Half Decent Week

On a scale of 'hot mess' to 'some reason for hope', the pendulum swung back towards hope this week on the running front. I ran more than zero miles (weeeeee!!), including a double-digit run and a not-too-shabby race. Yes, I'm still having some trouble with my feet (plantar fascittis in the left, Achilles tendonitis in the right), but right now it's tolerable, so, well, there you go. I'm not sure what will happen as I start to try to do speed work & stuff again, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

This weekend our Alliterative Dinner Club did our long-awaited x dinner. I made dessert, which was x-presso & xocolatl pot de creme with whipped xylocarp (coconut) cream. It did not suck.

We also made x-rated x-mas cookies, which I am too classy to post here. Use your imagination. But here is a non-x-rated one that's kind of cute.

Race Report: Oakland Turkey Trot

If you've been keeping score at home, you know that my plan this fall was to run a bunch of miles, race a bunch of short stuff under 10K, & get wicked fast. You also know that life didn't quite work out as I'd planned & I've been getting more & more frustrated on the running front.

Last month I ran a 5K in Redwood City by the skin of my teeth. By the time the race rolled around my goal had gone from "destroy this mother, come dangerously close to a PR, & depending on who else shows up maybe even win" to "just finish & don't make my foot/back/hamstring worse." I ran 22:23, which was work & definitely not dawdling, but not *fast*, exactly, and I never felt great doing it, during or after. Still, I was proud of myself for making a real effort to not phone it in, not giving up, & pushing hard toward the end.

In the immediate aftermath I thought "Hey, I can build on that! Four weeks till Oakland Turkey Trot, I can definitely improve over 22:23!" But then November happened, and suddenly I was not so sure.

But I was signed up & committed; no matter how bad or out of shape I was feeling, I still wanted to show up in Oakland and run the best race I could. If it's bad news, then let's at least get an objective view of how bad it is.

Ugggghhhhh just enough already.

I really hate writing blog posts that read mostly like a list of excuses for why I've pretty much been a lazy slob lately. For me one of the reasons for continuing to update this blog in what feels like the twilight age of blogging is for some sense of accountability, and, a lot of times, it works. But the downside is that sometimes there are periods where things just feel completely out of your control, and no amount of public accountability is going to magically change the central facts of your life.

At this point I feel like whatever meager amount of fitness I'd managed to build up by early October has now slowly melted and curled up into a corner where it continues to twitch only occasionally. A couple weeks back I had a decent week of 30+ miles--no workouts but at least getting some miles in. But since then it's been the perfect storm of injury & illness & travel & natural disasters & Just.

Enough.

Already.

The Year of No Shopping: Quarter 2/3 Update

I haven't done one of these in a while, so here's a quick update.

If you missed it, the original "Year of No Shopping" post is here. So, how have I been doing with the rules I set for myself around shopping? Let us take stock.

• No wine shopping/buying beyond what I'm already committed to through clubs. If you recall, part of the reason for the "no buying of wine beyond club commitments" rule was that all of our wine (we are talking maybe ~1500 bottles) had been in storage and I had lost track of exactly what I had and what would be ready to drink exactly when.

  Now before you ask, yes, there is a database (we outgrew spreadsheets long ago), but from about mid-2017 on I got really lazy about a) entering everything new I bought and b) marking bottles as drunk when we drank them. So I knew that there was a lot unaccounted for. And I didn't, for example, want to buy new bottles that would be ready to drink around say 2021 and then find out Oops! We already have more than we'll possibly be able to drink that will be ready that year!

  
  No shelves in the cellar yet so it's just stacks of case boxes which SHOCKING! is not the easiest way to organize.

  So, when the house was done and we finally got everything back out of storage, I was able to go through it and pull out wine that should have been drunk either in 2017 or 2018. (It was a lot. Oops.)

A little bit of hope

Sooooo this was supposed to publish last week & apparently it didn't & I didn't notice?? Fun times! :D . Just wanted to let you know I'm not dead yet & have been doing *some* amount of running, though this fall has not worked out exactly at all as I'd hoped. So, yeah. Not dead yet. Still trying to run when I can. Hopefully things will get easier after the holidays.

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It's been a busy few weeks (as I write this I am at the airport for the 5th time in the last week, GOOD TIMES) but I just wanted to pop in with a training update. Last we spoke I was having some super annoying problems with my right foot/hip/hamstring/lower back, but things are MAYBE kind of-sort of starting to improve a little.

Other life stuff: My sisters and I are planning a surprise 60th birthday party for my mom on Sunday Nov. 11. [Spoiler: We pulled it off & she was TOTALLY shocked!! It was awesome & I highly recommend throwing your loved ones surprise birthday parties.]

Yes, they fixed the peace sign but I didn't get a great photo of it after that. I hope someone else did!

Race Report: Redwood City OktobeRun 5K

My plan for this fall originally was to run lots of short, fast races, with nothing except RNR San Jose over 10K. Things got off to a good start with a great 10K and a super fun cross country race, but after that a combination of social obligations, work commitments, and general life stress/exhaustion took their toll and I skipped out on a couple of races I'd been excited to run. To force myself not to skip anymore I went ahead and signed up for three 5Ks (which you can see over there in the right sidebar), of which OktobeRun was the first.