A scary prospect

I love costumes, so Halloween is my kind of holiday. I'll dress up even if it's not Halloween, so it's nice to have a time when people don't look at me so strange. Oh, wait ... they still do. But, not because I'm wearing a costume at an inappropriate time.

This year, I have two costume parties. The first is tonight, and it's just a general costume party. I didn't know about it until late (a boyfriend's coworker's friend's party ... or something like that), so I haven't really been planning a  new costume. But, I do have plenty of options to choose from.

My next party is next Saturday, and the theme is "senior prom with a bloody twist." I have some ideas, but really haven't started on a costume for that. I'm excited about the possibilities, though.

What I'm not excited about is that both of these parties are on a Saturday night. I have long runs on Sunday mornings at 7:30 a.m., and we're getting to our longest runs of our training (10 miles each for the next two Sundays). These are important runs, but these are also important parties. So, I've got to enjoy myself at the party (with limited or no adult beverages) and call it an early night. I'm not good at that normally, but especially when costumes are involved.

Day 3

Well, running at 7:30 on a Sunday morning really is as bad as it sounds.

I arrived in a daze to meet the training group. The plan: run four miles; two miles in one direction, and then turn around and end back at the starting point. I started off feeling pretty good (aside from being half-asleep — I kept asking people to repeat themselves because I was so out of it). I ran 2.5 miles pretty easily, and then I felt like crap. I was hot (it’s amazing how hot it is already at 8 a.m.) and nauseous. Yuck. So, I didn’t run the full four miles. After the initial 2.5 miles, I started doing walk-run intervals. Although I’m not sure how much more I ran vs. walked. I had my Garmin watch and started it at the correct time, which is an improvement. I just forgot to turn it off for the drive home … oops. I looked at my watch after a much-needed shower and noticed that I ran 23.8 miles and burned 11,107 calories. Impressive.

Running is such a guessing game. I’m always evaluating how I ran and what caused me to either run successfully or poorly. This time, my guess is that I wasn’t fuelled correctly for the run. I eat at bizarre times on Saturdays. There’s no routine, which is fabulous, because it means it’s the weekend. I also seem to eat less (most of the time) on the weekend. This particular Saturday, I ate a breakfast-lunch combo (two eggs, vegetables, mango) at about 1 p.m. Then, I ate dinner (a rockin’ pork burrito from Taco Bus) about 6 p.m. Aside from some watermelon, I didn’t eat anything after dinner. Those burritos are filling (and delicious).

The morning of the run, I ate a protein meal bar and an energy gel (which wasn’t as nasty as I feared, but it still wasn’t great). When I started feeling nauseous during the run, I also had a very empty, acidic feeling in my stomach, so I’m assuming I didn’t eat enough (and that not-great energy gel wasn’t sitting pretty).

I hope that everything comes together soon, and I can run the full distance of these training runs. I’m feeling pretty pathetic at this point. There are many others in the same situation as me, but I’m frustrated because I know I can run these distances … or I have before. If I can’t run these so-called easy distances, how in the heck am I going to be able to run 13.1 miles?