3)Reminiscing by looking through old photos

This is why I love scrapbooking. I get to combine all 3 of those things.

Ethan turned 5 this last weekend and I wanted to see if I could get his scrapbook up to date by his birthday.  I had finished a couple of layouts, but I had not done much since his birthday last year. We keep all our photos in Picasa on our computer. I browsed through the months and started thinking about what really characterized Ethan this past year, how he liked to spend his time, what he was  excited about, and the big milestones. The main question I kept in mind was “What do I want to remember about Ethan from this year?” I picked photos based on the answers to that question. It was an incredibly freeing way to choose photos. We have hundreds of them and it can easily be overwhelming. Narrowing down the choices this way made it much more enjoyable. And, because we have the photos on our computer, I’m not losing the photos I didn’t print. They are still there.

Although, I prefer to put my scrapbooks together chronologically, this approach allows for more freedom than just scrapping one event after another. I did layouts on relationships between Ethan and his siblings. I did a page just about what he likes and doesn’t like. I did one page on his obsession with video games. The focus was on telling Ethan’s story and not just show-casing fancy paper, stickers or the latest scrapping technique. I love all of those things, but they can get in way of actually getting things done sometimes. I’m focusing on simplifying so the photos can spend less time in boxes or on the computer and more time in the kids’ albums. Even at the ages of 3 and 5, Audrey and Ethan ask me to read “their” books. I have a few pages to wrap up still, but here are some of the highlights:

Ethan got a brother!

I love this page of things about Ethan. They are the sort of things you think you’ll always remember when you’re living it, but are actually easy to forget as they grow.

2-page spread on Ethan as the first-born. I wrote about what it was like to see him become a big brother and how he often asks who I love the best!

A close/cropped shot of the journaling (I know it’s still hard to read- sorry).

Documenting a trip to Chetek.

The picture of this page isn’t as clear. It’s an entire page of photos of Ethan playing the Wii/PlayStation. I wish I could say all he did was look at books and build things, but this is our life. It’s something he loves and I thought I should document it.

This approach took the focus off of the paper and embellishments and put it on the story. The journaling became more important. You might not be able to read them all, but I did a considerable amount of writing on each page. As much as I have had to force myself to journal on the kids’ scrapbooks, I have to admit that has been Ethan and Audrey’s favorite parts when we look through their albums. It’s quickly becoming my favorite part too. Our blog archives have become a great resource as I think of what to write. Another awesome source of inspiration has been the book writing motherhood by Lisa Garrigues. It’s full of tips and writing prompts specifically geared toward helping mothers “mine their everyday lives for stories to preserve, publish, or pass on.”