Vacation gotta get aawwaaayyyyyeeee

Wow!

So that's the longest I think I've unintentionally NOT written on this blog.  Sorry 'bout that!  I've been having quite a bit of fun.

Training as hard as I can, too.  I had a great week of volume before I spent a week in NC.  And I learned a very important lesson, folks...Yankees (as my NC born brother-in-law calls me) should never, NEVER start their 4.1 mile run at 9:45am.

North Carolina is HOT, yo'.

I about died 467,963,105 times and had to stop under a random house's shade tree several times.  But it was still a great way to ring in my 35th birthday last Thursday.

Yes, you heard that right!  America and I are basically twins, separated by 201 years and 1 day.  It was one heck of a labor!

So I've been doing lots of thinking (shocking, no?) about what's left of my season.  I am such a planner, but if you've read more than 0.5 posts on this blog you *might* already know that.  Anyway, I'm having so much fun wrecking myself on Monday night rides and in the pool.  But the running?  Still not coming so well.  After my 4.1 miles (the most consecutive I've done since injury--booyah!) I was a little bit sore in the ankle.  Not that day, but the next day.

Sigh.

So I know I need to be very, very careful here.  Because we've already established I can't turn myself off.  So if I'm going to pay $300 to race at Rev3 Cedar Point, I need to be able to be ready and able to take a good solid shot at a sub 5:30.  If not, quite honestly, it's not worth my $300.

Do you know how hard it is for this planner to NOT PLAN?  DO YOU?  Well, don't you worry, because I have a plan for not having a plan!  Actually, two plans.

Step 1 is I'm going to race Huntington, give it my all, and see how it goes.  Assess the pain and/or damage.  Then...

--If I'm feeling pretty good about things and the state of running, ramp up the miles a bit and plan on Rev3.  I'm already to the swim yardage to get through it and almost comfortable with the distance on the ride to hit the pace I want to.

--If I'm hurting (and I need you to hold me accountable on this, interwebs) then I really, really need to do the SMART THING and back out of Rev3 with a focus on Vermilion or Lorain sprint or olympic (depending on the state of the achilles) and then pace all or part of the Towpath Half Marathon in mid-October to help my friend Sarah go sub-2.  Even if I jump in the last 10K, it will be fun.

Obviously this all depends on what my crystal ball says.  So, wait, let me just get that out...uhhh, hold on, I know it's somewhere....

#%(&!@!!!!

(If anyone can loan me a functioning crystal ball and/or time machine, I'd greatly appreciate it.)

One last thing: shameless bragging about my students, but if I can't do it here, then where, right?  I am so, so SO proud of my APUSH kids.  They absolutely annihilated their test.  It literally brought tears to my eyes when I looked up their scores.

I had 30 kids take it.  Of those 30, I had 13 5s and 13 4s.  My average score was a 4.23.

In case you don't speak APUSH, that's really, really good.

So proud of them. :)