Run like a motha

I signed up for my fifth half marathon coming up on April 20th, which will be my first half since having Alese. It's the Earth Day race in St. Cloud, which I ran back in 2010 and had my best race time to date. Funny enough, I was pregnant with Ashlynn when I ran that race, but didn't know it. I took a negative pregnancy test the week before the run...well, about a month later I found out that test was a negative positive. Fun to think back to that pregnancy - seems so long ago!

Back to running. I'm super excited to have something to train for, and to run another half. Running provides a challenging way to compete with myself and my past race times. Training for a race jumpstarts the daily run and brings more drive to the table. I've always signed up for races with friends, so of course it gives us something to look forward to and work through together, even though most of that friend training is done via encouraging text messages since we don't live by each other. Races are just plain fun to me. Doesn't matter the distance, time of year or who I'm running it with. It's guaranteed to make me work my tail off, challenge my physical and mental state, and, no matter the final time when I cross the line, fill me with enough energy to want to run another one.

As much as I'd love to say I plan to beat my best race time with this one, I know it's a little too ambitious for now. Case in point...I should be on week three of my 12-week training program, and I finally just started this past weekend. Which, I guess that means I am now operating off a 10-week program. Oops. It's not that I haven't had the motivation or excitement to run, especially now that we got a treadmill for Christmas. The whole reason we got it was the fact that it'd be uber easy to hop on after the kids go to bed or before they get up and we go to work/daycare. So nope, it's not the convenience factor. It's the concept of "after the kids go to bed or before they go up." That would require my adorable little girl Alese to sleep longer night stretches, giving me more than 5 or 6 hours of broken sleep. At this point, I'm in survival mode. An extra half hour to hour on the treadmill before bed at night or before work in the morning cuts my sleep that much more. I struggle wondering if the run or the sleep is better for my health, but at this point I've been opting for sleep. 

My new plan (obviously behind the plan that involves Alese sleeping a regular 5 or 6 hour stretch at night, and me consistently only getting up once) is to run as soon as we get home from work. That's pending the girls are content/occupied if Jer is working late. And then I just hope and pray that by the time my training gets into some higher miles (aka longer time on a run), my littlest is sleeping a little more sound.

And if all doesn't go as "planned", I'll still be running 13.1 miles on April 20. Maybe I'll get that PR, or maybe it'll just take me a long ass time to reach that finish line...regardless, it'll be the best I can do at this stage in my life and with my current schedule. And you can bet that when I cross the finish line, I'll be thinking about when I can run the next one.

What fun is a post without some pics? Earth Day Half circa 2010...
 

Not sure I'll be this happy on the upcoming race

Mom and Pops...always great cheerleaders

Racing buds...Bibs, Christi, Erin