Speaking of life mojo, I have been riding high for the past couple of months. Is it possible to find your own happiness obnoxious at times?
Perhaps that's why my running has been just kind of eh--everything else
is super duper great. I have good running days and not-so-good ones,
but it has been awhile since I've had a week or two of consistently
strong runs.When I run on the Greenway, I like to fly. There is nothing better to me than careening around the corners and stretching my legs to their limits. Which is perhaps why a few unplanned treadmill runs this past week really helped me today.
Tuesday, I had a dentist appointment and wore my running clothes so I could go to the Greenway afterwards. We had a ton of run over the weekend and when I got to the Greenway, the trails were closed from flooding.
I drove back towards my house and was going to park at the rec center
nearby to just run on the sidewalks, but I had to pee sooooooo bad. I
probably could have just gone into the rec center without paying the
daily fee, but I felt like a big weirdo doing that (and perhaps a little
embarrassed 
).
So I drove home and decided to just watch a movie on the dreadmill. I
needed a slower paced run anyway and this would force me to stay that
way.Yesterday morning, I knocked out 3 miles before heading to work. Started watching another movie and my run went by super fast. Woot!
Last night, Adam and I were talking with someone about his MS and how he has dealt with the physical issues over the past few years since his diagnosis. I've blooped about it before, but when he was first diagnosed in 2010, we took an Alaskan cruise shortly after he started taking a medication for some of his symptoms. The medication seemed to exacerbate his dizziness. We signed up to do a 5K walk for breast cancer aboard the ship and he was unable to complete it. The dizziness combined with the numbness of the right side of his body was just too much. So he had his redemption this spring, completing a 5K walk while I ran my marathon. Last night, he said that he was really proud he had finished a 5K a few months ago.
I thought about this a bit on my run today. I was really proud that he was using my sport as a benchmark of his physical success. I will never know if he wouldn't have tried something like that if we weren't together, but I like to believe that this was a positive influence that I had. He may never become a runner, but I'm lucky to have a really awesome spouse who supports what I do and uses the word proud when talking about running.
My run today was pretty much perfection. I started out with a feeling of 'easy' and was pleasantly surprised when I saw easy was just under 8:00 pace. I spaced out in my thoughts during the meat of the run and wasn't really paying attention to my Garmin. I glanced at it a few times and then just plodded along, pleased as punch that the humidity was low, the temperature was decent, the wind was blowing a bit (creating a nice breeze), and the skies were sunny. Plus, my legs felt fresh and I wasn't experiencing any major aches or pains. By the time I got to the other side of the sandwich, around mile 8, I decided to just grind some speed out of the final miles. It was a comfortable pace to keep up and I knew that I would still have enough gas in the tank to tear up the final mile. Splits: 7:50, 8:00, 8:04, 7:49, 7:57, 7:52, 7:42, 7:54, 7:26, 7:12.
And for my food-porn pic loving peeps, I have a few items. First, I made a batch of blueberry muffins to send in a package to Vblevins along with my check for the Rehoboth house.
Then I decided to add some of Grandma's cowboy cookies (oatmeal chocolate chip) into the package too. Grandma is 90 and has been making and eating them for almost a century--I think they are the secret to the fountain of youth.
Wednesday night, I decided that we should have our first dinner al fresco. A little caprese salad for me, greens for Adam, and a bottle of red wine from a vineyard in the North Georgia foothills. Later, we enjoyed some grilled pork chops and candlelight conversation:
Today, after my 10 miler, we went out and bought a new grill. Our old one was a Char-Broil that we got back in 2006. We kept it covered, but this past winter, 2 separate wind storms knocked it over. It still functioned, but was rapidly becoming a rusty mess. We had said for years that our next grill was going to be fancy pants. We got a Weber Genesis and our awesome local Ace Hardware store brought it out a few hours after we bought it:
Tonight, we'll be testing that bad boy out and perhaps enjoying another one of these:
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