Not feeling it -- last week in training

That's pretty much the story of my workouts for most of last week.  Not sure what the problem is.  I think it's a combination of not eating well (eating plenty, just not the right foods) and being stressed out over this whole car thing.  The thing is, I would've been happy driving my crappy car for the next 5 years and enjoying not having a car payment.  I'm not a big "car" person, I couldn't care less.  I don't have some dream car out there that I've been drooling over for years, and if I did we couldn't afford it anyway.  So the whole car shopping prospect is bringing me down.

 Monday: Already mentioned this in my last post.  My brother's in town, so I met up with him and his friend for a bike ride before heading to the Survivor games.  30.5 miles, 16.1 mph pace.  We could've pushed it more, but his friend was riding a hybrid while we were on our road bikes.  Sidenote: I think his friend started looking at road bikes the next day. :)

Tuesday: Monday evening Jeff realized that the van's tire was looking super low.  He aired it up, but it lost more air that evening.  He ended up putting on the spare so I wouldn't end up having to deal with a flat before work Tuesday.  When he took off the tire, it had a big screw embedded in it.  The tire was worn enough that it needed to be replaced rather than fixed, so I took it in for a new tire after work.

After a 20+ minute wait to even get helped, they told me it would be 2-3 hours.  Awesome.  I wasn't hanging around Wal-Mart for that long.  Unfortunately, I  obviously didn't have a car.  Now, I have lots of friends and family in town, but you never know when people are going to be busy.  I was feeling fragile enough (we have to replace a car and a tire??...and yeah, I know it's not THAT much money, but it's money on top of money on top of bills...) that I was afraid if the first person or two couldn't do it I'd end up crying on the phone.  Ugh.  No thanks, so instead I walked home.  1.6 miles.  In 2-inch heels.  And hell yeah I'm counting the mileage. :)

Wednesday: A friend texted me earlier in the day to say she'd be riding from near my house at 6.  I was hopeful at first, but after leaving work later than planned and being at the grocery store until 5:25, it wasn't looking good.  I had to get the family fed in time for Jeff to get J to PSR at 6:30, and I wasn't even home yet.  Boo.  Another missed ride.

And then I got home, got annoyed by something, and decided I was going to ride after all.  I changed into my bike clothes while I cooked, got supper on the table, and managed to ride to meet my friends by 6:00.  Nothing like a little motivation to get you moving! It wasn't a very fast ride (20.6 miles at 14.5 mph pace), but it was good to just get out and ride. 

Thursday:  (The day I started to get my joy back) Ran to my friend Lindsay's house and then to the local university to visit some metal birds.  Total of 5.8 miles and countless laughs.  We are big big fans of The Bloggess and, in particular, her hilarious post And That's Why You Should Learn to Pick Your Battles, so when we realized that there were metal chickens practically right in our backyard, we absolutely had to go visit them.

Could we be any happier?

We were momentarily dismayed to realize they were ducks, not chickens.  Actually, we weren't.  We just laughed and decided they were the love children of Beyonce and Donald Duck and dubbed them "chucklings".

I want one! We briefly considered a duck-napping but decided we might look a little suspicious running back across campus with a gigantic metal bird.

It's a beautiful thing to have a friend who makes you laugh and giggle like a silly high school girl.

Saturday: Picked up my bike from the shop where I'd taken it for adjustments and because my front wheel was seriously wobbly.  I told them it needed to be trued when I dropped it off, then when I called asked again to make sure it had been trued.  Unfortunately, I didn't really look at it until I got home, when you could tell the wheel wasn't right just by looking at it...and when you spun it...oh, man.  It was still terrible.  Plus, it had like 1000 pounds of air in it...not what you need for a mountain bike.

So here was my dilemna: do I take the bike back (to St. Louis, a good 25-30 minute drive) and say "Hey, you didn't take care of this; fix it" (and there had been no charge) or do I take it somewhere else.  On one hand, clearly they didn't do what they were supposed to; on the other, if you didn't do it right the first time, do I really want to trust you with my bike again?  When I need it in less than two weeks (!! happy dance !!)? Luckily, a friend came to my rescue and offered to true it for me.

Sunday: I was supposed to meet some friends at Pere Marquette park for a training run for the upcoming race and my hopeful redemption after last year's pitiful showing.  Instead, I combined a wheel drop/trail run/UTM plotting tutoring session by meeting Chuck at Lost Valley.  This was to be my first trail run since probably March, when I stopped doing my long runs on the trails and went back to the road in preparation for the marathon.  I was excited about it but realized it had the potential to be a tough run.

It. Was. Awesome.  I felt really good running on the trails, and the weather was perfect.  We'd gotten a little rain the night before, just enough so that it wasn't all dusty.  I was breathing hard but for the most part didn't feel like I was going to die, and the time on the trail gave me a chance to pick Chuck's brain about the upcoming adventure race.  There were a couple tougher hills to run, but most of them were more rolling hills and fun to run.  We even got to have a couple walk breaks thanks to each of us falling, but I was either:

a) "Smart" enough to not fall on the rocky part of the trail

OR

b) Clumsy enough that I fell on the smooth dirt part

Regardless, I bet Chuck's bruises were worse than mine today.  No blood, 11 miles in 2:07, and I felt a lot stronger than I did last winter when I ran that loop with Chuck, Robin, and Patrick after they'd already run 11 and still was the one dragging behind.