I ran! And things that make you go hmmmm...

So yeah, this girl went running. I know, right? I mean this is a running (ish) blog. Although, I'm really enjoying making it more of an Excuses For Not Running and Look At How Adorable My Horse Is blog.

I figured with Goofy looming in the not too distant future, I should probably do some running. I wasn't feeling well at all while I was running tonight. I almost felt like I did when I was figuring out I had a gluten intolerance. I only ran 3.6 miles, but I felt terrible, so I guess I can cut myself some slack. Don't worry, I documented my post run sad face for you.

I'm really good at looking pathetic.

Tara (I figure if I keep linking to Tara's blog, I will shame her into actually blogging. It's not working so far) and I have 12 miles on the calendar for Wednesday because we're doing the 12-12-12 Virtual Race. Yes, I need to bribe myself with virtual races just to get my training runs in.

Anyway, just because I live in the desert doesn't mean we don't get into the Christmas spirit around here. I did capture some good Christmas lights pictures. It's practically a Corona commercial 'round these parts.

In other news, I found this on Amazon. Who comes up with this stuff? And even weirder? I kind of want to get it for someone.

That's what's happening in my world right now. Anyone else find crazy stuff on Amazon?

My First DNS

I was supposed to run the Hot Chocolate 15K today. I really wanted to run it, too. Last week, Tara and I were trying to fit in some races since there's so many to choose from during this time of year in Phoenix, AZ, and we need to get some serious training done considering Goofy is creeping up on us.

Through a long series of texts that included this little gem below, we agreed to sign up for the Hot Chocolate 15K.

Just call me Dr. Jaime. I will stitch you up!

Annnnnnyway, so we decided to run it. It looked like a lot of fun. But then this weekend happened, and well, I had my first DNS (that's Did Not Start for those of you that are unfamiliar with racing lingo).

So Friday night, we celebrated Tara's birthday on the other side of the world at Los Dos Molino's, which has awesome Mexican food.

And I had a giant Prickly Pear Margarita, which was amazing. I was leaning towards the raspberry, but this guy David ordered this for me and it rocked!

My mouth is watering looking at this picture.

I also intended to run on Saturday before our race Sunday, but this has been such a crazy, killer week, that I just couldn't make myself get it together. I still had every intention of running the race on Sunday, however.

Buuuuut, then there was our Kemah Farms Christmas Party, which was an event. Mostly, because we decided to dress it up. It was catered and we had a musician, which was really nice.

Some of the Kemah Farms girls:
Ava, Linda, Kristy, me, Jeannette

I actually can get dressed up! But don't ask me to wear stilettos and drink wine. Not a good combination.

I really, really tried to keep in mind that I was supposed to race in the morning, but the longer the night went on, the more I just wanted to have fun with some of my favorite people. (Although, Tara is one of my favorite people, too, but running is not really as fun as drinking wine and getting all crazy, right?)

And then it got more and more wild...

And then this happened...

By the time I left, I still thought maybe I could pull off a 15K in the morning. I got home, set out my race stuff and went to bed. When my alarm went off, I had a killer head ache. I'm sure it wasn't from the wine...

I had given Tara a heads up that I might not be ready to race earlier in the night, but then on my way home I convinced myself I could do it...

At 6:00AM, I said screw it and went back to bed. So I do not have an awesome race recap for you. But Tara was a rock star and did it, anyway. I have a couple of race options for next weekend, so I better to stick to my guns on one of those.

I did meet the barn peeps for breakfast this morning.

Don't we look great?

And I saw my little Lou, but I gave him the day off. He's only four, after all. He doesn't have to work as hard as the big boys.

That little face can't help but make me smile.

So that was my weekend. How was yours?

Paranoia

I was going to continue my annual convention recap with all of my awesome pictures of our VIP Disneyland dinner with all of my clients and pictures of the actual convention.

When am I going to get to wear these again?

Disney open bar? Yes, please.

I took lots of cool pictures, but my paranoia started to kick in half way through the second part of my post and I decided against posting pictures of clients - even though I have some really good shots! So I have to stick with non people pictures...

It got me thinking about all of the things that people post on the net. Generally, I'm not shy nor do I have a secret life but I have to be careful when it comes to my job and the privacy of my accounts. I started thinking about the ripple effect of a client stumbling upon my blog and seeing their picture, and so on.

I have really good relationships with them and I'm friends with a lot of them of facebook not to mention hearing all about their personal lives over the phone, so it's not like it would be all that weird to blog about a cool experience with them at Disneyland...but in the end, I decided against it.

Does anyone else think about things like this or is it just me?

I think I'm overly tired. Today was the last night of the convention, but I still have a bunch of work left to do. It's been almost a week since I've seen poor little Lou! I hope he remembers me.

I'm off to get some sleep. Maybe I will have some actually training stuff to post soon.

Annual Convention

Not that anyone asked, but I sell drugs for a living. Horse drugs. For real.

The equine pharmaceutical industry is a medical community unlike any other. It's quirky and fascinating (mainly because I've shown horses for most of my life). Every year, there's a huge convention for all of the vets and we write a ton of business. It's stressful, crazy and even fun (and emotional). This year, the convention was in Anaheim, California, which is right in the middle of my territory, so yours truly got to go! The convention always runs Sunday through Tuesday and since I have to be back to actually place all of the orders, I had to be back at my desk Monday morning, so it was a busy, exhausting few days.

But Tiana got to go , too, so what could be better? Friday morning, we hopped on a plane to California.

Me and Tiana getting on the plane

Also, it just so happens that the convention hall was right across the street from my favorite place: Disneyland! Tiana and I left a day early and managed to do some fun stuff before all the craziness began on Saturday night.

I won't bore you with all sorts of actual work and convention pictures (mainly because I didn't think to take any) but I'll show you the awesome side of the convention- the schmoozing part!

It was raining on Friday after we arrive, but we trekked over to Downtown Disney for lunch at the Jazz Kitchen. It was a little pricey, but delicious.

If you ever come here, you must have the garlic Parmesan fries. You'll thank me.

We wandered around in the rain for awhile and couldn't resist stopping by this place:

How could we resist?

And I tried on some hats...

Then Tiana got the super genius idea to go to Medieval Times! It was a good call because what's better than watching hot men in Medieval garb riding horses, right?

Sexy!

Everyone is assigned a knight to cheer for and we got the blue knight.

Our knight didn't win. Boo.

We got there early, so we got great seats right up front.



We were right up by the action.

I really enjoyed Medieval Times. It's a fairly short cab ride from the Disneyland area, so I recommend a trip some time.

Saturday morning, we even snuck in a little park time the before the opening convention reception that night. I rarely get to go to Disneyland at Christmas since I usually only go for a race these days, so it was fun to see it all decorated.

So, I haven't been running, but I've walked a ton this weekend. I have more to report about the wild world of equine veterinary pharmaceuticals, but I'm too exhausted to post it tonight. Stay tuned!

Post Thanksgiving Blues

It's always hard to go back to work after a four day vacation. It was a wonderful Thanksgiving break, Surprisingly, I don't have have actual Thanksgiving dinner pictures, despite the fact that I have divorced parents and therefore, I had not one, but two Thanksgiving feasts within a few hours of each other.

Wednesday night started off with an 8 mile run with Tara... Which didn't do anything to really lessen the damage I did shoveling food into my mouth on Thanksgiving day. *siiiiiiiiiiigh*

Thanksgiving started with a morning at the barn, of course, and Louie attempted to steal my coffee...

Mmmm

Coffee? Yes, please!

Actually, he was more interested in ripping off the plastic top and chomping on it than the actual coffee, despite the fact that it was cinnamon coffee with vanilla creamer!

Then there was lots of Thanksgiving snarfing. Like, seriously, I ate a lot of food on Thursday. I wish I could say I did some sort of Turkey Trot run - it's not like there's not a ton of them around - but I did not.

I also did not participate in Black Friday this year. I've joined the insane masses on Black Friday for the last several years with my friends and it always turns into getting up at some insane hour, going to the mall, getting Starbucks, getting sleepy and annoyed, going out to breakfast and then finally heading home pretty much empty handed.

Last year, we pretty much had Starbucks and people watched instead of trying to actually shop. I was too exhausted to join in on that this year. Maybe next year instead of Black Friday Starbucks, we can tailgate and and drink wine in the parking lot of Best Buy and watch crazy shoppers try to kill each other. How awesome would that be? It would be awesome.

Hell yeah, count me IN!

Moving on...

One of my friends also organized a reunion of some of my high school friends. While I have seen some of these people a few times since high school, most of them I haven't, so it was so great to catch up with everyone.

By Sunday, I finally did some more running. I met up with Tara once again for a long run. We originally planned for 13 or 14 miles and ended up doing close to 11. It was 10.75 to be exact.



Yup. Had to Instagram this to make it look better.
Here's my required narcissist blogger pic.

The park is really pretty at night

Tara brought me CHRISTMAS GU!!! OMG, it tastes like candy canes. I loved it.

Tastes like Christmas!

Tara running along...probably around mile 4

Thank God, Tara and I have started making an effort to meet for longer runs. She and I are total slackers and it's getting tough to make myself go out and run. At least we find ways to entertain ourselves.

Pole dancing

Tara doesn't like boring pictures, so she wanted me to be silly. Of course, it turned out really blurry...

This is the only filter I could find to
lighten up this pic

We tried to come up with a strategy for the Goofy Challenge. Since the NYC Marathon was canceled,  we don't have the experience of completing a full marathon to figure out how to pace ourselves for Goofy. Last year, when we did the Half Marathon and the Marathon Relay back to back, we took both races really slowly to try and save our muscles. I think we're going to try and do something like that this year. Anyone have any advice?

Speaking of Goofy, I went to send my Dad the link to the Goofy hoodie I wanted for Christmas (he never knows what to get me) and they're already sold out!

Waaah. I want it.

Anyone have any ideas for how you plan to handle Goofy? Any advice?

So that was my Thanksgiving holiday in a nutshell. Love my family, my friends, my wonderful little horse, the great friends I've made through running, blogging and various other Internet sources. I'm thankful for each and everyone of you.

Hope everyone had a great holiday!

Baby Steps

So my almost month long hiatus from running ended this evening. On Sunday, I wrote about getting back on the wagon and until tonight, that basically consisted of trolling for iTunes for hours looking for new music. Baby steps, right?

After work, I met up with Tara and decided to leisurely run for 2 hours. This basically consisted of doing 3 minutes run, 1 minute walk intervals. We started off pretty pretty strong, running at a decent pace, even though how walk intervals were pretty slow. Toward the end of the run, I felt pretty fatigued, but I suppose that's alright considering my complete lack of running for the last several weeks.

Ready to run!

Luckily we decided to meet because it would have been pretty easy for me to bail on the whole running deal. It was nice to have each other for entertainment.

And we saw this weird car...

So yes, I am back on the wagon. On another topic, has anyone seen Pitch Perfect? OMG, hilarious. And the music is awesome. Check it out. This was floating around Pinterest, and I had to share...

Hello, Wagon, We Meet Again

I've fallen off of the wagon in a major way. Like, I've done no running for about 3 weeks. Yep. Three weeks. I happened to notice my handy dandy little Goofy Challenge countdown says that the Goofy Challenge is *gulp* less than 2 months away. Insert panic and dramatics here.

I love 30 Rock...

It's not even like I'm in a funk or feeling depressed. I've got lots of things going on of great importance. Like very important work projects with my work BFF, Tiana...

Grade school project or work project? You be the judge.

I've been spending loads of time with this super cute dude:

And of course, I can't help but Imstagram him, pretty much all of the time:

I mean, seriously, how cute is he?

I'm also developing a serious addiction to Pinterest. It's like I can not stop. I can't remember the last time I got so sucked into a social type of network. I'm blaming Katie for insisting that I join Pinterest when she had to know how sucked in I would get. There are times when Katie and I will hang out at the barn, split a bottle of wine and pin like crazy for like 2 freaking hours. What is wrong with humanity?! Anhyhoo, yeah. Pinterest, I <3 you.

The point of all of this chatter in that I'm seriously in a training rut. Although, that has not slowed down my calorie consumption. Oh no, I'm still eating like I'm running 20+ miles every week. So far, the damage has been minimal, but I know it will catch up with me soon.

So yes, the Goofy Challenge is looming ahead and I need to get my shit together and stop effing around. Time to jump back on that wagon. Like stat. Don't want to miss out on these babies:

My precious....

All of that starts tomorrow, of course, ya know, because it's Monday and all. Right now, I have to play Song Pop, see what's happening on Pinterest and finish off some wine I already have open.

Feel free to (attempt) to keep me accountable by leaving me nasty comments about my ass getting bigger or yell at me to blow the dust off of my running shoes. I'll update you all tomorrow. Good night!