brrrrrr!

As I mentioned a few posts back, I'm in the middle of training for the Boston Marathon. There's nothing like training in the dead of winter! Brrrrrr! My two training mates were out of town this weekend, so I had to find it within myself to get my butt outside in 6 degree weather (YES...I said 6 degrees)!! I started yesterday at 8am, and I must have looked so silly! I ran in two layers on my bottom half and four layers on my top half with a hood tied so tight that the only thing exposed to cold was my mouth, nose and eyes. I didn't want to get too far away from my car in case I found it too difficult to run in the cold, so I decided to do the 5k loop 4 times to equal 12 miles. Can you believe that after just one 5k loop (that equals 3.1 miles or about 21 minutes of running) my water bottle was FROZEN???!!! I wanted to be able to get a quick drink each time I passed my car, but I couldn't because my water bottle was a solid block of ice. ha! In any case, I actually ran a pretty good time--partly because I was just wanting to finish as quickly as I could so I could warm up. (Aunt Cathy, sunny Florida weather is sounding very enticing right now!!!)

Check out this cool little widget below. Have you heard of the Nike+ ("Nike Plus") that Nike and Apple developed? It is an amazing little invention. You take your iPod Nano (it only works with the Nano), and you plug a little chip into the bottom of it. Then you attached a different chip to one of your running shoes. This $30 piece of technology measures your running distance, measures your calories burned, calculates your pace, talks to you in your earphones as you run to tell you how much farther you have to go, and then sends the workout data to nikeplus.com so you have a log of ALL of your runs. So Tara and I are using our Nike+ for every run that we do for our Boston Marathon training. It is the BEST invention! Plus, it's a motivator. I don't want a BAD workout logged, so it's this silent motivator for me. (One more cool thing to tell you about it and then I will shut up. Ok, this thing remembers your personal bests. So if you happen to run your best mile, or your best 5k, or your best 10k, then Lance Armstrong comes on your earphones after you complete your run and congratulates you on your accomplishment. The first time it happened to me, for a second I thought my dreams of meeting Lance Armstrong had come true. I quickly snapped out of it, but thought, "Man...this thing ROCKS"!!! You should buy one!!!)