Thankful

This morning, I got up early and decided to make the most of my time by doing a yoga video at home instead of trying to get to the gym and then come home and get ready for work. I thought it would be a much better use of the time I had as I have been pretty stiff lately. My session went like this:

-Put DVD in and because it was freezing in the house, turn up the heater.
-Get started with the warm-up.
-The dog starts whimpering so I run over and let him out of his cage. Go back to warm up.
-Dog decides to help with my warm up by licking my arms while I am (ironically) in the downward dog postion. I ignore him.
-Realize that now I am moving, I am burning up and don’t need the heater on and go run and turn it down.
-Hear a giant crash in the kitchen and run in there to find the cat has knocked over the trash. Throw cat outside and resume video.
-Dog decides doing the plank is not hard enough and tries to play tug with my hair to make it more of a challenge for me.
-Finished video, guessing I actually “did” 30 out of 45 minutes.

If working out at home is this hard with pets, how on earth do you people with kids ever get anything done? I am in awe.

Turns out doing the yoga this morning was probably a very good decision as I got hit going through an intersection on the way to work. I would like to think being relaxed and loose probably helped me from getting hurt! I am ok, car will eventually be ok, and I am just thankful it was not worse….or that I was not on my bicycle!

Water Torture

I felt like this was my expression the entire time I was swimming on Tuesday. I take a lesson once a week with a coach and lately I have just been dreading it every week lately. Why? Because of this:

It is the bane of my existence. You see, I hardly kick at all while I swim. I use almost all arm strength. Trying to kick constantly is a lot like trying to pat my head and rub my tummy at the same time. I just suck at it. So, to work on this I get to work with the kickboard. The good news is that I can tell it is helping, but it sure is hard to get motivated to go.

I enjoyed reading the comments on my last post about the time limits my running club is putting on some of their longer races. I think there are several sides to this story but basically what I need to focus on is just getting faster and more consistent and it will not be a problem.

A big THANK YOU to Leah at BecauseITri She ran a picture caption contest and I won a runner up prize of a dozen gels that I know will come in handy soon! Thank Leah!

Slow Runnings

Yesterday in the mail, I received my runnings clubs latest newsletter. On the front page, there was an statement annoucing that the board members had voted to put time limits on several of the club races. Their reasoning was that if you could not run a 13 minute mile, you were undertrained and should not be running. The other reasoning is that if you were slow, it was not fair to make the volunteers wait around for you to finish. There are now going to be cut off times at certain mile markers and if you were not there at that point, your bib would be pulled.

I am of several minds about this. Yes, 13 minute miles are slow. Being slow myself though my first reaction was anger. Obviously, if I am mad about it, then I just need to faster and it will not be a problem. Fair enough. Then I think about all of the people out there (not a whole lot, but still there are some) who are slower than me. I think if I got pulled off the course of a small local race, I would not come back. Is that the message we want to be sending to people? "We welcome all runners, but by gawd, you had better MOVE!!".

I guess I can understand large races having cutoff times, but this is a smaller local club (300 members or so) and something about it just rubs me the wrong way. I don't want people to hurt themselves trying to do distances they are not ready for, but I think in this society, we need to encourage people to come out and get moving.

What are your thoughts?