B.R.I.E. v R.I.C.E. and a PR

Good morn! I can't believe it's Monday already. Geez. I forgot to mention last week that I finished "The Non-Runner's Marathon Guide". It might be the first book I have ever read cover to cover...I read the intro, body, epilogue, acknowledgements, about the author, etc. I just couldn't get enough. Then I got sad because I thought "What do I have to look forward to now?! This is horrible." Somehow, I shall go on.

I put a new twist on an old classic on Friday: B.R.I.E. instead of R.I.C.E. For those of you not familiar with the acronym it stands for "rest/ice/compression/elevation". My version consists of "beer/rest/ice/elevation". On Friday I did a short warm up, then ran 3 miles straight. My left leg was bothering me a bit and as I waddled around the kitchen (somehow looking like I'd just gotten done with a 14 hour horseback ride), I decided to grab a brew, a bag of frozen corn, and flop down on the couch to watch season 3 of The Office. I was quite pleased with the results.

Saturday was a rest day. Dave and I went to St. Pete Saturday morning. I LOVE downtown St. Pete very much. There is always something going on. On Saturday mornings they have a Farmer's Market from 9am or so until 2 pm. There is always a band playing (usually cover songs), and there are food vendors, crafts, plants and tons of people walking around with their dogs and/or kids. I love to walk around and take everything in. There is just so much LIFE happening and it always puts me in a good mood to be there. We walked around for a while, did some shopping, had lunch at our favorite pizza joint, and watched "Run Fat Boy Run". It was pretty cute. Of course I wanted to see it because it's about a guy who decides to run a marathon to win his ex back. Ever since I made the decision to do this challenge, I have been consumed by all things running: books, magazines, movies, blogs about running, just to name a few.

Sunday we went to Caladesi Island, which I BELIEVE has won several awards for being a top beach in FL if not the country. I need to read up on that. (Yes, Dr. Beach made it #2 a couple years ago and it's 4th best beach in the country according to another source.) Anyway, you go to Honeymoon Island state park, then take a ferry to Caladesi. On the ferry ride we saw a momma dolphin and a baby. SO CUTE! I've never seen a baby dolphin before. It was quite a bit darker...I guess they lighten with age. So we got to Caladesi, walked to the beach area and plopped our stuff down. As I sat down and looked out at the completely smooth, clear beautiful water, I could have sworn I was in a Corona commercial - except for the beer drinking part :(. It was absolutely beautiful. One thing I really love about our beaches is the white sugar sand. We walked for a while, looking for sand dollars because for whatever reason, Dave is obsessed with them. We found quite a few of them, as well as some other cool shells. Oh, and we saw a HUGE starfish that washed up on shore. Dave put it back in the water. I hope it was ok. Unfortunately, we have no pictures of any of this. We figured the camera was better off in the car. Not really. We just forgot it. I was so pissed. I didn't ask Dave if we had the camera in our bag until we were literally walking onto the ferry and he said "oops. it's in the car, behind your seat." I wanted to scream. I wish I'd have asked him sooner...like while we were waiting in line for 15 minutes waiting to get our ferry tickets. Oh well. It was still a lot of fun. We stayed there for a couple hours and then decided to pick up some food on the way home to cook out. After that we went to an impromptu get-together at my aunt's house and then came home. I knew I had to do my long run but was totally pooped. All I wanted to do was go to sleep. I groaned about it for a while, trying to figure out if I could somehow justify NOT doing it. I couldn't. So I suited up and got on the treadmill. It was a bit painful starting out. I felt like I couldn't quite catch my groove. I worried that I wasn't going to be able to do 3 miles, let alone 4 (if not more). Somehow, 1.5 miles went by pretty quickly. I started to feel a bit better. Around 2 or 2.5 miles, I decided I wanted to do 5. Prior to this, the most I'd ever run straight without stopping was 3 miles. A few weeks back I did 4 miles in one of my workouts but it had walking intervals. To keep from feeling overwhelmed at having more miles to do around the time when I am normally stopping, I decided to start counting songs.."Oh wow, only 6 or 7 more songs until I can stop. That isn't so bad". Then when I got closer to the end I started counting down laps "Yay, only 3 more to go!" More than anything, I wanted to be able to say that I did 5 miles. My body felt great during the run. My biggest obstacle was convincing my brain that I could do it. Five miles sounded like SOOOO much. But here I am. I did it and felt great. So that was my PR (personal record) for distance. It took me 58 minutes to do the 5 miles. I won't be breaking any records with that, but it's ok. For now the only records I care about breaking are my own.

Also, I want to give kudos to my body, which has refused to relinquish even a SINGLE pound despite going from being sedentary to running over 40 miles this month. A round of applause everybody... Seriously, I'd like to lose just a few pounds to get things rolling. PLEASE. I'm dyin' here. Does anyone want to start a "I'm running my ass off but the pounds aren't going anywhere" club? Let me know.