Unplugging and Rocking Out

Weekend Miles:  14
Explorin’ Strides

This weekend was a mixed bag of unplugging running style and rocking the house with the family.

Rockin’ it out at a family wedding. Yes, it was about 90 degrees and my son is wearing a sweater vest.

I got in 14 miles this weekend which gave me a 19 mile total for running (lots of other activities, fitness too).  Given that I’m now in the rehabilitating phase of the injury I’ll take that.  I finally got a read on my fitness from the injury fiasco and learned that while my short-distance speed may not have been affected, my mid-long range speed certainly has.

So Saturday morning I ditched my mom and the kids at the beach (they were obviously devastated by this) and explored some of South South Orange County’s (like Dana Point to San Clemente) finest ocean front trails.   This naturally meant watching everyone else have fun while I was sweating my little toosh off.  It was perfect.

This picture has nothing to do with my run other than the fact I am feigning excitement about something. The dichotomy between a fun run and seeing slow splits. The answer: an ice cold beer.

No pace time yelling at me, but I did record it to see what my “comfortable, but not pushing it” pace was and it was a progressive run with paces ranging from 8:00-9:00.  While I swore I didn’t care about the times while I was running, I was none to pleased when I saw the results.  I had to remember it was a fun run – and sometimes speed doesn’t always equal fun.

Nothing says multi-tasking mom like giving a wedding speech with a child on your hip. That said, they only interrupted me about 3 times.

But unplugging it and taking easy was not the name of the game this weekend.  We had a family wedding so this meant my boys literally partying until the wee hours of the morning.  Somehow they found themselves dancing and photoboothing until about 1am.

Oye!  The teenage years are going to be rough if they can pull this out now.

That said, the babes finally starting shutting down towards the end of the evening, but not after about 4 solid hours of non-stop dancing.  I secretly think people were feeding them rock candy from the “Candy Bar” to keep them going.

And finally, I tried looking up how many calories you burn an hour or what a good heart rate is for dancing with a 45 pound weight strapped to your neck, but didn’t find any results.  Any ideas? 😉

Just a few minutes before midnight and while it looks like I might be be holding him up, he’s actually trying to thwart the process from which I will turn into a raggedy princess and my car a pumpkin just a few short minutes later.

Any fun weekend plans for any of you?  Any good workouts?  How do you fight unplugging vs. slow runs?