In Celebration of Running

Tonight is the showing of the movie Hood to Coast and I'm kind of excited to see it. I ran the Ragnar Socal race last year and had a blast! Someone mentioned to me that Ragnar is based on the Hood to Coast race. The Hood to Coast Relay is held in Oregon in late August and is the largest relay race event in the world. The race normally sells out very quickly. I think I mentioned in a recent post that my Ragnar team was thinking of signing up for this race in the near future. I hope we do because I would love to be a part of this event.

Since I love team relay events and running movies, I just know that I will like this movie. So in honor of the showing of this movie this evening, I went out for my first long-ish training run of the year, 9 miles. This distance use to be so easy for me but due to my lack of training these past 2 months, I struggled with this run. It was also pretty cold outside and I had not been doing a lot of training outside. I am glad I did it as it reminded me that I need to toughen up. I've gotten soft over the holidays in more ways than one.

It took me 4 miles to warm my entire body up, after which the other 5 miles went better. It is always a struggle to regain fitness. It is mentally hard to know that you were once faster or stronger than you are now. I try not to beat myself up too much during the regaining process. Despite saying that I struggled with this morning's run, I am proud of myself when I achieve small victories, like running that 9 miles today. It is these small building blocks that will get me back on track. Not that I was ever a track star but I always like to do something better than what I did last.

I was reading my latest issue of Runner's World (gift from Sister J) and came across an article on dressing properly for outdoor running during the winter time in different parts of the US. Here are the pages from that issue...

I was going to take a photo of what I wore to go running outside this morning but I forgot. I wore something very similar as the girl on this page. Except I had on a white long sleeve C9 Champion mock turtleneck running shirt and a grey fleece vest. One of my coworkers gave me a Nike headband that is also an ear warmer for Christmas, similar to the one the girl is wearing on this page. I will review that soon.

Happy running everyone! What is your favorite piece of cold weather wear? My hands were really cold this morning. They are normally cold even when I wear gloves. Do they make anything out there to keep hands warm for the first few miles on cold days?