Today was my first full day back to work after a nice LOOOOOONG Thanksgiving Vacation. I took 10 days off and enjoyed the indulgence of down time, project time and some major quality family time.
Today my first client was at 7am and I worked non-stop through to 4:30pm with no lunch break. Paisley has private voice lessons in Indian Trail on Wednesdays @ 5pm. It was looking like I was not going to get my run in today before dark. However to my surprise, tonight Adam was home early and offered to take Paisley to her voice lesson for me so I could go do my run before dark and before we all shared a family dinner together. Awesome gift from Adam to me.
By the time I changed my clothes it was dark :o(I never run at night by myself, I just don't think it is wise or safe for a female to run at dark alone. I had several valid reasons why I couldn't do my run tonight, especially the fact that it was already dark, also very icy and very cold. However this voice inside inside me was saying that an Ironman Triathlete would not validate any of my reasons, but rather they would look at my seemingly valid reasons as lame excuses. That changed my whole outlook and attitude regarding the task before me. As I watched my inside attitude, and motivation transform (because I long to be and Ironman) I actually got excited about donning my new headlamp, cold weather gear and hitting the icy streets of my neighborhood in the dark!
As I headed out the door, it was 19 degrees, clear and all the streets of my neighborhood were covered with a solid sheet of ice. I started my music inside the house to get myself pumped up, I put on my snow tracks (basically studded snow tires that fit over my running shoes) my snow hat and my new cool headlamp, gloves and my sub zero running jacket.
By the time I got out the door down my driveway I was excited about my run adventure. I ran for 51 minutes and had a blast. I was never cold, I was never afraid, and was all caught up in rocking out to some really good music. I really enjoyed the silent dialogue that my head lamp made with all the head lights of passing cars. Last year I totally learned to love to run in the snow, a fantastic treat if you have the gear appropriate for the temps and conditions.
My Frontal Right brain loves to try the new and different, so maybe this year my new favorite thing will be running in the dark with my new headlamp, even alone in the dark. This is a paradigm shift for me.
Tonight I am grateful and proud of myself for making a choice that allowed me to experience success in conquering a long time personal fear of darkness for myself. I have had the unfortunate experience in my life of being stalked before and have for years had significant fears and issues regarding being alone in the darkness. The feeling of accomplishment tonight is very empowering for me!
Victory is Sweet!!!!!!!!!
After the second week we were disenchanted with our Whitworth class and we both realized that we were not going to gain much of anything new from this class.
We both admitted that we had learned so much more from Roger, in regards to stroke improvement at our Starbuck's Swim in the morning than we did from our triathlete class we paid for. Once again this make me realize one of the significant benefits of being in a Club like Tri-Fusion with World Ranked Athletes who are so willing to share what they know with other Club Members.
Some of my favorite highlights of this past Sunday’s Starbuck's Swim were definitely the fellowship and coffee at Starbucks before the swim. Roger’s positive critique and personal swim technique instruction for each of us. Jessi taking pictures of us swimming, it was awesome to see what we actually looked like, since it is a little hard to see yourself in action when you are swimming, and also seeing Kevin really get into learning how to analyze effective and not so effective swim technique in everyone’s strokes with Roger. I learned a lot today and the pictures were a great visual learning tool for me.
To start with we all met at Kirk Wood-Gaines home, where we had the pleasure of meeting his wife Susan for the first time. Roger let Kevin and I borrow two of his headlamp’s (picture above) since he was injured and would not be able to run with us. We all bundled up and headed out the door about 7:15pm for a 10 k run. It was dark, about 34 degrees and so foggy that it was difficult to see the edge of the paved road and literally impossible to see more than about 20 feet in front of you.
We all (Sam, Kurt, Jessi, Kathi, Natalie, Kevin, & Jennifer, (Kirk was suffering from the aftermath of food poisoning and Roger was nursing his twice sprained ankle) started out in a pack, we were huddling together trying to keep warm. About a half mile into the run Sam says, hey did anyone hear the News tonight? We all said no, so Sam proceeds to tell us that on Channel 2 News they reported that they found a dead body the previous night, on the very same road that we were running on! We are all like, Sam are you being serious?? And Sam is like yes, they said 2 guys beat him up and left him for dead, wrapped around a tree and stole his car. All of us girls freaked out and start talking about how we should stick together, and how each one of us would never go running on this road at night alone, on how we hate scary movies and bad guys etc.
Roger decides to come up along side of us in the Subaru (I think it was killing him not to be running with us) instead of following from behind, and he rolls down all his windows and opens his back tailgate and blasts his music from the car. We are laughing and singing and thinking it should be illegal to have this much fun while running. What a hoot, there were actually several neighbors that came out on their front porches to see what the commotion was and we are like, Hey, this is Tri-Fusion Support baby!!!!!!!!! WhooooooooAhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
