Frog tastes like....

We put in 7.2 miles this morning... just a gentle warm-up in readiness for the Princess Half-Marathon (2 weeks today). Sam's ankle seems to have held together so all is looking AOK :D You can check our laps by clicking the link on the right - updated 22nd Feb. I had high hopes that I'd found a way of retrieving the Marathon details from the PC, but it's lost forever :( .... transfer from the Mac failed this morning, but 2 minutes later I had it working again - it's just so much easier to get things working with my Apple :P

My Garmin watch is scary !! We took the kids out for a little stroll around our neighborhood and I put the watch on to see how far it was (different to the normal 'lap' with a nice big hill for endurance) ..... well Garmin.com have just added Mac support for my watch (tried linking it to a PC and lost all the info!) and (obviously!) it quickly and easily installed and communicated...... THIS :O You can see my house from here!! You can also see that I forgot to turn it off before walking around the house for a bit !! That is a lot of detail. Needless to say, it's goodbye Nike watch, hello Garmin supercomputer :D

Well here we are in all our glory (and a lot of pain in the middle pic!) Thanks to my Garmin GPS watch (early Birthday present!) I was able to pace us to perfection.... we started out a little fast - had to pull in the reigns a little as all the newbs were a little over-zealous !!!! I noticed a few people pulling out before mile 3 with shocked looks on their faces :( ... by the halfway mark we'd managed a very respectable 3hr14m which gave us some breathing room for the 7hr cutoff time. 18 miles was our landmark - we'd not gone further than that in training... we had beaten our previous time by over an hour! I would say the last mile was probably the toughest, longest mile of our lives but the feeling at the finish line was more than overwhelming... yes, there may have been a tear or two! One of the things that motivated both of us was the crowd - hearing your name being called out by complete strangers is a little weird at first, but eventually you start to lean on the great s...

....my knees, my back, my shoulders, my head..... trouble is we haven't done it yet! I think the brain is trying to convince us to not turn up - nice try Mr. Cranium... we will be there bright and early... look for 15195 and 15196 (near the back ;) ) and wish us lots of luck.... off to bed now!!!!

This may well be my last entry before the big day (Jan 11th) ... we've done all we can now, so it's just little runs to keep the legs working. I'm nervous and excited about it - I do know that if we hadn't signed up for the full Marathon we would never have trained at all, so whether we make it or not in the alloted time (7 hours) we have both got a lot out of this (as has our sitter!!). I think the weirdest thing for me is the amount of weight I've put on!! I have been a consistent 165-170 lb. for most of my adult life... not a lot for 6'3" - I now weigh in at 195 lb. !!!! (of course it's all muscle ;) ). Hopefully that extra weight will help my endurance - at school I was the sprinter and complained about distances further than 200 Meters !!!! Anyway, wish us luck and if I get the chance I will post the results post race.... then it's off to VEGAS !!!!!!

...training when you have family visiting. It is easy eating cake though!! This week my Dad will be here with his Claire. Really looking forward to seeing them - they also like to exercise so we can get back into the swing of things. Not long to go now!! Happy Holidays :)

...as you can see under my 'little man' we've completed our goal for the month - next month's goal is 50 miles on the road (that doesn't include gym work - little man can't see me on the treadmill :( ). This Sunday we'll be trying for 18 miles which should burn off all the Turkey calories!! Happy Thanksgiving :)