OH HEY

I am back! My cat is ... okay, mostly, I think. I will not bore you with the long and ambiguous details of her illness, but she was at the vet's for IV fluids and forcefeeding for a few days and she is home now and seems mostly back to normal. I'm waiting on test results that will hopefully tell me if she has an actual condition or if this was just an episode, but either way things are much better than they were a week ago.



I guess, Sophie. I GUESS.

I didn't run at all last week, as a result of both the unbelievable stress of the combination of making no money and having a really sick animal, and of my schedule last week. I flew to North Carolina on Thursday for a two-day job interview, got back late Friday night and spent Saturday running around town picking up my various pets from their boarding places and then sleeping to recover. I had taken Henry to a bunny boarding place downtown and had a minor freak-out when I left him there because the photos on the business's website were EXTREMELY misleading. I thought I was going to be leaving him in a big well-lit room where he'd be able to run around and play with other bunnies. Instead I left him in a dark hallway in a cage.



Normally when I'm on a short out-of-town trip I just leave him in his man cave in my apartment and have my pet sitter feed him along with the cats, but after Sophie was so sick I felt like spoiling all of them, which is why I decided to board him in what I thought was going to be bunny paradise. Instead it was like bunny Auschwitz. Of course he is fine. But NEVER AGAIN.

So I was all set to go do a fabulous long run yesterday to restart my training and general good-at-life-ness, but then this happened:



Ugh really. REALLY? I debated my options (while eating some garlic breadsticks) and eventually arrived at the conclusion that I just couldn't miss another run. I've gotten way off-track training for the past month and I needed that to stop. So I sucked it up and went to the gym. As soon as I walked out of my apartment I knew I was making the right decision, because it was literally like setting foot inside of a sauna. Just DISGUSTING. I got to the gym, found Mean Girls on TBS and ran 10 freaking miles on the treadmill. TEN. It sucked and was boring and I wanted to die. I took three 40-second breaks to drink water (my Nalgene does not lend itself well to drinking on the go, I can barely drink standing still without sloshing all over myself), but otherwise I just pounded that mother out. I'm proud of myself, for going at all when it would have been easier and nicer to stay inside in the air conditioning watching Grey's on my computer, and for running a full 10 miles on the treadmill when I was ready to stop at around five and gave myself permission to stop at around eight. Basically, I'm proud of myself for (finally) sucking it up.

I'm still feeling sad about missing the half, though I know it was what I had to do for my own sanity that day. I found out the next day that the race organizers ran out of water at mile 2 and that people were dropping from heatstroke the entire time, so it's probably not a bad thing that I missed it, but I'm still kind of bummed. I don't want to register for another one because I'm (knock on wood) not sure where I'll be in a month (the interview went well), so for now it's up to me and my training. But now that I've knocked a 10-mile run out - on the freaking TREADMILL, no less - I feel more confident about things. Now if the weather would just cooperate everything would be golden.