4 Things

Hello Dear Reader,

I've got four things on my mind:

1) Something I've noticed: when the goal is to run a 5k (which takes about 33 minutes), I feel super tired and I'm ready to call it a day. When the plan is to run for about an hour or so, I get tired initially, but seem to get a second wind and feel like I can go for days. My conclusion is that a mental and physical warm-up (for me) takes a good 20 to 30 minutes.

2) Rain, rain go away! For almost the past five days, it has rained every day! Several months ago, Lesotho was desperate for rain. The King of Lesotho, at one point, called for every person in Lesotho to pray for the rain to come. Clearly, the heavens were listening and now it just won't stop. On one hand, I'm loving the rain because it cools everything down (me included) making a nice morning run very comfortable and I don't come back home sweating like a pig on the spit! On the other hand...dang...can we get a light rain instead of the big grape sized drops? And mud is not exactly my favorite thing to run through either. You win some and you lose some, I guess!

3) Because the rain let up this evening, I decided to run 5k after work. Although it was interesting to run through the pulsing city- people knocking off of work, people heading home, cars zooming past, a setting sun- I definitely prefer to run in the calm of the early morning hours. At 5 am, the city is refreshed, people slowly trickle into the city, there is a slight chill in the air, and most importantly- all of the riffraff have yet to arrive. Simply put, I feel much safer running in spandex pants when there aren't groups of men standing around/staring/commenting...you get the point.

4) I'm happy to announce that I've reached a milestone. Somehow, I don't think I'm the only person who has outgrown a pair of pants, and not because they shrunk in the dryer (ps, I haven't had a dryer for over4 years). Furthermore, some of you may be able to relate to keeping said pants in hopes that one day, you'll be able to pull them up past your ankles (jokes, but really!). Yesterday, I was in the midst of changing out of my work clothes when my "when my body is RIGHT pants" caught my eye. If all calculations are right (although I'm super suspicious of the gym scale I used in the beginning and don't really trust the one I bought a month ago), since the beginning of this whole running thing to now, I've lost a little more than 17 lbs. With that information, accurate or not, I figured that I could give the pants a shot. As I said to a couple of people yesterday, the picture can speak for itself:

Well, that's all I have for now! Until next time...one foot in front of the other...keep it movin'!

Yours in (staying focused) training,

Dani