Race excitement!

ACK!
The Humdinger is coming up Saturday and the excitement is flowing!  7+ miles of running through crunchy, snowy fields, streams, hills, woods, pig barns, etc!  Oh and it's only Tuesday...

That's mainly what's in my head right now.

But here's the past weekend:
Kids/warm weather
It was like 45F both days.  And I had some easier runs scheduled.  Why not make them harder!?  (:

Saturday...  We bundled up Thing1 and Thing2, put them in the bike trailer/stroller with the front wheel attached and I headed out for 5 miles around the block...
Physical aspects:
Warm temperature was nice.
Wind was apparently in the 30-40mph range.  And that enclosed trailer...  Well, pushing it into the wind pretty much brought it to a dead stop even downhill when it really blew!  But I got some running in.  That stroller doesn't track straight either, but it's pretty easy to just tilt it so the front wheel isn't on the ground and then it goes pretty easy.  Legs were a bit more tired, but not horrible.

Mental aspects:
The toughest 5 miles ever.  Within the first 5-10 minutes my 2 year old decided she did NOT want to ride anymore so we had more than an hour of screaming.  SOOO tiring...


Sunday:
Again, another nice 45F.
Windy, but not as bad as Saturday.
8 miles listed...
Well, why not go crazy and try 2 year old on my back.
I didn't have a lot of hope for this, but from past experience, I had better hope that she'd be happier back there than in a stroller.

Physically?
WOW, I don't notice the 5 or so pounds of my Camelbak, but 25 or so pounds of kid?  That's a LOT more stress on the legs and joints.  We didn't really do any running, I did something more like power walking on the flats and downhills.  And thankfully Kenzie was happy to ride back there and semi-snooze.  It's hard to tell when she's on my back, but I think the 4-wheelers passing us kept her from fully sleeping for a while, and then she slept for about an hour.  I didn't go very fast, but I did go up and down the hills and over the snow all the way.
Then about 3 miles out she started waking up and making more noise.  I could barely tell she was awake at first.  Then she wanted more bouncing from me "running".  Then of course she started saying that she wanted to get out and walk herself and she couldn't seem to keep her bink in her mouth which was almost impossible for me to reach.
I managed to talk her into being a "good girl" and staying back there till we got to the last 3/4 mile around the lake without TOO much trouble.
I let her out once we were off the snow covered road and she was quite happy there, even though the first thing she did was fall over forwards.  But then she did a good job(though of course we went even slower yet) of walking along and did some bits of running as well.  As usual her biggest problem is keeping going down the road.  She wants to either veer off the side into the snow, or run across the other side of the road or something.

But in the end we made it without much of any screaming and we did all 8 miles so WOOHOO!  (:  Definitely harder on the knees though.  I should probably start incorporating more weight into my runs to get used to that(or more yet if I'm going to be hauling SIXTY pounds up ski slopes for Spartan...)  I think I have my half marathon training taking me up to 16 miles mid april and then some time before the marathon training starts, so maybe that would be a good time to start adding weight.

Oh, I did also as a "something is better than nothing" finally tie a rope to a beam in the garage.  It's about half as thick as a climbing rope and it's not in the greatest location, but it's some place I can at least grab a couple times a day as I come and go and at least start to get used to.  After a few days, I can pretty well at least do a pullup on it.  Only tried the feet a couple times, no luck so far, but I just looked again at what to do, so I'll have to see if I can improve my technique.  Just very difficult since right now my arms and hands aren't overly found of holding my weight much at all.

RACING THIS WEEKEND!