Litchfield, MN

Well, I made it to Litchfield last Saturday mid afternoon. There is NO internet and NO television to speak of in my 1970s
sorority house-eske dorm. So, that is why I haven't been around much.


Monday, I spent the first 2 hours seeing inpatients and a couple outpatients. The next 3 hours I spent on my feet in surgery. The rest of the day was a flurry of patients. I had five 9 hour days on my feet this week. I couldn't run the first 3 or so days because my feet hurt so bad. I did workout videos but it wasn't enough. Finally, Wednesday, I decided to brave the ridiculous winds and ran 3.5 miles. Thursday I did 3+, I ran 30 minutes. I had to do some walking because my iPod decided to have a mind of its own, but it was gorgeous out and I buzzed through the rest of the time. I ran down the main road in town to Lake Ripley and ran alongside it. Worst part? Giant swarms of gnats. Otherwise, a great place to run.


Friday, I worked 8-6 and then drove up to Fargo. Went out last night with the boys:

L to R: Chris (my cousin), Ando, Me, Random Guy from the hotel, Wilkie, and Fetzer. This picture is actually from when we went to see Metallica in Omaha back last fall. However, all of these guys except the random guy were out last night. Fetzer is my cousin's roommate and he drove us home. How nice!

Got wastey, drunk tweeted my running friend Mark, slow dance to Lonestar like it was 2002 with a very nice guy who wanted to arm wrestle me, outdrank my cousin, and ate three bites of my Perkins. All in all, a fun night. Today, I had quite the hangover, so I didn't do much. Slept most of the day off and on, watched the Twins blow it against the Yankees again (shut up Mark & Cody) and am planning on taking Sage out for a walk/run later. Tomorrow, I'm going to do 14-15 in the morning and head out to the lake to get the cabin ready for summer.


Due to my lack of internets, I will probably only post about once a week. However, I will try to post to daily mile when I can - though it usually only lets me do 3 entries at a time (I have internet through my cell phone, which means DIAL UP!) ick.

Good luck everyone!
Run on!

my half

Today I set out to run my half, since I missed Lincoln this past weekend. My left foot has been acting up a little so I got the new shoes and headed out. I made it 12.5 mi and then walked .6 back to my apartment. I'm TIRED and my feet and knees are sore but overall, I feel pretty good. I just stuffed my face with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, huge (baseball game pop cup size) cup of water, and now I'm eating a Nature Valley (Cinnamon my fav) granola bar - yeah, I'm eating both of them and chugging a pint of juice. Bra's feeling loose so I hope a good wash & dry will help shrink them back up a bit.

Hate for this to be a short entry, but I have been writing a lot lately and also I have to get ready to go out. Feliz Cinco de Mayo! I'm going out for my friend's birthday/cinco celebration. Bring on the Dos Equis!

Run on!

another race...

And a trail race to boot? Yes, please! I think that since I couldn't afford the dinero (in the spirit of Cinco de Mayo) to run in Lincoln, I should replace it with a cheaper race. And I found one! The Uff Da Run in Woodville, WI on May 16th in celebration of Syttende Mai. Syttende Mai is Norwegian Constitution Day, which is actually May 17th. I happen to be 100% Norwegian, so this is pretty cool for me! Also, it's only about an hour and a half away from Litchfield it'll be easy peasy to get to. Maybe even someone from the cities will drive over with me! Anyway I have until May 9th to decide, so I think I'll sign up this afternoon after my long run. I want to wait and see how the foot fares in the new shoes first before signing onto an actual race.

And with that, I'm going to sit and watch some TV and then hit the trail for 12-13 miles. Later tonight is my friend's birthday celebration and Cinco de Mayo! Drink some margaritas and Dos Equis yum!

Run on!

rest day

I decided to take a rest week. I haven't had one in awhile, and haven't had a good one at all during my training, so I took today off. I did 4.5 mi yesterday and 7.07 mi the day before and my foot has been really bugging me. Since my foot hasn't been hurting much during my run, just after, I took a look at my shoes. They are worn out! I bought them in October, and they probably only have about 250-300 mi on them, but that was enough. I bought the new model:

The Mizuno Wave Inspire 5

I am going to start to wean into them, using my old shoes on my shorter to mid length runs and the new ones on my long runs. These are GREAT shoes and work wonderfully right out of the box. Anyway, I'm going to hit the elliptical later tonight and do some strength training.

I went golfing today! I was going to bring my 305 and record how much we walked since we weren't going to use carts but I definitely forgot it. So anyway, we walked 9 holes and it was really fun. I suck at golf, but it was a beautiful day for it. I'll just count that as cross training!

sister love

My sister, Maren, and I went out for a quick jog this afternoon. It is cloudy and 70˚F and the humidity is at 27% (according to weather.com but it feels pretty muggy out). The cloud cover helped a lot.

I tried wearing my HRM below my bra to see if that helped reduce my bounce any, but then it wasn't picking up my HR so I gave up on it. The bounce wasn't too bad. I'm on the second clasp again and I'm thinking I'll need to machine wash (not hand wash) these puppies on gentle to get them to shrink a little. They didn't come with wash instructions, but since they have underwire, I have been taking it pretty easy with them.

We ran west down Pacific from our apartment (basically 78th St), which is the sucky way. I listened to an indie music podcast, which was a series of songs at different BPMs. I'm still not sold on the BPM-song thing. My 305's BPM numbers are so small I can't really watch to see if I stay with the song (or whatever) anyway, so I don't really worry about that so much. My foot felt pretty good the way out and got a little tired on the way back, but painless. I think it was worst on the way back because my left foot (the bad one) slants down & out based on the slant of the sidewalk. Either way, I have iced twice today and am about to ice again after I stretch. I better get to stretching, or it won't get done. Then, I think I'll have a lean cuisine pizza for dinner. yum!

Run on!

Lincoln Half/Full Marathon

Today was the Lincoln Marathon. Congrats to ALL runners! I had a blast watching everyone run and it made me want to run SO BAD! My foot is still bothering me a little, but I am going to try to do a couple miles this afternoon. I'm going to try to do 13 tomorrow so I might just ride the bike today. Anyhoo! We stood about half a mile from the finish line so we saw it all. Happy people, runners who were grateful it was about over, and people who were really struggling. Here are a couple shots from the day!


These two ran 13.1 miles in Star Wars outfits. Darth Vader and a Storm Trooper. It was incredible. Darth was pretty tired. Granted, he was wearing black.


This is my friend Josh. He decided out of the blue one day to run a half marathon and he did it in under 2 hours!


I wonder how many miles this guy has put in over the course of his lifetime?


This is my friend Cody. He's about to graduate from PA school. About 10 minutes before him, we saw his double. I think it was his brother.


I love the airborne shot!


My friend Kristin! It's always good to see people with high spirits late in the race.


Again, this dude is so happy!

I didn't see everyone that I knew were running, but I saw a bunch of people. Congrats to Kristin, Josh, Kim, Micki, Alicia, Andrea, Ellen, Kenzie, and all the others who made it! GREAT JOB!!!

Blog of the Week!

Wow! Mike (aka DirtDawg) mentioned my blog in his podcast this week and named it his blog of the week! You can listen to his podcast here (on podbean) or on iTunes (dirt dawg's rambling diatribe podcast).

How cool!

Anyhoo, good luck to everyone with races tomorrow, especially those of you running the Lincoln Half! See you there!

Run on!

summertime...in the city!

Hello everyone! I am on summer break! Well, for 1 week I am. I had my last final on Thursday and we have had craptastic weather the last couple of days so I spent my workouts on the bike. Did some riding Thursday around Omaha with really no purpose and then rode to UNO to meet my buddy Mike yesterday. He lent me his smaller camera bag to take with me tomorrow to Lincoln. Since I am unable to afford the race myself this year yet have multiple friends running in it, the plan is to go on bike with a couple of my friends and try to get some good race shots. It will all depend on if my friend Katja got her neck brace off yesterday and I'm still waiting to find that out. Otherwise it will be a walking/running venture for us to try and get to places to see our friends.
EDIT (kinda. I haven't published yet, but I don't want to delete and retype those last couple of sentences): Katja just texted me and the brace is off! She isn't supposed to run or ride for 4 weeks, but if we're careful and we do all the looking around for her, she should be fine so we're a go on bikes! Woo! I do, however, need to figure out how to put my bike rack on my car. I got a bike rack last summer that fit on my Saturn Ion and I was lucky enough that it fits on my new car, which is an SUV. How it fits on there, I have no idea. But I will try to figure it out today. At least, until I lose my patience, and then I'll probably just run to the Trek store down the street and have them help me.

Anyway! I come to you not from my regular blogging location:



I normally like to blog from my desk because a) it's where I plug in the Garmin and I'm already sitting there and b) I'm lazy. Anyhoo, since today is such a gorgeous day, I thought I would blog from my porch!



I have this awesome porch off of my bedroom that gets shade and sun about this time of day so I am sitting here with my legs in the sun and computer in the shade, chugging water and enjoying the breeze. God, I love summer!



Today I got up at 9:30 and headed out for 7 miles. I left close to 10 and about half a mile in, ran into my brother. He was trying to sell his accounting book back after his final this morning. The bookstore was closed - FAIL. He'll just have to try again later. The run was great. I ran down Pacific, through Elmwood Park, around Memorial Park twice and back. It ended up being about 7.07 when I stopped to walk the last three blocks or so to get my heart rate down. My foot has been feeling a little sore lately, but not painful (knock on wood). I'm going to keep trying to stretch it out a bunch and ice it and hopefully it will feel better. I wore the Maidenform again, which was fine. I fastened it on the second tightest eye hook and I think the bounce was minimized. It is kind of hard to tell because I think my heart rate monitor kind of screws things up; the underwire doesn't site right on my ribcage. I only thought about bounce once during the whole run though, so something is working. The pre-shower "chafe check" came up with much of the same as before: slight reddening in a U shape and that's pretty much it. I'm VERY impressed with this bra.

I listened to DirtDawg's 9th and 10th podcast and his wife (DirrtyGirl) was wondering about a forum of sorts for bra reviews. So I want to put a call out to every chick out there that reads this (and tell your running girlfriends) - tell us about the bras that you/they run in. If you have any stories, reviews, whatever, PLEASE email me (topheavyrunner@gmail.com) and tell me about it! I will feature any entries in blog posts (let me know if you want to be anonymous or credited) as soon as I get the email. This blog is small and kind of just starting, but why not make it something that could end up being great! So bring on the bra stories! And you don't have to be a "top heavy" (or front heavy ha!) runner, either. All posts will be labeled as bra reviews/stories so they can be easily searched on google.

Cool!

So I had a minor run in with a vampire this morning:



Just kidding, I cut myself shaving, which I haven't done in forever, then when I bent my knee to put on my undies, it looked like two vampire bites!
EDIT2: I just realized that looks like I mean I haven't shaved in forever. I mean I haven't cut myself shaving in forever! haha

So I fixed it with 2 SpongeBob bandaids. Success!


I leave in a week for Minnesota where I will not have immediate internet access. I will hopefully be able to access the web from the hospital and will try to update as much as possible from there, probably at lunch. I will be there during the inaugural Stillwater Marathon, which I might drive over to watch and photograph, and will be in a small town. Lots of miles will get put on the sneaks and bike and hopefully I will learn a lot! I'm looking forward to just chilling out and having a little time away. Oh, and running in a new place!