A long weekend's worth of updates.

This long weekend could not have come at a better time. I'm not a big fan of Columbus Day and I don't really understand why my office (which is all about social justice and loving the stranger) celebrates it, but between the recent illness and all the schoolwork, I definitely needed an extra day at home. Here's what I've been up to:

Thursday night, I got a lovely package in the mail from my former roommate Katie, who now lives in Hawaii, containing the shirt pictured above. As much as I don't want to go through marathon training again, I may consider it as part of a future visit to her new home of Honolulu. Especially if I can convince her to run it with me. She doesn't think that will happen, but I can be very persuasive...

Friday, I tried to take it easy and go to bed super-early in order to shake off the last of my cold and gear up for Saturday's 18-miler. When I started out on Saturday, I thought it had worked. My first few miles felt really good, and I was appreciating both the week of rest and the fact that I was moving again. Around mile 7, it started to get tough. At 8, I decided to slow down a lot and try to recover for the second half of the run. That got me to about mile 11. At that point, things really started to fall apart. I just didn't feel like I could run anymore, so I switched almost entirely to walking. By mile 13, even that was difficult. I was exhausted,  pretty much everything hurt, and the 5 miles back to my car felt like a really long way. Fortunately, one of our coaches noticed that I was taking too long to get back to the start and drove to the trailhead to look for me, cutting the last 1 1/2 miles off the end of my return trip.

Not finishng that run was one of the lower points of my training. I didn't cry or panic, but this was one of the only times in the past few months where I actually thought "maybe I can't do this." Oddly enough, someone from my gym made me feel better this morning by asking how I'm feeling and commenting that I looked awful last week. She was right. On my one and only visit to the gym last week, I had to run into a bathroom mid-class and splash water on my face to keep from throwing up. I was really sick, and I obviously needed more time to recover before attempting such a long run. If I continue to take it easy, I will get back to where I was before.

For the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday, I got to really enjoy the extra dose of weekend. Saturday night, I went to Baltimore to celebrate the lovely Katie Cashin's 26th birthday. Yesterday, I spent a few hours making some fall dishes: corn fritter casserole and shepherd's pie:

Yum! Then, I actually went to a movie. I've been to maybe 5 or 6 movies in the past 2 years, which is so sad. Going on a Sunday, which is usually homework and laundry day, felt downright decadent.

Finally, this morning, I went to the launch of the new Group Power release. Earlier this week, I discovered that the company behind GP actually puts up trailers on YouTube, so here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkApJe4XQI8. I am grateful that our instructors, Bill and Kelly, are a little more low-key than these guys. They still make it fun, but I think they understand that there's only so much enthusiasm a person can handle at 6am.

Now, its time for deferred laundry and homework day... but maybe a nap first.