weekend recap

We get one day of spring weather here and I'm a new woman. It was 50° and sunny Saturday (sorry, Midwest) and I feel completely reinvigorated. Even though the winter here really isn't that bad comparatively considering we don't get mountains of snow (sorry again, Midwest), the gray-ness has been really wearing on me. This weekend was much needed.

It started with my long run on Saturday morning. I've been having a hard time committing to long runs on Saturday morning and have been delaying them to Sunday, throwing the whole week's schedule off. When I woke up and saw sun I actually wanted to run for once. We knocked out 6 miles at an 11:30 pace, which is almost a full minute faster than my pace of 12:26 for my 5 mile run last week. I couldn't believe how good it felt. I have a record of horrible 6 mile runs (once I seriously messed up my IT band, another time a bug flew INTO my eye and managed to stayed there for the rest of the run) so I expected this one to be the same. But I think it was a combination of the weather, carbo loading with Thai fried rice the night before, and running without my Garmin and therefore not obsessing over my pace that made this run actually enjoyable. 

source | yeah, I'm not someone who can take pictures while running. I can't do anything while running except run and think about running.

It was also a great route; our apartment is close to the mountains (hills? big hills) so usually when we run and don't drive somewhere to do so, there are hills involved, which I'm horrible at. Saturday, we ran near campus and it struck me how pretty this area actually is. As hard as it is to live far away from family and friends and everything that I'm used to (like mountains of snow during winter), sometimes I feel really lucky to live somewhere so beautiful.

Afterwards, we fueled with bacon potato pancakes (healthy, right?) and I was on such a runner's high I started spring cleaning. I finally organized things that hadn't been since I moved in (... in September...) and even went super crazy and opened some windows until I realized 50° actually isn't that warm but at that point my cat was occupying the window sills and it was too late.

Sunday it was back to cold, gray, rainy weather and motivation-less me. What was supposed to be a 2 mile "easy" recovery run ended up being 2 miles of torturous hills and me tripping on the curb and almost biting it; I think Saturday's run gave me too much confidence and I forgot how bad it is to run out my apartment door. I spent the rest of the afternoon mostly on the couch watching Food Network, making pulled pork nachos, watching the Olympics and lamenting the lack of sun and wishing spring was just here for real.

right?! please.