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Saturday, April 5, 2014

I Love Running!!

Greg and I have been running off and on for almost five years.  Sometimes more off than on. Throughout this time we've met a lot of folks that like to run and a lot of folks that like to tell us why they don't run.  I'm really a to each his own kind of person.  If you don't like to run it's fine with me, I don't judge. Can I judge?  Not really, I've fallen off the wagon a couple times. Life presents us with challenges and there is always a point where something needs to give and for us sometimes with two jobs and two kids it is the exercise.  My hope is that this time something is different.  

It does feel different.  We have some pretty hefty goals for ourselves this year.  A 15k, a half-marathon and a full marathon all in a year.  Is it attainable with everything else we have going on?  I'm not sure.  Greg and I talked about the full marathon prospect and we are currently debating backing down and doing two half-marathons in the fall instead.  This is for a couple of reasons, we do our long training runs on the weekends and with Greg's second job getting these in is going to be challenging over the summer. Also, we both have recently had mild running injuries, he has some muscle strain in his hip and I've developed shin splints.  I'm seeing a PT who gave me some exercises to help me gain some strength and chance my stance a little when I'm running that should help resolve the issue.  For this reason, we've adjusted our training a little and incorporated better cross training.  I'm looking at the half-marathon options around here for the fall and I have a few I'm considering. More details to come.  If we make this shift we will aim for a full next spring instead.

Now onto the title of this blog.  I really love to run, when I went into the doctor to make sure my shin splints weren't fractures I was really panicked that he would tell me I needed to quit running. Our primary care doc recently left her practice and we picked a new doctor closer to home and we were excited to see that in addition to focusing on primary care he is also a sports med doctor.  This is great because we knew he'd be able to help us with running related issues as they popped up. As he was doing his exam, I kept asking if I was going to need to quit or slow down.  He finally looked at me and said I'd have to slow down and cross train better.  I sighed and he looked and me and said. "No offense, runners are crazy.  A good kind of crazy but crazy."  I laughed because I knew he had me pegged.  The idea of taking time off when I've finally getting into a good groove was a little disheartening.  I was visiting with someone else the next day and told him about this conversation and he is a former runner but when I talked about my dislike of the elliptical machine. He told me runner's are snobs, I said "it's just not the same" and he said, "Exactly, snobs."  I started cracking up. 

I never expected to be one of these crazy running people but the rush (runner's high) I get after a run is invigorating, I crave it.  I feel as if I've conquered the world.  If you don't run and are interested feel free to contact me, I'm happy to share the couch to 5k plan we started with a few years ago.  It really got us started on the right foot and helped us build the endurance to run long distances. Once you get past the I can't catch my breath, I want to die place of early training days it is a pretty awesome sport.  
  

Purge 2014 Update

We've gotten a little behind in posting our purge pictures.  We are still getting rid of at least an item a day but for awhile I ran out of room on my iPhone and the iPad so I wasn't taking any pictures.  I cleared the space up finally so I've started getting back into the picture taking habit in the past few days.  Regardless of picture taking, we've made lots of progress over the past month.  Greg took another carload of stuff to the Goodwill drop off station today.  That makes four good sized carloads, I'm not sure the govt will believe all the receipts next year.  

We have listed pretty much all of our cake pans on either eBay or if they don't seem worth the eBay attempt on Craigslist.  We narrowed down our cake pan collection to what I honestly think we have the best shot at using.  The rest are going because there is no point in having six boxes of cake pans sitting around waiting for a rainy day.  None of the boxes had been opened since last spring when we moved from the house we were renting to the apartment we stayed in over the summer.  
Tonight, I also started the process of going through the girls baby clothes.  I'm working on gathering the stuff we really like to get sent off to make a quilt for each girl.  I started tonight buy pulling out three bins within a half hour I'd pulled out enough to bring it down to one and put two more bags of clothes out for the goodwill or a used kids clothing store. 

So for now, we keep on trucking.  The progress feels slow at times but I continue to remind myself that we did not accumulate everything overnight.  Change is slow sometimes and as long as we keep moving forward, we will succeed in our journey towards less.