Merry (belated) Christmas! Or Happy Boxing Day if you’re in a country that celebrates it (you lucky dogs! I’m back at work now!)

I had a fantastic Christmas! Spent lots of time with my family, had a few good runs, and got lots of good stuff from Santa. Yay!

Friday, after I got off work, I went to the park to run. It was about 1:00 in the afternoon, sunny, a little warm, but beautiful. But once I started going, I was just not in the mood to run. So I walked most of it, then went home and put my cat in her carrier, and went to Baton Rouge. I didn’t feel bad that I didn’t run as far as I could have or should have. After all, my official training hadn’t started yet anyway.

Saturday, before I had to go to the airport to pick up my brother and sister-in-law, I wanted to run on my mom’s circle (as mentioned above.) I went around about four times, and God, was it boring. My shins started to hurt (I need new shoes) so I used that as an excuse to stop. Certainly didn’t want to start my training with an injury!

And now the real training begins…I will denote training days in italics. Silly.

Week 1, Day 1
On Monday, my sister-in-law and I went around the circle, 11 times to be exact. She walked while I jogged (oops, I mean ran) alongside her, and we had a nice conversation and though I wasn’t going very fast, it was a nice start to my official training. It probably ended up being a little more than 3 miles, but I walked the first and last loops.

Tuesday was no day for running for me (no time!) but I did get lots of good loot. The running watch I wanted (a Timex Rush V02) and a Polar A3 Heart Rate Monitor and a Camelbak Flashflo (which Chris got me too…so now I get credit at Road Runner Sports…yay!) and Jeff Galloway’s book, Marathon, plus my sister-in-law gave me a set of real British pint glasses, which was the coolest thing ever. She had to bring those on the plane! She’s so swell! And a cool book on London, and an Amazon.co.uk gift certificate, and some earrings, and…etc, etc, etc. We gave my mom a DVD player and some DVDs which she loved, so I’m happy about that. Everyone was in good spirits, and everyone liked their presents, and my anal-retentive brother didn’t make everyone take turns opening presents one at a time. Yay!

Week 1, Day 2
Today, Chris and I went for a four mile run before I had to head back to New Orleans to go to work. We went to the LSU lakes, and we each wore the HRMs that we got for Christmas. It was fun comparing our heart rates (mine were invariably higher than his, but that’s no surprise.) The pace was not bad, it was definitely manageable, and I was extremely pleased to see that we did the four miles in 50 minutes! A 12:30 pace! Not bad at all! I’m quite happy with that, for such a long run. I wish I knew where the mile splits on that route were, so I could have used my handy new watch to record them. 😀

I’m starting to get intimidated by the distances in my training, but I decided I’m just going to take them one day at at time…no pressure, don’t think ahead, just do what needs to be done.