January running crazies

Four day weekend: Awesome.
Four days of dreading returning to work today: Not so awesome.

Thankfully I have good friends (and their dogs who are going to get up and need a walk anyways) to get me through.  There was a spirited debate amongst us on Facebook last night about running this morning.  Ultimately only me and Beth decided to give it a try.  (Seriously, Beth has this dog that always gets up at 5am.  It's one of the best things to happen for my training in a long time.)

Winter blows!

I agreed to run this morning in the mildly bitter cold because I'd already seen the low temperatures for the rest of the week and knew there was no way in the world I'd be running then.  (The low was 9* today.)

At 5am I woke up and facebooked Beth for a moment on the merits of not running.  (At 5am and 9* everything can be an excuse not to run.)  Ultimately I found my pants and my work ethic and headed out the door.

I got to St Paul and Beth tried to head out her door.  Only to fail.  (I can't go out the back door, there's 56" of snow back there that we haven't shoveled.)  It brought up an interesting opportunity for some ingenuity and a big opening talk about possible winter evacuation routes from the home.

Eventually Beth got out and tried to kill me on the run *ahem* we had a great run.  Happily neither one of us fell down this time.  The run started with the words, "it's not *that* cold" followed by "I can't feel my face".  All was well when we were moving.   I swear I got hypothermia in the car on the way home.  (Any runner who's run and then got in the car all sweaty afterwords knows exactly what I'm talking about.)

Work was pretty rough.  I went out for Chiptole for lunch and to call my mommy (yes, work was that rough) and lost my keys.  Which sucked.  But opened up the possibility of the best moment of the entire day: the sweet Barnes N Noble lady who helped me find the keys again.  Relief is quite a powerful feeling.