AuburnChick's Adventures

Y’all, with my renewed focus on running, thanks to a backlog of medals that have been sitting around my house the last few months, I am discovering some of the unpleasantness that accompanies pounding the pavement…

Blisters.

Oh goodness, but one of my toes has a raw spot from where the toe beside it digs into it, and the nail has rubbed off the skin.  No amount of trimming and filing will help.  I ran into this problem last fall when I began doing Piyo.

Then, two days ago, I must have either jammed the tip of my toenail or created a blister on the top of my toe when I ran.

As a result, I gave myself yesterday afternoon off.  I thought that things would be better this morning.

They weren’t.

A couple of things are fueling my current running mojo…the stacked-up medals and calorie burn.

I am all about burning calories, let me tell you.

I decided to stop being a baby about the blisters and bandaged up.

I covered up the tootsies with my fabulous socks from Gone for a Run (love, love, love this company) and prepared to run.

My goal for the day was to complete a 5k…the first in a series of four mini races within the big OneHRC House Marathon race sponsored by the Hogwarts Running Club.  It’s comprised of four distances and four medals.  The 5k is the shortest run.

The morning was crisp but not cold…sunny but not hot.

I had my route already in mind.  It’s funny how, now that I’ve been running more regularly, I can tell you which routes equal out to which distances.  I am forever keeping tabs on my fitness watch during my runs…monitoring my heart rate and the distance I’ve traveled.

It’s also funny how, now that I’m running different distances, that 3.1 miles doesn’t seem like it’s very far.

I usually start my runs with a half-mile walk, but I am not one who likes to waste my time.  I wanted to get the job done quickly, so I went ahead and started off running.  Not fast mind you.  I am definitely not fast.  I wish I was.

In fact, I was thinking about my speed last night when I attend my school’s football game.  It was a BIG game against our arch rival.  The place was packed.  Teachers lined the track that surrounds the field for an up-close-and-personal-view.

The game went back and forth with both teams scoring constantly.  It was so much fun to watch and a bit unnerving at the end.  My school came up with some incredible plays and wound up winning after a very tense final 30 seconds when the other school had the ball, and we stopped them all the way through their fourth down.

One such play was a fast sprint down the field.  I said, to the administrator standing beside me, that I wished I could run like that…that I wished I had the player’s height and long legs…that I could cover some major ground quickly.  At 5’3″ tall, I have short strides, and I’m definitely not a sprinter.

The administrator and I are friends…have been ever since he coached my kids in middle school and taught Rooster in one of his classes.

He told me something that kept replaying in my mind this morning when I ran.

He said that I had endurance.

He and I are friends on Facebook, and I suspect that he’s seen my frequent fitness posts.

His words though…they encouraged me so much and reminded me not to focus on what I lack but on what I’ve developed over time and through persistence.

So I surprised myself by running the entire 3.372 miles (according to my Charity Miles app..slightly different from my Garmin app).  I ran from the moment I left my house until the moment I returned to it.

All.  The.  Way.

This is the third outing in a row when I have run more than three miles straight.

Proud, I was of myself, as Yoda would say.

I represented both my Rooster /Airman boy and my Auburn Tigers while displaying the medal I earned today.

Each Hogwarts house has its own race and medal.  The medals will be put together, once all races are run, to form a large medal representing the entire Hogwarts school.

The message on the back…

Here’s a closeup of the frame that my running club sent out to hold the pieces together, even though they are magnetic and will connect once joined.  There was a problem in the manufacturing, and some of the medals weren’t connecting, so the running club came up with the idea of the frame as a fix and sent each participant one free of charge!  Is it any wonder why I love my group so much?

If those three empty spots aren’t reason enough to get motivated, that I don’t know what is!  I cannot WAIT to place each remaining piece!

Stay tuned.

Filed under: fitness | Tagged: fitness, Gone for a Run, Hogwarts Running Club, OneHRC House Marathon, running, virtual races |