aaaaaaaand I'm back!

Annnnnnnd, I need a vacation from my vacation!  Thankfully that little foray into the woods happens but once a year and I now have an entire year to recover and prepare myself for our cottage 'vacation' again next year!

Some good definitely came from this trip away though.  The first is that I for the most part stayed on track and didn't eat like crap as I normally would.  I actually don't even think I had one delicious beverage the entire time we were there - maybe I should have!  There's also a pretty huge plus to having to literally walk up a hill to get to the bathroom - it means calories are burning on a regular basis!  It does however mean that my water intake was down over the week (for which I blame my minor weight gain today.)

Oh! speaking of which, I weighed in at 183.6 today which is up .2 from where I was last Monday!  Yup, that's right, there was a scale on premiss for our little trip to the woods thanks to the head Richard himself, my brother!  It actually helped to keep me on track which was good.  At one point after a run, I weighed myself at 181.6 which was why I was so disappointed this morning when that number showed up.  However, I can get back there an am aiming to be below 180 next Monday.

I ran outside a lot this past week and it was glorious!  I love running at the cottage.  The shade of the trees, the breeze off of the lake...it's amazing and really invigorating.  I wish I could do that every week!  Now that the cooler weather is here, I think I'm going to aim to hit the lakefront trail here once a week after dropping the boys off at school.  There's a great trail down there - not quite as pretty as the one at the cottage, but there's some pretty nice little spots and a couple of decent hills to keep me going strong!

I've got my big 15 k on Saturday.  I hope that this run is way better than my most horrible run, jog, exasperating walk that happened last weekend!  I tried to do 8.5 mi on a treadmill in the gym while at the cottage and it really wasn't a good idea.  I'm really not sure why, but every time I try to run on a treadmill other than my own, it really doesn't work out so well.  I can never get the pace right, I feel super hot because I don't have my tiny built in fan blowing cold air on my belly button (one of these days I'm seriously just going to tape that thing in place so it will actually blow on my face!)  Generally, it's a really sad display and this time was no different.
I assumed going into manual mode would  allow me to run as far/long as I wanted.  I really shouldn't ever ass-u-me.  After 30 minutes of already the worst run ever, it went into cool down mode.  When I tried to up the time, it just kept ramping down.  So then I got mad, stopped it and started all over again.  I hopped off for a minute to get a paper towel to wipe my sweat drenched face with and the thing shut off again.  By this time, I was furious and frustrated so I started walking more and more and feeling worse about the run.  I did however, get the distance in, but there wasn't a whole lotta running happening, that's for sure.  After that, I decided I wasn't running on that machine again and did the rest of my runs outside all week - even in the rain one day!

So, this week it's lots of little runs, lots of water and fingers crossed that we get down below the 180 that's been plaguing me for the last year!  I'M GONNA DO IT!