Sunday Evening

So this has been a productive weekend -- for once! Saturday I worked at the Hope Clinic (a super cool place that I volunteer at on Saturday mornings) and then Jim and I spent the day running errands and I worked on grading some papers and doing some paperwork in the late afternoon. I also went through about 40 job applicants (I am on a hiring committee).

This morning I was up super early to run the Jingle Bell 5K over at Harrah's Casino (it was a fundraiser for arthritis and all of us folks who are on the Fleet Feet Racing Team showed up! I probably don't need to tell folks in the St Louis area that it was so cold this morning! Luckily, the great folks at Fleet Feet had some hot chocolate out and that helped me stay warm until the horn went off signaling the beginning of the race! The course was fairly flat (except for one gravel hill at the start and the beginning). It took about a mile for me to feel my fingers (did I mention it was cold?) but I felt pretty strong for the first two miles. I was honestly shocked. I am getting so used to feeling winded right away that I was sure how to respond to feeling strong (and speeding up even!). After the two mile mark, I sped up even more and that is when I first started to feel that I was racing but it wasn't until about 2.80 miles that I started to "really" feel it. I struggled up that little hill and then the finish line was there! My time was 30:03, just shy of the 30 minutes that I started hoping for as soon as I realized my legs were feeling pretty good. My PR is just under 24 minutes but since my more recent 5K times have all been around 35 minutes (with lots of pain), I was feeling great about this run!

And then I did it again tonight! I am in the middle of doing a bunch of indoor triathlons at the St Peter's Rec Plex and tonight was #2 (the first was two weeks ago). My pal Melissa is doing the series with me so I am realizing how much more fun it is to do something like this with a friend (more pressure to actually show up and do it in the first place!). Last time I had a total time of 1:13-ish (300 yards in the pool, 10 miles on the bike, and then 3 miles on the treadmill). Just like this morning, I felt pretty darn good. The swim was a tad bit faster (thanks to my ongoing swimming lessons on Monday nights), the bike was much faster (I had gotten dizzy last time and had to slow down), and I just kicked ass on the treadmill (29:25, a wee bit faster than this morning's run!). My final time was exactly 1:03:00 -- yeah! Both Melissa and I beat our previous times so now we will have to work just as hard to beat our times for the next on (on December 11). I wish I knew why today was such an amazing racing day for me when so many of the other days the past few months have been crap. Dare I hope that my body is FINALLY bouncing back?

I still have about 13-14 Annotated Bibliographies to look at (I HAVE to make sure my students get these back in the morning) but ... this will be a short week! We teach on Monday and Tuesday but then we have the rest of the week off. I am not sure why, but I need a break for a few days. There are some articles that I need to get to for the dissertation and then I need to jump more fully into my coding (the next big step for my dissertation).