100 Day Burpee Challenge
So today marks day 8 of 100 in the burpee challenge, and I'm beginning to see why its a challenge. For those who don't know, a burpee is an exercise where you start standing with arms at your side, go down do a pushup, then stand back up and jump as high as you can. The 100 day burpee challenge is where you have 100 days of doing burpees. On day 1, you do 1, on day 2, 2 and so on all the way to day 100 where you do 100. We started this challenge with exactly 100 days left in the year, so we finish on new years eve. I'm quite excited about it. The best part is, if you want to join its not too late, you just have to do all the burpees that you missed to catch up, if you start today you just have to do 36 :) . If you want to join drop me a note and I'll add you to the bookface group...Here is a video on how to do a burpee:
Garden 1/2 Marathon
I went and picked up my race packet on Friday afternoon with full excitement. I asked the lady distributing bibs how many runners there were, she said about 400. I got kind of nervous at this point because this was by far the smallest run I've ever been a part of. After a quick chat with L I realized there was nothing to be worried about. She explained smaller runs are great as they are more casual and you don't have to worry about traffic (people, not cars) as much. I agreed with this theory, and the nerves subsided.
The weather was set to be a little cool at the start, but I was really looking forward to this run. I had my normal race day breakfast, peanut butter toast with banana on top. I got to the course a little early, and had the honor of watching the sun rise over the Lake Monona. What.a.view! Sadly I left my phone in my car, so sorry, but just imagine a really pretty sun rise over a lake with trees and stuff :)
The race was set to start at 7am, so we thought. People started to gather around the start line at 7, then the lady said, the race will start in 15 minutes. Some people were grumpy about that, complaining about the cold, risk of injury, blah blah blah. The organizers were rushing to get everything set (the timer didn't get setup until about 5 minutes before the start), but they were doing there best and it all worked out in the end, kind of.
Before we knew it the start had begun. I started off WAY to fast, again :\. I told myself, just take it easy, let your body get use to the cold air. The first mile, 7:08 (PR), flew by. I didn't even look at my split, the second mile went by quickly as well, 6:53 (PR). That one caught my eye and I literally said, "oh boy, I need to slow down". I then just kind of maintained for the next 10 miles at about a 7:15-7:30 pace. Once I hit the last water station at mile marker 12 I looked at my watch and noticed it was only at mile 10.x... I quickly looked for another runner to validate I'm not crazy. I found a couple and they all had the same thing. When I crossed the finish line and handed my 1/2 marathon medal I checked my watch, it read 11.7. I felt kind of jipped. I saw a couple other people continuing to run to finish it out for there watches (and because they are crazy, like me :) ), but I had already hit finish on my watch. I decided to just run another 1.4 miles to finish it out on a separate run. Thankfully Endomondo has a "merge" feature. The bummer is after being stationary while I made this decision my muscles had time to realize the pain they were in. So my first 11.7 miles was at a 7:22 average pace, my last 1.4 was at about a 8:30, still not bad, but I feel like I could have been faster if I just stayed on it, or if the course was actual distance :) I ended up with a 1/2 marathon PR of 1 hour 38 minutes, a 2 minute improvement!
But distance/speed aside, what a view! This run went all the way around lake Monona in the beautiful city of Madison Wisconsin. It was actually quite peaceful. After the group spread out over the first couple miles, I didn't really see any runners until the end. Half of me was relaxed, the other half was freaked out and felt like I was off course. Better course marking would have helped.
By the way, cookie monster was there!
Here is the official results: http://tandhtiming.com/assets/Garden-Half-Marathon-and-4-Mile.html.
My take away thoughts, this race gave me the exact motivation I was lacking the week before. I am now looking forward to my next challenge, the Madison Marathon in November, and maybe the Haunted Hustle, maybe...
Life and Stuff
So a couple life updates. I had my family here for my big 3 0 birthday. It was really great having them here. I got to show them all my favorite spots of Madison, they all said they had a great time, so did I. I think the biggest difference I noticed in being 30 is I'm in a new race bracket, other than that, SSDD.I got a new kitty, her name is Mia Mittens (with a British accent and everything). I got her so that my other kitty would have someone to play with while I'm at work. I read Think Like Cat because I already had it from my previous cat, who had some bad habits. I recommend this book to any cat owner with a misbehaving cat, or if you are into learning more about cats.
Using the plan in the book, here they are together cuddling w/in a couple weeks! If you know anything about my big cat, you will know that this is amazing.
I think that is all for now.
Until next time, burpee UP and run on!
