Sweet Carolina, bum bum bum (Kelsey)

Well since we last spoke, my running has been going better. Not perfect but better. Last Tuesday, my 3 miles was rough, but Thursday, I ran 4 miles, and I didn't walk a step, and I can honestly say that it really wasn't even hard to keep myself from stopping. The weather was perfect. It rained about 30 minutes before we (Josh ran with me) left, so the humidity and heat were down. I actually ran at 4 in the afternoon, which would have been impossible earlier in the week. But it was encouraging.

This past weekend, I covered over 1,400 miles. However, only one of them was on foot. Well running foot anyway. Friday, I was in a van from 7:30 AM until 11 PM, so there wasn't much opportunity for cross training. And Saturday, I was supposed to run six miles, but I had a wedding to go to, and I was at a random hotel and had no context of a route. I probably could have tried harder to run 6 miles, but I just didn't really feel like figuring it out, either the route or the timing. So I didn't. Though I did wake up at 9 and run with Josh and his sister (it was their cousin who was getting married) hence, the one mile. However, I kinda failed. Josh's sister is a college cross country and track runner so she had us going at a nice pace, and we ran in a hilly subdivision in humid and hot weather (even at 9 AM) and I was dehydrated and overtired and had less oxygen to work with in the higher altitudes of South Carolina. So I ashamedly had to make them stop twice, and I don't think it could have been more than a mile or two that we ran. I felt a little sheepish. I hate making people stop for me. But I did swim quite a bit on Saturday, so I wasn't completely exercise-less.

Sunday was another long stretch in a van, so no kind of running for me Sunday either, but tonight, Monday night, I decided to tackle the 6. There was quite the debacle, in my household, to try and figure out this 6 mile route. As I've said before, I'm kind of boxed in on all four sides, but my neighborhood is hard to find much more than a 4 mile route without having to bring a large sheet of directions. So I was hoping to discreetly leave and not exactly tell my parents that I was going to run 3 miles down Wood street (the busy, but less ghetto choice of the horizon expansion options) and be good with it. But then my mom asked... so I confessed. So at 7:30 PM as I was stretching, they were trying to come up with other options that weren't really feasible, so I offered to ride with my mom to my turn-around point and back to try and point out that I could run the route and not likely be hit by a car. So we got in the car, and instead of just seeing it and driving me back home, she dropped me off at the turnaround point and told me to start from there. This gave me quite the challenge of making up a route as I went. I was slightly irritated, and it was challenging, but it worked out alright. I ran the entire route except for when I had to cross a busy intersection and had to wait for probably a minute and a half or so for the okay-to-walk sign light up. I didn't jog in place cuz I would have felt dumb doing so in front of the 12 stationary cars waiting for their lights to turn green. I would have looked almost as foolish as I did talking into my bicep today all 18 times my mom called me when I was gone. Nothing is quite as encouraging as your mom calling you every 10 minutes and saying, "You aren't done yet?!?"

I have noticed in both my 4 mile from last week and 6 mile from this week, that once I hit about 1.5 or 2 miles, the rest of the run isn't really difficult. It wasn't too hard for me to keep myself running today and it wasn't too tempting to walk. My breathing was quite easy for basically the whole 6 miles, which is such a blessing. My legs started getting tired the last couple miles, and my toenails were reminding me that they need to be cut, but aside from that, 6 miles wasn't super awful at all. If anything, it was just a little boring. I never thought there'd be a day when I could run 6 straight miles. But today was that day. And it feels good to be that girl. I ran 6.04 miles in about 69 minutes, 67 or 68 if you don't count my wait at the intersection.

Well I am off to bed! And to explain how I'm rearranging the schedule, I'm doing 3 easy tomorrow, resting Wednesday, and 3 regular on Thursday and then going according to the schedule from here on out (hopefully, though I do have another out-of-town wedding to go to this Saturday too).