Weekend Recap - Long Run, Viking and Nutella

Here it is Tuesday afternoon, and I'm finally getting around to posting about the weekend!  Saturday morning rolled around, and once I managed to drag myself out of bed and eat some breakfast, I was ready to head out the door for a run.  Well, as typically happens whenever my kids are awake, they all begged to go with me.  I figured I'd head out for a "run" with them and then get my real run in afterwards...they usually only make it about a mile.  But then the kiddos managed to convince Daddy to come along too which meant a walk down to Starbucks for coffee!

I love getting to take walks with my family.  With several kiddos at home, my husband and I don't get out much, so getting out and taking walks with the kids is a great way to catch up a bit.  The kids run around and have a blast...we talk over each other, trying to get a few sentences in before the kids interrupt ;)  

After we were home and my coffee was gone, I headed out for an easy 4 miles.  It still blows my mind that I can call 4 miles "easy"!  

As a side note, posting pictures of myself running on my Instagram account has really changed the way I view myself.  Mostly in a positive way, occasionally in a negative like "Eww!  Is that really how I look when I run?!"  More often it's "Huh.  I guess I kind of do look like a runner.  A chunky runner, but a runner."  The picture above I chose to post because you can kind of see the muscle in my right leg.  Visible leg muscle = Chunky runner win.

I totally skipped my long run on Sunday, but I was able to squeeze it in on Monday (yay for family who babysits for me!).  Sunday was just a hard day, so the whole family spent the day at home watching movies and playing games.  I knew I was getting close to finishing my Viking challenge, but at the end of the day I saw this

and I knew I had to at least walk up and down the hall a few more times to finish that up!  So I did, and my medal is headed this way =)

When I headed out for a 10 mile run on Monday, I knew it was going to be tough at the end because I had missed my 9 mile run the previous weekend.  So, I decided to what every single running coach/expert/author tells you do and slow down on my long runs.  That's where I have a hard time.  I don't run my long runs by feel, I run them by pace.  Initially this was because I had to teach myself to not run too fast at the beginning, but even then it was only about a min/mile slower than my goal pace.  This time I knew it was going to be hard, so I slowed down by another min/mile.  It was so hard to keep my pace that slow for the first couple of miles!  But I eventually got into the rhythm of it and it was an amazing long run.  As predicted though, the last couple of miles were tougher than the rest, but certainly not as bad as they could have been.  I slowed down a bit more and managed to actually keep running without taking unscheduled breaks.  One of the best parts of the run though, was this:

It's pretty much like eating a spoonful of Nutella in the middle of your run.  And how could you get much better than that?