I Think I'm Covered

One thing I've been stressed about is how I'm going to get my training in this summer. 

I'm taking the kids to Maine for the summer because we are having an addition put onto our house here in MA. (All three kids are in one bedroom. You can see how an addition might be necessary...) 

Anyway. I'm taking the kids and we are staying at my parents'. I contemplated saddling my mom into watching the kids for the 15-20 hours I need to workout--but--well, frankly, that's a shitload of time. Too much time to ask for even from a devoted Gramma. It felt very wrong to assume she'd being willing or able to do that. The hub. will be up each weekend, and so I can get in some workouts then. But during the week it's all me, all the time. 

I put an offer out to my cousin, Lauren, who will graduate from high school in the spring, and to my two sisters and one of my sisters-in-law to see if I could get a bite. I offered a good chunk of change in exchange for 15 hours a week workout time. Lauren took me up on the offer. Thank God! She is a Texan (San Antonio) and she and her dad come to summer with us each year. She's so awesome with my kids and they totally love her. She beautiful, fun, and patient. I'm so psyched! Plus, she lives in the beach house with us, so there's no commuting etc. involved. I feel enormously relieved. My kids can hang at the beach when I'm out on the bike or the ocean or on a run--and I don't have to feel like a slime for sticking them in all day camp or forcing them to stay inside while I do a treadmill or trainer workout. _____________ 

I had an incredible week of training, and I'm SPENT. I've been building little by little, but this week I made a major jump in hours put in. I can't do a long workout on Easter, so I switched my long bike to Good Friday. For that reason the hours and miles are somewhat skewed. (I log from Saturday to Saturday.) I finished my long bike at like 5 p.m. yesterday, which I did it on the trainer because Friday was wicked cold and had gusts of wind up to 50 mph. Then I got up early this morning to do a 9 mile run. It was still cold and windy and my legs felt like absolute lead. I ran with a few friends who are training for Boston and who had to do an 18 miler today. Thank God they had to go long because the pace was slower than usual as a result. 

 By the end of this I felt like I needed to crawl to my car. In other news, my friend Michael, a runner, broke his running streak this week. He ran every freaking day for 6 years, 4 months and 3 days. That's 2,316 days in a row. He averaged 8.77 miles a day for a total of 20,230.5 miles. That's dedication, my friends. In my mind it's an accomplishment of mental and physical toughness that few of us will ever match in our lifetimes. He's the man.