run this amazing day

Thanksgiving is a difficult holiday for most.  It is usually many more people in one place than is easy to handle.  Someone ends up spending all day in the kitchen working their ass off so everyone else can enjoy a nice meal.  It can be tough - especially in families, where we tend to fall into old habits about relationships - tempers flare easily and feelings can be hurt.  Family relationships have always been difficult for me, and while I think things have improved over the past few years, it is easy to regress. Like many, I am sure, I felt stress while I was home.  I vented about this stress in a place that I thought was safe.  I said things that I was feeling - things that I could never, would never express out loud, but things that I could vent about, even overreact about, and then let go, send spiraling off into the universe to then breathe more easily with these negative thoughts out of my head.  And once I had let go, it was so much easier t...

Every Monday afternoon, I go for a swim.  Sometimes it's up at the Wilson pool, and sometimes it's just over at my gym pool. I usually do a low intensity, medium-long swim (2000-2500 yards).  Warm-up, 1-2 distance sets, a few short sprints, and I'm done.  Nothing super taxing.  I almost never lift on weekends, but I generally get in a long ride and the past few weekends I've been walk/running 5K's (NOT RACING), so I like swimming on Mondays to stretch everything out and give my legs a nice smooth recovery day.  But for the past 5-6 weeks, my swims have completely sucked. It's not swimming that sucks - I also swim Wednesday nights, and those have been pretty solid.  For the past 4 weeks, I've only been swimming twice a week (I know, shame on me), so I don't think I'm overdoing the swimming.  I just can't figure out what is wrong with Monday afternoon.  I feel lethargic and slow, I have no motivation, and I'm barely moving through the water....

I found this race a few weeks ago when I was not yet running but looking for "test" races to come back to.  I was lucky enough to convince Kirstin  to join me for the first Turkey Trot of the year! We showed up pretty close to the start of the race.  It looked like competition was going to be pretty fierce in the 18 and under division, but as Kirstin and I were competing on our own division - the "walk 2 run 4" division - we weren't too worried.  We started off walking and chatting, and our walk 2 run 4 plan quickly turned into a "my HR is low, let's run" slash "this is a big hill, let's walk" plan.  But it was a gorgeous morning and I had a blast walking, running, and chatting.  I actually have no idea how much running I did overall, because this graph isn't very helpful:  But I think the best part of the day was the spending time outside with friends, doing a little running and a little gabbing. Total: 3.14 miles/33:17/av...