Surprise Surprise!!!

We had a fun mother's day weekend going to Fort Wayne and surprising Jason's mom. We had been in conversation with Jason's dad, Walt, and had planned on his mom, Beverly, being home between 3 and 4 pm on Saturday afternoon. We got to The Fort at about 3:15 and no one was home, so we had a beer and sat on their back deck and waited....and waited...and waited. Finally I told Jason just to call his mom and be like, "Hey whatcha doin.." (of course while he is on the phone with her their bird was squaking up something ridiculous and I was like, "GET OUT OF THE HOUSE before she hears the bird.."). We find out that she had gone to Jason's grandparent's and was on her way to the store and then she was going to head home.

We decided to try and surprise her at the grocery store because, really what would be more surprising. So we are sitting in our car looking around and ducking every time a car rolls past. A few minutes later, we see Beverly's car and stealthly (ok, two tall skinny people can't really be stealth...but we tried) waddled around the cars in the parking lot. We followed her to the bread aisle and said..."hey there!". She totally did a double take and was SO happy to see us! She couldn't believe that we were in Fort Wayne and had driven from Chicago to see them. We had a great evening chatting on their deck and grilling out.....mmmm...Cheddar brats...there is not much better.

Saturday evening, we also did some research about running paths in town. There has been a push lately to get all kinds of bike trails and whatnot put in. The idea, I think, is to have the whole town connected by the said bike trails which is a fantastic idea. It's nice to see a littleish town doing this and making an effort to get this kind of thing in place. I am so spoiled living in Chicago with the lakefront path that I forget not all places have such a thing. So we looked at the Rivergreenway path which goes along the three rivers that come into the downtown Ft. Wayne area.

We got up at about 6:45.....and I didn't move even one inch during the night. Our cat has been a handful lately and as Jason put it, "We don't have kids for a reason!", so it was nice to sleep soundly. We were out of the house by 7:15 and navigated our way over to the path area. And I must say...fantastic! I am used to running on the lakefront path in the city with tons of people and bikers and kids and rollerbladers ....which I love. This couldn't have been more different. It was mostly through wooded areas, and we didn't see another person on the path except for one bicyclist towards the end. It could have used some water fountains and bathrooms, but other than that it was a really really nice run. It was weird not seeing other people and being out of my running comfort zone because when we passed like mile three, I was wondering how in the hell we couldn't have been done already. We jokingly played I Spy..."I spy something green", "Is it a leaf" "DING DING DING It IS a leaf!" and laughed and did 10 miles.

I have to include a graph of how we did...cause I'm awesome and a numbers girl.

The pink line with the markers is our pace at each mile, the black bars are the average pace for the whole run. The two lines on top and bottom are the limits on what McMillian says my paces should be for long runs. As you can see this run was *perfect*. We started off a big slower, towards the upper part of our limit and with each mile got a bit faster. We were pretty stable in the middle and dropped low towards the end. This is also suggest by the Pfitz book, saying the beginning of your long runs should be at about 20% slower than MP and toward the end creeping up to 10% slower that MP.

Just to note that 10-20% slower range is 9:04.5 - 9:54.0 but the McMillian numbers are a little faster than this coming it at 8:43-9:43. I seem to be ok with theMcMillian range given and so will stick with that.

Our last mile was in 8:10, which is just a bit faster than our marathon pace. I have been enjoying doing the last mile or our runs at about this pace and I'm hoping to keep it up (at least the idea anyways) as the runs continue.

Tonight we are going to work out at the gym now that volleyball is over. Tomorrow is running with the Kansas kids...I think it's time to try some strides.....