Back in the saddle.

Running:

So this past week I only ran TWO times. That is crazy to me, but the stupid cold Jeff's cold I had last week knocked me out, on top of work being NUTS, I had no energy. So the two times was Wednesday at our run club, which I ran 4 miles, at a slower pace than I want to talk about. The second time was on Christmas . I was still a little stuffed up, but overall I feel like I had a really good run. I needed a good run to gain a little confidence back too!

Last year during my marathon training Jeff and I were able to run together a lot This went really well, most of the time....... We did have a few run fights as I call them, but mostly they were great runs.

This year, with his Ironman training our schedules really haven't matched up at all. Since my long run this week fell on Christmas, the group I train with wasn't meeting, and since Jeff had a run scheduled we decided to run together. we I slept in until 9am, and it was GLORIOUS! After I got out of bed, I had some coffee, a bagel, and some Ibuprofen. (I won't go into the details of the

necessity of the pain killer, but let's just say, men don't have to deal with it, and once a month it makes running so much fun!) Anyway, after that we were off. Now, it was a little cold outside. And when I say cold, I really mean cold, like it was in the 30's and cloudy. So we put on our layers and headed out.

I was super excited to wear my running new running tights too. I kinda feel like a ninja when I wear them too.

We did 15 miles, which was more than both of our plans called for, but I am wanting to add miles and Jeff agreed to go longer with me. It took 2:21, which was a pretty good pace for me. According to my Garmin, it was an average pace of 9:22, which I was very happy with. I really hope I can keep that up for the marathon.

As a side note, Jeff likes to sing while we run (one of the things that has caused a run fight in the past.) At one point he was singing Guns-N-Roses and on my I-P0d I had Ke$ha going. I guess whatever motives you, right?

Retail:

Last week was INSANE at work. I mean, it was crazy. As an example of the craziness, I had a disgruntled customer from another store call my store, and started crying on the phone to me about a pair of jeans. He holiday snapped if you ask me. It is not that serious people. Though I could have snapped Thursday night, as I was at my register ringing up customers from 6p-9p straight with no break. And this is how the conversation goes at the register. We are having a promotion right now, "Buy 2 get 2 FREE" A pretty easy concept to grasp if you ask me. I mean, if I went into a shoe store, and saw that I would know I could buy 4 pairs of shoes, and only pay for two of them. So a customer walks up to the register with two items, we say "hey, everything is B2G2, they say, yeah, I saw that, how does that work? Over and over again. I mean really, it that really that hard to understand. I really felt like telling some people that they didn't qualify to get the sale because they were too stupid to understand what that means.

Anyway, for days my store has looked like a clothes bomb exploded. But the craziness will end in the next week or so, and then I will be complaining about how slow we are. January is always slow, and my associates will probably get sick of me having them fold, size, and re-fold the whole store. January is a great time to shop without crowds, fyi!