The real workout of the day - cleaning!

Whew! I just cleaned my whole apartment - a nice deep clean. It took about 3 hours total. I clean weekly and daily but not as intense every time as I just did. It didn't help that I had laundry to do while cleaning, and to put away along with a full clean dishwasher to empty that I had been putting off. But I'm done! Now I can relax and enjoy the weekend. My aunt and cousins, plus another cousin are all coming into town this weekend and the two cousins my age are staying with me! Should be a fun but sad weekend. Sad because my brother has been home on leave for most of the month but he has to go back to his base in Japan on Monday :(. It'll be good to spend time with everyone though, I'm excited!

My other workout today was an easy 3 mile run:
Mile 1: 9:25
Mile 2: 9:39
Mile 3: 8:28

I had planned on more but I ate some chips that has wheat and dairy in them beforehand (stupid impulse) and my stomach wasn't feeling it. I hadn't run since Saturday as my ankle had been tweaky. No pain today though! I'm going to try and get out early tomorrow and do a 6-8 mile progression run. Then I'll try for a recovery 5-7 on Saturday and a 9 mile progression run Sunday. I'll need to get up early to get those in so that they don't cut into family time but I think I'll manage.

23 miles for the week at the least I'm hoping ... need to get back into the 30+ miles/week next week. Must start going to bed earlier and consistently doing my early morning runs. I need to figure out some tricks to make this happen ....

Hills

The boyfriend and I headed to a nearby state park this morning because he wanted to ride his bike not run and I wanted to get in some hill work, and there are some good hills there. We headed out and I did a little over one mile of warmup with him, some of it on trails which I really enjoyed. Usually, the boyfriend rides his road bike but today he wanted to do some trail riding so he rode the mountain bike. After our warmup, I went back out on to the main road to run this hill:

 I think this may actually be the downhill view of it. Here's the uphill, I think:

Anyway, it was a nice size hill even if the pictures don't necessarily show it. I did about 6 hill repeats.

After I was done with hill repeats, I met back up with the boyfriend and we did a cool down, which actually involved more hills. Fun! Did 4.75 miles total which is less than I originally planned but when I looked back at my schedule for the week, I had planned on 2 miles yesterday not 3.1 and 5 today so I ended up with more miles than planned anyway, so I'm all set. My garmin and training log are downstairs right now so I don't have all my stats and will have to edit later to add them. I'm having a little bit of arch pain, so I'm babying that right now, hopefully it will be better in time to run Monday but if not the day off won't hurt me.

I spent the rest of my day helping my mom clean (I'm living at home until January) and boy did we get a lot done. We completely reorganized both bathrooms, the kitchen cabinets and the fridge. I also did another little project, my dad is a magazine hoarder and has about a million golf magazines. Well about 100 of them resided in a wicked basket in our living room and it looked really messy, which drives me crazy so I went through them all and arranged them by year (some dated back to 1996!) and then by month and boxed them up for him. So now they're in a box in the basement and when he needs an article, he'll know where to find it and I'm happy because they're out of sight. I'm an organizational neat freak which is completely opposite of my parents so it felt really good to get some things organized today.

I also helped the boyfriend go through all of his clothes and clean his room since his family is selling their house soon and it needs to be clean for viewings.  

We did not get to go apple picking as planned :( but we will soon. Just too much going on today. I did however get my apple pie. I met up with one of my best friends from high school for dinner tonight and had apple pie for dessert after my clam chowder bread bowl, yummmm. It was so good to catch up with my friend too since we hadn't seen each other in a while and she just moved back to the area.

A busy but good day. Tomorrow will be a homework day so that I don't have to do my homework on lunch breaks like I did last week.

- Ashley