Hi friends! I'm back from my unintentional hiatus with a super delayed race report for you!

On Valentine's Sunday, I ran one of my favorite 5Ks - Love the Run You're With.

Unfortunately for all the runners, the race this year fell on what is supposed to be the coldest day we have all winter. It was expected to be so cold that the race directors sent out an email the day before, saying they would let us know the status of the race in the morning -- they first needed to confirm it would be warmer than 0 degrees.

Luckily (or maybe not so luckily, depending on how you look at things) the race was still on, so my friends and I headed over to Arlington to freeze our booties off.



Gotta love that 1 degree real feel...

I've honestly never run a race with temps this cold, so I wasn't sure how to dress.

I ended up with the below outfit.



It was

• Two pairs of Under Armour tights


• A Cold Gear top


• My Terps fleece-lined running pull-over that was a Christmas present from my brother's fiancee (thanks Justine, it was a life-saver!)


• An ear warmer, hat, gloves, and UA socks.

Since it was a Valentine's Day themed race, I obviously tried to make sure I had plenty of red in there.

In good news, the race started right outside a bar, and the bar was open for race festivities and let the runners hang out in the heat. We soaked up every bit of warmth before braving it out in the cold.

The two friends that ran with my are wayyyy faster than I am. So they lined up a bit ahead of me, and then we were off.



I didn't have a goal other than finishing and not freezing to death. In that regard, I succeeded on both fronts, though I don't think I had feeling in my hands for most of the race.

My hip starting nagging at me a little bit somewhere after the turnaround point, and I could see the times on my Garmin getting slower, but I wasn't too concerned, other than the fact that slowing down meant more time out in the cold.



I finished in 27:42, only a few seconds slower than the 5K I'd run the previous weekend and the Love the Run course was way hillier, so I'll chalk that up as a win!

So after a solid three months of my left hip being annoyingly tight, stiff and at times downright painful, I finally decided to do something more than stretching/yoga.

You'd think maybe I would have done something before now, but what can I say, I'm stubborn. Plus I was sort of hoping since I wasn't running as much because of school, that maybe the extra time off would help it just magically fix itself.

Turns out magic fixes don't actually exist.

So last week, I called up my massage therapist and basically begged her to find time to fit me in the next day. I was lucky and she was able to squeeze me in to an early Friday evening appointment.



When I told her what the deal was, she asked me a couple questions, and then was like, "You know, a lot of hip stuff starts in the glutes...is that OK?"

It took me a second to realize she was basically asking me if I was cool with her touching my butt. At that point, I just wanted to issue to be fixed so badly, that I was like yea, you do what you need to do.

She took that to mean digging her elbow into my glutes and IT bands for a solid 10 minutes each. Holy Moses, I wanted to cry.

But when I left, my hip was finally loose. When I walked, it didn't feel like the muscles were "catching" anymore. (Not really sure how else to describe what I had been feeling).

But then I ran those seven miles on Sunday, and everything went to hell again.

So I realized, it's time to officially get back into a regular foam rolling routine.



Because really there's nothing like a little bit of self-torture to fix running issues.

I foam rolled for a while tonight, and I have to admit even though it hurt like crazy, it helped. My hip again feels looser and less like it's catching. So I guess my new routine is going to be about 15 minutes of foam rolling a day to see if I can get this hip nonsense cleared up for good.

Hopefully it will start hurting less soon or my neighbors are going to start wondering what weird stuff is going down in my apartment.

On Super Bowl Sunday, I got up way too early to run a 5K around Hains Point with Meghan, Tim and Warren.



Tim, Meghan, me, Warren

A few months ago, I somehow convinced both my coworker Tim and my friend Meghan to buy the Pacers race pack that included Sunday's 5K, plus three more races in 2016. Mainly I wanted to have friends to race with, and since I'm obsessed with Pacers races, I applied some gentle peer pressure.

So on a fairly chilly Sunday morning, we all trekked out to Hains Point for the first race in the series.



The race was a pretty simple out and back along the Potomac. I was grossly undertrained and wasn't expecting a banner day. (Plus I'd run about 2 miles to get to the race start so my legs were just feeling dandy).

I actually think that running to the start helped though. If nothing else, it made me slightly less freezing cold. The race started and I just went with the flow. My legs felt OK, but I basically had no feeling in my fingers until mile 2.5.

My friend Scott's parents came out to watch me and Meghan, and snapped some nice pictures of me coming in to the finish!





Thanks for coming out and watching us Tina and Fred!

Because the race was Super Bowl themed, once you finished the 5K, you had the option to do the "combine." The combine consisted of a circuit of 20 push-ups, 20 sit-ups, 20 squat jumps, 20 lunges and then catching a football.



I'm not very good at push ups

I was feeling OK after the race, and headed straight over the combine. Let me tell you, those squat jumps were killer.



My total time for the 5K was 27:38, and I finished the combine in 3:26.

After everyone else finished, we all grabbed some water and then quickly said our goodbyes before heading back to our warm houses.

I ran another 2 miles back, making my total mileage for the day 7. That's more than I've run in a long time and let me tell you, I was feeling it on Monday morning. Holy Moses did my hips hate me.

I hit yoga class Monday night to stretch things out, and took a straight rest day yesterday, and today my legs are finally starting to feel normal again. But it was definitely a solid reminder that I should probably fit a few more long runs in before the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler. I need to stop saying that's so far away, and realize it's actually not.

I definitely took advantage of all my free time during winter break between grad school semesters to cram in a ton of reading. I know I recapped some of the books I read in December in my last book post, but I wanted to make sure I summed up the books I read between Christmas and New Years in this post with the stuff I read in January.



End of December Books

Devil's Bridge - Linda Fairstein

Really enjoyed this book and getting to spend time with some of my favorite characters. Especially liked that a large portion of the book was told from Mike Chapman's perspective, which was new.

The End of Marketing As We Know It - Sergio Zyman

I had to read this for one of my MBA classes, but since I work in the marketing field, I found it fairly interesting. It's definitely dated by this point, but some of the basic principles still hold true.

The Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach

My favorite book of 2015. I read it on a recommendation from a friend of mine from my reporter days and just instantly fell in love with the story and the characters. As the name implies, this book is about a college baseball player and all the people who circle in and out of his life. It’s 512 pages, and I tore through it in about two days over winter break.



Room - Emma Donoghue

Everyone totally raved about this book to me and the waitlist at the library was a mile long so I figured it was going to be OMG amazing. It wasn't. It took me a while to get into it and I actually found the child narrator pretty grating at times. I did appreciate that the story was different than anything I'd really read, and I'm glad I stuck it out to the end because the plot definitely picked up, but man the beginning was slow.

The Guilty - David Baldacci

Overall enjoyed this book. It was different than Baldacci's usual DC-based thrillers. This one was set in the south and in many ways reminded me of a Grisham book.

 

January Books

Orphan Train - Christina Baker Kline

This was a fast and good read. I really liked the two parallel stories from the 1930s and present day and how the two women's lives overlap.

Fates and Furies - Lauren Groff

I hated this book, and I think I might be the only person on the planet that feels that way. The first half of the book was so painfully slow. Both main characters were pretty much terrible people, and I just couldn't get invested in their stories. The only good thing I can say about it is that the second half of the book moved moderately faster so I was able to finish it more quickly. If this hadn't been a book club book, I wouldn't have finished it.



After You - Jojo Moyes

I wasn't sure if I'd like this book as much as Me Before You, but I found myself unable to put it down. I loved following along as Louisa tried to move on after Will and figure out what she was meant to do with her life. Definitely cried my way through the end.

The Nightingale - Kristin Hannah

I thought this book started off a little slow, but once it got going it was a really captivating story and I couldn't put it down. Also it was definitely a tearjerker.

The Yellow House - Patricia Falvey

I picked up this book because I'm super excited for my trip to Ireland in May, and I wanted to read some books set in Ireland or by Irish authors. I'm glad this was the one I started with. It was beautifully written and the story felt so real and also kind of heart-wrenching at times. I loved the main character and how strong she was through all the hard stuff her family went through being Catholic in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.



This Town - Mark Leibovich

This book is basically an insider look at how the DC political class and media class are all caught up in themselves. After living here for this long and working for the government and having lots of friends in the media, I felt like this was one of those books I needed to read. It was weird how much I could recognize and relate to. If you're into politics and the media and how it shapes DC, then you'll probably find this book interesting. If not, I'd imagine you'd hate it.

I've got a stack of books sitting on the table waiting to be read, but with classes being a bit more time-consuming this semester, I'm sadly just staring at them most days. I don't think I'll get through many books in February, but I'm hoping I'll at least have time for a few good reads!

Last week was rough on the work and school front. Lots of long days made it really hard for me to find time for workouts.

I managed to run on Monday, but ended up missing my yoga class on Wednesday. Then I had plans to do a run over my lunch break on Friday, but got pulled into a meeting, so that plan went out the window.



Earlier this month, I wasn't as concerned about not fitting in my workouts. If work or school got in the way, it was a bummer, but not the end of the world.

But now with spring race season -- and the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler -- quickly approaching, fitting in those workouts is going to be really important.

In the past, I've always made my training plans with runs scheduled on certain days. Maybe Mondays were intervals and Wednesdays were tempos and then Saturdays were long runs. But with my more unpredictable schedule this semester, I think I'm going to need to be more flexible with my workouts and not have them necessarily pinned to certain days.

My plan now is to look at my calendar for the week on Sunday nights, and figure out when I'm most likely to be able to schedule my workouts for that week, and then try to block that time accordingly.

I know sometimes things will come up that might throw my schedule into disarray, but I'm hoping that by focusing on just one week at a time, I'll be able to make most of my workouts happen.

I also know this means I need to try to make this time a priority and stop over-committing myself to other things. In my attempt to keep having fun during the semester, I probably say "yes" to a few too many after-work social engagements.

This week, I already have plans to catch up with two colleagues from other agencies Tuesday night and then book club on Wednesday night. I have an option to hit up an event Thursday night, but I think I'm going to have to turn it down, even though I'd really like to go. Otherwise I'll never fit in my classes and my workouts, and then race day will roll around and I'll hit the wall somewhere near mile 2 and no one wants that.

So we're going to give this week-by-week training plan thing a try and see how it goes. I'm feeling that if I can be a little creative with my schedule, I'll be able to make it all work.