Quadracool: Yeah, yeah, another bloop of running, food, and fun

The Cold Hard Facts

Monday: 10 miles after working 8 hours (on my feet, slinging furniture, it's okay to be impressed). Garmin had satellite issues for 2.5 miles!!!! and then decided to cooperate-ish. The splits I got: 26:29 (erm, yeah...), 7:52, 7:50, 7:56, 8:08, 8:00, 7:53, 7:34. It was 1:18 for 10 miles, so really it was around a 7:50 average pace.

Wednesday: 6 miles of speedwork. 1 mile warm-up at 10:00 pace, then 8x400s with 400 recovery, and a 1 mile cool down. 400s were 95, 95, 95, 95, 95, 94, 93, 90.

Friday: 3+ miles of slogfest. Legs felt like bricks (thanks speedwork/4th of July). Ran at an 8:34 pace.

Saturday: Much, much happier legs. 8.5 hilly, hilly miles in the 95% humidity. First 7 mile splits: 8:25, 8:13, 8:23, 8:16, 8:24, 8:29, 8:17. Then I ran just over a quarter mile down to the track and did 4X200s with 200 recovery at about a 5:50 pace. I sloooooowly swam ran back to my car and decided I was happily spent.

Pictures are worth a thousand words

Or something like that. Otherwise this bloop would be even longer.

Gah!

I started the plank challenge this week. Much like the push-ups, I have a starting base of practically zero. Somewhere under here are some abs:

Today, post planking, I took another picture (this is why celebs turn to the side, so much more flattering!) and think I found one beer in the six-pack. Hopefully I can uncover another one this month:

My faithful readers (hah!) know that I'm a crossword nut and my head almost exploded when one of the long clues (#62 across) was related to marathons:

I remembered that while chocolate ice cream does not cure all problems, it sure is quite the endorphin booster:

Adam and I have hosted a 4th of July party every year since we've been in our home. My decor has grown over the years both outdoors:

And indoors:

I started party-goers off with a bomb pop (like the popsicle) cocktail:

They were pretty potent so many of us switched to beer later on:

I turned my grill into a smoker using hickory wood chips and let the pork shoulder and chicken get nice and tender all day long:

Sadly, it was raining most of the day and when it came time to shoot off fireworks, I opted to stay inside while 1 of my dogs went into attack mode. She isn't scared of fireworks, she wants to kill them. If we let her outside, she will actually try to bite any lit firework. So special....

There was an increase in the half-marathon I was considering, so I capped off my evening by registering for a race in October. They had an option to sign up for the 39.3 challenge which combines your full marathon time in March with the October half. Last year's female winner won with a combo of 5:11 (3:36, 1:34) which is too fast for me, but the second place female was 5:45 (4:00, 1:45) which is completely beatable. Obviously, it is a pretty narrow field, but it still could be neat to place!

Apparently some people were not done celebrating even on Friday morning, because a drunken idiot did this to a brick wall in front my store at 11am:

He drove off, but a good citizen in the parking lot copied down his license plate and the police tracked him down at his house. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Last night, we did sushi for date night: