Carlsbad Can't Come Soon Enough

I am weary, people. Weary of running. Or rather, weary of marathon training.

I have been training on and off for a marathon since July. Because of several major life changes (e.g. moving across the country, starting a new job, buying a house on the west coast, managing our places on the east coast, blah, blah blah), my target marathon date changed from November, then re-scheduled for December, and now January.

That's more than six months of 12-20 mile weekend long runs, whether I wanted to run them or not.

Running lately has been a struggle mentally, as well as physically. And I didn't want to project my crankiness about our sport onto you.

So that's one reason why you haven't heard from me lately.

Last Saturday, I ran 19.5 miles. I logged the first 10 in my neighborhood, and the remaining 9.5 when it got dark and the temps dropped 20 degrees, in the Caltech gym. Boy, was I happy to finish.


And my scheduled 8-miler today turned into a 4-miler because my hamstrings were still tired from doing a 6-mile tempo run on Wednesday night.

But here I am. But with holiday photos! The first one is from Christmas. We did a White Elephant gift exchange, and one present I picked turned out to be a juicy bone. That's why Nelson, our chocolate-lab mix, looks so interested in the picture. At the far left of the frame is E.'s mom, who is laughing.

The second photo was taken after E., his mom, and I played tennis on Christmas Day, on a sunny and balmy afternoon. Apparently, playing tennis on Christmas is an E. family tradition.

The third is of me and my grandmother looking at the Rose Parade floats a couple of days before the actual parade. And the fourth photo is of the float sponsored and created by my new company. Cool, huh?!