New Year, New Blog Image

Chris was sick of looking at my blog with no header image, so he took it upon himself to make one for me again. I think he is still making some tweaks, but at least I got something up there now. Next weekend in Houston is the Marathon Olympic Trials that run right by our house, so we are going to get up early and watch some really fast runners run by three different times to get me motivated for the Houston Marathon the next day. The marathon is going to be a training run for me to prepare for IMTX. I haven't had the time to ramp up enough to go after a PR, but I did get in a few long runs and hope that I can finish without an embarrassing time. I love the course and will know lots of people along the way, but I still secretly wish that I were going to be running the half instead of the full. I PRed a half about two weeks ago and think I have a faster time in me, but I am going to put on my big girl pants and run/shuffle the whole thing. At least I will get to wear a cute outfit so the peeps can pick me out of the crowd. I did have a minor setback this past week that may cause some problems for the run, but I hope I caught it in time. I tried to copy my brother and go vegetarian right after Thanksgiving. For no other reason except that if he can do it, so can I. Well apparently I can't. After about 3 weeks my recovery time tripled, my times were sucking and I felt like crap all day every day. I had tried this before and had the same problems, but apparently I thought doing it again would be different. Isn't that the definition of insanity? I talked to my coach and doc and they both told me to immediately go eat burgers for three days in a row. My iron levels dropped, and I guess that isn't good. They also both said not to try something that drastic until after IM. I don't want to try it again. All I could think about was how much I wanted whatever meat Chris was eating, and I will just let the vegetarian habits stay with my little bro.
Here are the pups earlier after one of my long runs. They don't run long runs with me, but they both have the recovery side down and take naps with me.


And here is a photo of my niece just because she is cuter than any other photo I have. She just turned 6 months.