With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams...

I'm reading the book Born to Run.  I'm considering the value of strengthening the muscles in the feet.  Not converted to barefoot running, but strengthening the muscles by walking barefoot seemed like a good idea.  So I went our for what was supposed to be a 1.2 mile walk around the hood.  The asphalt is so rocky that it was painful navigating all the rocks.  I went about .45 miles out, and then the road got really bad, so we turned around & walked back home.  I need to work on toughening up the bottoms of my feet before I do that again!

Since it's Sunday, I decided to post a nice photo of the blossom on my okra plant instead of dead animals.

Got out early with Wyatt this morning.  We ran the 4 mile hood loop forward then backward.  Saw 2 other people out running.  Evidently my neighbors aren't all the lazy folks I'd had them pegged to be.  At least not 2 of them :-)

And lucky for us, just as we were about to finish, we found our treasure for the day:

It's a headless Spiderman!  MR has attached him to the side of my "Treasure Box" so he's hanging off the edge with his spiderweb shooter hand pointing out.  If you listen really closely, you can hear the song "I'm Awesome" playing in the background.

cross-training day. 

30 minutes of sweating in the garage on the elliptical followed by 45 minute pilates video.  It's been a while since I did the pilates and I'd forgotten how much I enjoy it.

After that, I went to Wyatt's house and swam in her pool.  You can interpret the word swim to mean "sat on a float."

In the afternoon I got to drive to Raleigh with MR so we could pick up our oldest buccaneer at the airport.  He's been in Thailand for the last 2 weeks having the vacation of his life.  We are supremely lucky to have such a great family!!

Got up, did my PT exercises and went out for a run.  It was very humid this morning- almost foggy!  But it was cooler too; only 70 degrees!  It stayed overcast all morning, so that was a nice relief from the sun.

I was worried that I wouldn't see any road kill, because I'd gotten to mile 4 without a sighting.  So I took a photo of the cypress swamp with the beaver dam in the front of it.  It's probably hard to see, but there are lilly pads & flowers all over the back half of the swamp in the trees.

I did end up seeing 2 really smashed up snakes after I took this photo, but decided to keep on running instead of stopping for their photos.

The run was kind of a pace/interval run.  2 miles warm up, 2 miles faster, 2 miles slower, 2 miles faster, 1 mile cool down.  Overall AP was 9:10.  Splits were: 9:37, 9:34, 8:43, 8:57, 9:17, 9:14, 8:37, 8:26, 10:04.   The last fast mile was tough on me, but I made it.  Good run!

Wyatt and I went and played with the kids on base this morning.  MR invited us to go on a ruck march with him & his team, so we headed out early with our backpacks, phone books & rocks.

We did almost 4 miles on the trails hauling our packs.  Mine was a little too heavy for me.  I put in a granite rock, and it ended up weighing around 40 pounds.  Next time, I'll use phone books or smaller rocks. I managed to do okay on the trails, but later that night, my knee was sore.  

After our packs were off and the kids were getting ready to go to work, we went for a quick run on the trails.  Running seemed like a breeze without the extra weight!!  It was 3 miles on some hilly trails, and we did pretty good. Lots of fun.

Then I came home and decided it was finally time to watch Gone With the Wind.  I watched it while I baked chocolate banana bread and a huge batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.  It took me almost the whole 4 hours, but I finished both of them :-) 

32.75 mile bike ride with MR.  We took a few new side roads, just to see where they would go.  We're going to work our way back up to another 50 miler again.  We aren't hard core bikers...obviously.

No real great road kill treasures, but we did find a light housing (bulb included) for the treasure box.

Didn't run today...want my knee to be great for my 4th of July run on Monday.  MR did p90x core synergestics with me.  Then we did yardwork for hours.  Blech.