Eons or ions?

It's been eons (sp?) since I've mad a post but this was something Inwanted to do for me, to chronicle my running and fitness and I'm hoping if I start posting again, my fitness will be more at the front of my mind. 

I hurt my knee somehow running this year and it has made running frustrating and less enjoyable. I haven't gone to the doctor, which I should, so I dont really know what's going on with it or what is causing my problem.  I kind of feel like my family physician won't know a lot about these types of injuries and I probably need someone who specializes in sports injuries. Anyway! I feel like the pain is not actually originating in my knee, but more from tightness in my lower back or even my hip and thigh area. Sigh....I'm not sure. I know it doesn't seem to make sense. But it isn't actually in the knee joint. It's the surrounding tissues. I'd been using KT tape which surprising helps a lot but I didn't yesterday when inwent out for my three plus lie run Nd my knee is very sore today. Much more so than it had been during better weather and I thought since I had cut so way down on exercise, this wouldn't be the case. Anyway it's irritating and frustrating and also causing me anxiety because I can't imagine having to hang up my running shoes!! Running saves my mental state and I love it! I don't care if I ever run a marathon and I don't care that I'm slow. I just love how it makes me feel and I refuse to think I might need to give it up. I plan to buy a knee support sleeve or brace and try that and if I don't get any results, I will reluctantly go to the doctor to be seen. I'm a nurse so I don't know why I procrastinate these things!!

Anyway, the run yesterday did me a world of good, even though my knee is now paying for it! I want to go again today but we have another family Christmas to go to this afternoon so I may settle for the elliptical. It was gloomy gloomy gloomy on the trail but I loved it! Gloom and doom, or bright green plant life, I don't care - I love getting outside and running!

Ran my longest distance!

I am almost alway seeing one kind of creature or another when I am on the trail. If getting out and running or walking does not else, it keeps me in tune with the outdoors and all the different life in nature. Our world really is beautiful if you just look around and notice. :)

I've has several good runs lately. My longest being 8 miles. That's the longest I have run as of yet. I don't really know whether or not I should be working on extending my distance, or maybe increasing my speed. I did do some fartlek runs and I love them! Those are when my muscles really feel it. The long runs tire me out, but the speed work runs really challenge my body. I am anxious to do more of those.

I walked three miles early this morning and three miles this evening. I plan to do a speed run tomorrow morning if the weather allows, probably another three miles. We have had several inches of rain today and all of those little drainage ditches and nooks and crannies for water drain off are deep and rushing like crazy right now. I like it! It's cool to be on the trail and hear what sounds like a waterfall all around you.

Here are some photos from some of my runs/ walks, the last couple of weeks....

P.s. I'm not very good with positioning photos, especially when posting from my iPad!

Stealing Photos

So I haven't been writing but I have been keeping up with my running. As much as I am able to that is. There was a day last week that I was sick. I don't know what was wrong, I got up early and walked my trail with the intention of running later that afternoon. While I was walking, I started feeling chilled and the more I felt chilled, the more my body started to ache. When I got home I took my temp and sure enough, I had a fever of 100.4. No big deal, but I sure felt wiped out. I at first suspected the fever and feeling crumby could have been from my Rebif injection that I had given myself the night before. But usually, taking Tylenol or Ibuprofen takes care of that and it didn't this time. And I was just so weak and exhausted. I really think I just may have had a mild viral illness. I don't know, it's a mystery.

This is a photo my daughter just sent me from her walk she took this evening. So beautiful! I worked last night and have tonight and tomorrow night off. I wanted to get up today and either run or walk, but it didn't work out. I will go for a run early tomorrow. And maybe get another fast run, or walk in Tuesday morning as well. I've been trying to increase my distance for my long runs. I'm up to seven miles now. Not much compared to some, but I'm still happy about it. I really need to follow some sort of training plan even though I'm not training for anything. I know there are a lot of books out there. I'll have to research this more.... 

What a week/weekend

Well this last week I was due to work three nights in a row, from Monday - Wednesday. Wednesday I woke up with such a terrible headache that I called in sick. I don't call in sick very often, and especially for a headache, but this one was a doozy and the medication that I take for these bad headaches knock me out for sometimes a full day.

Which is what happened. I basically woke for a few minutes at a time on Wednesday and then stayed sleeping until Thursday morning. I was still feeling groggy but I made myself get up early Thursday morning for a run and ended up running 6.5 miles! That is a lot for me, my long runs consist of 5 miles max. It made me want to try and boost my goal to something like 10 miles for my long run. We will see. I really feel like by the time I am at mile 4 or 5, I could just keep going. I kind of wanted to keep going but I started feeling like I was going to need fuel and since I didn't have anything with me, I called it a day.

Our youngest kitty Frederick, that was born to a feral mama last summer on our property (we adopted Fred and took him to the vet for vaccines and then neutering when he was old enough) had been showing signs of some kind of gastrointestinal distress for the last couple of days off and on. I didn't get too concerned until by Friday morning, he was unable to keep anything inside his little body at all and it was apparent that he was very sick. I took him to the clinic that did his vaccines and surgery and after palpation to his abdomen, there was worry that he might have an obstruction. He needed an xray and their facility did not have radiography there. So I was sent on to another clinic. The other clinic did the xray and although there wasn't any sign of an obvious foreign object, his intestines did not look placed the way they should and then I was referred to another animal clinic, this one with emergency services such as ultrasound and specialty surgery. That is where he needed to stay, to rule out obstruction, pancreatitis, or other illnesses that could be causing him to be so sick.
$2000.00 later and he is home today, still feeling a bit under the weather but hopefully, on his way to being his old self. It wasn't an obstruction and they aren't totally sure what happened but I'm still worried because after that much money, how can I even afford to take him back if he starts getting worse again? But we sure are happy he is home. Here are a few photos of him at the hospital last night when we went to visit him.

We did have a little time to have fun on Saturday at an event called "Swinefest" which featured several wineries from Iowa, as well as several different restaurants and chefs that created lots of yummy dishes using pork. The ticket price was 40.00 in advance or 45.00 at the start of the event. It was my husband and I and one of my daughters and her boyfriend. On admission you are given a wine glass along with a coupon for one bottle of wine of your choice. You could then visit the booths and eat and drink wine, without paying for anything else unless you wanted to purchase more bottle of wine. Which we did. We ended up bringing home 7! bottles of wine which was including our 2 free bottles.
It was so much fun sampling all of the different types of wine and that they were all local wineries made it special too. The food was delicious and we definitely ate more than if we would have just went out to dinner somewhere. It was so much fun and everyone was so friendly and we have a lot of different ideas now of places to go and things to do. The different wineries all have all sorts of fun events that go on throughout the year, especially the summer months. We will not ever have any excuses to be bored!

My hubby and I

My daughter Laci and I

I don't have any photos with her handsome boyfriend from the event! Not purposely leaving him out!

Maybe this week I will have some photos with him in it. There is an event every Wednesday evening during the summer at the local zoo called "zoo brew" 

There is usually live music and they serve alcohol and food. It's an adults only event. I have tickets and hopefully everyone will be able to make it this week!

The next three nights

The next three nights I am working twelve hour shifts at the hospital. There are hard on a person, let me tell you. I will basically leave my home at shortly after 6pm, and won't return until the next morning at about 8am. Sometimes later. This pretty much decides for me that I won't get any work outs in. Someone people can do it, but not me. My routine is to come home, wash my face, brush my teeth and get into jammies. Maybe try to read but that doesn't last long until I am nodding off. Then I am up and have just enough time to drink a cup of coffee, shower and get ready, eat, and then it's time to go back to work. I love my job, but depressing! Especially when I am doing that for three nights in a row. 

So anyway, I decided to have an early morning run since it won't be until Thursday when I get run again. The weather was so nice! It was a little cloudy and a cool and breezy 64 degrees. It was perfect! It what so overcast that I had to check radar a couple of times to make sure it wasn't getting ready to storm. But nope, there wasn't anything in the forecast. I wish it was like is every early morning!

I did see a couple of new mushroom sprouting up:

I know there is nothing exciting about mushrooms (or maybe these are toadstools - probably poisonous!) but they strike my eye and there is something I feel to be beautiful in noticing yet different things in nature, no matter how insignificant they may seem. 

I need a dslr (?) camera. Did I tell you about my hobbies? I have many. Many that I start and then lose interest in. That's why I am putting off on getting a camera. They are expensive and I need to know if I am going to be committed to using it before I invest in one.

I'll go into more detail on my hobbies someday. Some of them are (were) very interesting! Have a great day!! :)

A Run and Ride

 A couple of views from this morning's run. I did 3 miles this morning.

The temp was 69 or 70 degrees when I started this morning at 6:30. It was just so terribly humid. I'm glad I started early.

I also met this guy crossing the trail. He was not so happy to meet me. He was hissing and trying to snap at me. I didn't bother him too long. I just wanted to take his photo and then I was on my way.

After I got back from my run, I ate some yogurt while my husband was hooking our bikes up to the bike rack on the car. We rode just about 9 miles on a popular bike trail. It was almost 80 degrees by then and still super humid but we were mostly in the shade so it felt tolerable and actually wasn't bad at all. 

I really wanted to take photos, but I didn't this time. The bike trail was a little bit busy - not crowded at all, but if you stopped for anything, before you knew it there were people going past you. So I didn't feel like I could stop and take photos. At one point we were in an amazing tree tunnel - it was so cool! Even though the sun was out and blazing, it was actually a little dark in the tree tunnel. We also ran across another snapping turtle crossing the road. This one was three times as big as the one in the above photo. I wonder what was going on that I happened to see this twice in one morning and in different areas?

I'm going to back to that trail, and maybe during the week when it might not be so busy. There were lots of incredible photo opportunities! Hope your weekend was great, now have a great week as well!

Absolutely Nothing - Try again tomorrow!

Well this is the view that I had at my running trail on Monday of this week. The geese were all out taking their babies for a walk.
I was hoping to get out there again this morning and also we had a bike ride planned but a migraine threw a huge monkey wrench into the whole day.

It's so frustrating when that happens because I have so many plans of things to do on my days off and today I feel like I accomplished absolutely nothing. So it's a little bit depressing when I spend the day laying around, too sick to do much of anything. But I still have one more day off so I am going to try again for a very early run and then early bike ride before it gets too hot and also it's supposed to thunderstorm.

I found this pretty on Monday as well. When I took a walk on the trail on Friday, it was gone. You can't tell from the photo but it was really tall! We had some rain today so maybe I will be finding more of these in the morning.

My daughter is with her friend and her family at a beach house in North Carolina for the next week. These are a couple of photos of things that they have found on the shore. I told her to take a lot of photos of her adventures there and we will make a photo book when she gets back. It's very beautiful there!

Well, since I'm feeling some better, there is no time like the preset to start working on some house cleaning tasks and I will keep my fingers crossed that I make it out for my run in the morning. Goodnight!

Pajamas at 6PM

After waking up this afternoon at 4pm after having worked 3 twelve hour night shifts in a row, and with almost 90 degree weather, I decided that I might not survive a run. But I knew I would feel guilty if I didn't do some sort of activity so I decided to walk the bike trail.

I didn't encounter many people on the bike trail this afternoon, just a few people on bicycles. The weather was really tropical this afternoon. I did a 3 mile out and back walk and felt just a little bit guilty for not running, but at the same time I felt satisfied that I did get a little bit of exercise in.

I saw a dead baby bird laying on the bike trail that must have fallen out of a nest from somewhere above. It made me pretty sad - he didn't really even have any feathers yet. He was pretty big for a baby bird. I wonder what kind he was. Anyway, there wasn't anything I could do at that point, he was already gone. Sad.

After my walk, I was sweaty and sticky and covered in bugs (I felt like anyway) so I came right home and showered and decided...I was just going to dress in my pajamas. Yes it was early, Friday night, about 6pm. But screw it, I wanted to be comfortable. So I put some pajamas on and cooked a little dinner - stuffed green peppers and fresh spinach sauteed in butter and white wine. (And maybe a couple of glassed of that white wine.) It was so good! I should have taken a pic!

Our plan tomorrow is a 10 mile bike ride and if I can motivate myself (I think I can, I think I can...) I will get up and run in the morning around 7am. 3 to 5 miles. I haven't decided yet, we'll see how I feel. If I want to run, I am going to have to do it early. Otherwise it will be just too hot. I'll let you know what happens!