I've been super behind on the thread, we were sick at our house for like a week and busy with work (we work at home, so sick time isn't necessarily not-work time), and then my weekends the last like 3 weeks have been jam packed with ALL THE THINGS \o/ both days. It's been crazy! Like this past weekend I had an agility trial all day Saturday, agility class Sunday morning (which is about 45 min away), had to hit the SIX03 (NH running organization) big expo to pick up my swag bag and check out all the vendors in the afternoon, and then an agility trial planning meeting at night (which is like 30 min away) for the trial my club hosts in May. I need some weekends to recover from my weekends! It's been like that the last 3 weeks. And then it seemed so daunting to catch up, so I've been doing a few pages at a time and I finally made it.
The expo was ok, but I'm a pretty big introvert IRL, and while I know a handful of peeps from playing Wednesday night pub trivia with their team (I got pulled in last winter when they were having troubles filling up the team by one of my buddies in my regular running group who also runs for both groups), I don't know most of them well enough to stand around and chit chat without feeling super awkward, so I mostly just wandered around a few loops by myself, said hi to my buddy from my regular running group, and then just hung around on the outskirts waiting for the raffle, because I got there about 20 min before the big raffle stuff was going to happen and the big giveaway was one of the new Garmin 645M watches. I held one of the watches at the Garmin booth... IT IS SO LIGHT. And the straps are so flexible. I didn't win, boo hoo. I want one so bad now. My 220 feels like a huge clunky piece of junk now!
Maybe the charger will finally become unusable and I'll just HAVE to get one.
2 of the 4 pins are stuck pushed down on my charger. It's just barely making contact right now, but if they go any lower, I'm guessing they won't.
Catching up on the QOTD... I think I got them all.
Shoes -
I like bright colors, but I also like colors that go with my running clothes! When I was wearing my Altra Olympus, I loved the color schemes I had going there. I had 3 pairs in a nice neutral dark gray color but they also had neon lime green and neon blue accent colors/laces for some fun colors. And I had a dark purple pair when gray and neon lime/blue just didn't work. My current pair of Paradigms go with everything because they are boring and they are all black with a couple white accents.
I am hoping the next model of the Paradigm gets a bit of a redesign back to their roots. The toe box is EXTREMELY narrow for an Altra, IMO. My foot does not splay in the foot shape like it should. It looks like a squeezed sausage with the wide part of the ball of my foot bulging at the sides.
Holiday races -
Let's see... I have done a Turkey Trot a few times, I have done a St. Patrick's Day pub crawl one once (and the next one coming up in a month!), and I guess my HM last fall was kind of Halloween themed. The medals had jack o'lanterns and witches on them, and there was a costume thing, although most of the costumed people were running the 5K, not the HM. I do like the Turkey Trot, makes me feel less guilty about eating at dinner, although it shouldn't really make me feel that much less guilty since it's only 5K.
(P.S. I don't mean that like "only a 5K" isn't a legitimate race or anything, I just mean that it's not really worth THAT much pie
) The pub crawl is fun, too. We run 5K, and then we go get some coffee and bagels in our tummies so we're not crawling on an empty stomach, and then about 11:00 all the pubs and bars in town open up for the people who got the pub crawl bracelets, and you can go from bar to bar and each one is serving some kind of unique St. Patrick's appetizer, which you can get with your bracelet for free, but you have to buy the booze if you want. You get stamps at each place you hit, and you turn them into the Chamber of Commerce people and there are drawings for prizes and you get so many entries based on the number of stamps. I think my running group made it to 5 out of 13 places last year and thankfully every one of them had our favorite local hard cider on tap (North Country) so we drank a lot of cider (myself and 2 of my group buddies are more cider fans than beer fans
). Then when I left, I offered to take everyone's maps to the place where the Chamber had the turn in because they were staying at the pub and the 3pm cutoff was approaching and I was parked near where you turned them in... and I turned everyone's in but my own.
Sleep -
I probably do best on 7-8 hours but sometimes only get 5-6 if I have to get up early. I am not really great about going to bed early, 10:30-11 is about as early as I go to bed if I'm really really tired, but it's usually between 11-12 that I get tired, even if the alarm is going off at 5.
Other workouts -
I'm about to start my May HM training plan soon, so my schedule will be more rigid than it currently is. My intentions on non-run days are to do easy yoga (I do 90 min Yin on Sundays when my weekend schedule isn't so insane crazy, and would love to get back to doing Gentle Flow on at least one weekday) and/or Orangetheory (soon). I got the founder's deal for my local studio that is opening soon... I wish they would just hurry up and open! I have been signed up since December, but they aren't opening until in March I think (they had been saying February but now it's March).
Mardi Gras -
There isn't much going on for this in New England as
@JulieODC said. It's never been that big of a deal around here, even when I wasn't a lapsed celebrater... maybe just an excuse to eat a bunch of candy or something if you were going to give that up. There is a Mardi Gras 5K over in Manchester, I think, speaking of holiday races.
