A Little Bit About My Week

I'm a little disappointed in myself for not writing more in the past week.  I meant to post about my latest training and time would just end up getting away from me.  I guess that's just how it goes.

My past week has been pretty busy, to say the least!  In terms of running, my training plan had me doing 4 miles during the week with a longer 6 mile run scheduled for the weekend.  Since my weekend was incredibly packed, I ended up running my long run on Thursday evening last week and I dropped one of the 4 mile training runs I was supposed to do.  I wasn't happy about it, but it happens.  I kept doing the 30s run/walk split last week during my runs and I ended up with an average pace of about 13:45 minutes per mile.  This week, so far, my run was slower, unfortunately.  I read in this Jeff Galloway training guide that if I stepped up to running a full minute and then walking a full minute, it would step my pace up from an estimated 14 minutes per mile (with the 30/30 split) to a 13 minute per mile pace.  This doesn't make any sense to me since the ratio of running to walking is the exact same and should, therefore, yield the same per mile pace.  I tried this minute on, minute off method and, sure enough, my per mile pacing was about the same (though, as I said before, a little slower than last week because it was pretty sunny with little breeze).  I think I'm going to try running 45 and walking 30 maybe to get my pacing up as well as running fartleks with Rob sometime soon.  While I'm not really concerned about my pace too terribly much for the half, I really would like to try and keep my time somewhere below 3 hours.

My run yesterday (where I tried the minute on/minute off pacing) was kind of funny, in terms of the scenery.  During the run, I saw a ton of butterflies, a big fire (complete with helicopters circling above it) and ended it with a double rainbow right in front of our house!  I wish I had pictures, but alas...by the time I got my phone, the rainbows had disappeared.

Here's the weekend rundown:

On Friday night, Rob and I were able to attend Halloween Horror Nights at Universal since he covered it that morning for the news station he works for, Local 6.  Unfortunately, for the third year in a row, it rained on Media Night for us.  However, the folks at Universal were pretty awesome, giving us all free ponchos and free beach towels (we scored Spongebob and Simpsons towels!).  Also making it a fantastic evening was the fact that the food was free (tasty items like sliders, coconut shrimp, jalapeno poppers, pasta and a HUGE dessert station that took up a good part of the Monster Makeup Show lobby area we were in), there was an open bar and we were escorted to the front of the line to all seven of the haunted houses (and Rob and I even got to go on the Rip Ride Rockit roller coaster and bypass the line!).  We also got to see Penn & Teller who came out to do a Q & A session with us (us being the media, that is).

Waiting to get into HHN 22 in our free ponchos

The haunted houses this year seemed a little lame, to be honest.  I had high hopes for the Penn & Teller 3D haunted house since last year's 3D house was so very awesome but it was definitely disappointing.  There weren't many of their 'scarachters' inside and the only time I was even slightly frightened was when an air jet blew on my feet to distract me from Elvis waiting to pop out and scare me.  My favorite haunted house was definitely the Gothic house.  It had some pretty awesome sets and effects.  I really liked this one part where we had to bend down to get underneath an obstacle and then got scared just on the other side of it by one of the characters in the house that jumped out at us.  Pretty tricksy, Universal! I just felt that they really did a great job with the house in making it unique and interesting...and the characters inside were well concealed so you couldn't really see them waiting to jump at you.  That always ruins it for me.

Creepy guy getting a little fresh with me

After we finished up the first few houses, we headed back to the 'refreshment area' to get more drinks and we ended up joining up with the Fox 35 group (Rob's old station) to avoid going to one of the lame shows the Local 6 group was going to see.  Boy were we glad we did!  We went straight to the Rip Ride Rockit, bypassed the ridiculously long line and go to ride it at night!  I love that ride so much because you get to pick the song you listen to while you ride it and it was even better at night because you couldn't see the track!  Seriously AWESOME!!!  Hopefully I'll remember to check my ticket when I get home so I can link to the picture of us on the coaster that night!  Another memorable moment was hanging out with one VERY drunk news anchor (who I will not name, but I will say that this person does not work for Channel 6).  It was totally hilarious, I couldn't tell whether he was hitting on me, just messing around for his friends or was just completely loaded and unaware of how he was acting.  He kept putting his arm around me and, for a while, we walked like that through Universal, with Rob right beside me.  Yeah, he was so drunk that he didn't even realize that I was there with Rob despite the fact that Rob was next to me the entire night.  This guy definitely felt it the next morning, there's no doubt about that!! If you want to check out some pictures from the event, one of the producers in our group was taking pictures and posted them on the Local 6 site here. (No pictures of us, unfortunately.)

Rob's HHN Collage

The very next morning, we got our butts up and out the door nice and early so we could go to the Gator game!!!  I got Rob tickets for our 10 year "date-iversary" present.  I had only been to one Gator game before and, that time, we ended up having to sit in the South Carolina fan section directly behind their band.  Not the most ideal seats (but they were good, just the same. I just felt guilty cheering for the Gators and sitting there).  Saturday, it was a completely beautiful day for a football game, with the exception of the heat!

The front of The Swamp

Rob had done a bunch of research and came up with a strategy for where we would park, where we would tailgate and what we would do after the game.  The man had a plan!  Everything was going really well, until we found the group we were going to tailgate with.  Okay, so I went to school at University of Maryland, not exactly a huge football school but I did some tailgating there during my 4 years.  I know what it can look like and, because of this (and the write up on the Gator fans' website), I had an idea of what to expect.  The site said 'you bring your own booze, but all the food is only $10.'  Rob and I thought that was a good deal and I didn't plan on drinking anyway, so that's where we went.  I had visions of brats or burgers swimming around in my head as we walked to where they said they'd be set up.  We eventually found their tents and saw a tiny little table with what looked like some pie plates on them, one of which was empty.  Rob and I kind of looked at each other like, 'Is this it?' and he talked to a couple of people about where the food was, if we had missed the grilling yet or not, etc.  We were pointed to the head dude who said, "Aw yeah, we're not grilling for today's game...but feel free to help yourself to anything on this table. (At which time he pointed to the tiny table of pie plates)  We've got some quiche over here, I think it's, uh, like sausage and bacon and, uh, like cheese.  That's all ya need for a delicious quiche, right?" to which I said, "Egg?"  Rob looked at me and said, "So what do you think?  Do you want to just eat here?" I looked over at the sad table with the half eaten quiche and the empty pie plate next to it and said, "Um, I don't want to pay $10 for a crappy slice of quiche.  That seems like a rip off!"  So, we walked our butts back up the hill to the student union and settled on some nice, game day Panda Express....in the air conditioning, no less!!  And, by the way, WHO tailgates with QUICHE?!?!?  Seriously!

Showin' some love

We finally got done and headed into the game just in time to catch the Gators charging onto the field!  Our seats were pretty freaking sweet!  We ended up sitting in the alumni section, which was nice because we were only in the sun for half of the game, because of the luxury boxes behind us that eventually blocked it.  I still ended up getting sunburned on my forehead and nose (and it's already mostly peeled off actually) but the game itself was super fun!!  I LOVE college football! It's definitely my favorite over the NFL, though I'm just a football girl and will take any kind of football I can get...well, except for high school probably.

View from our seats

After the game (Gators shut out Kentucky, by the way!), we went back to our car to freshen up a bit and then went to what used to be the Purple Porpoise (it's now called The Swamp) and had some dinner before heading back to O-town.

You can kind of see my sunburn there already!

Rob's Gator collage

And, there ya go!  A little glance inside my last week.  This weekend, I'm supposed to run a 5K but since I couldn't actually find any 5K races this weekend, I'm just going to run it on my own.  I'm thinking about signing up for some more races soon.  There's this UCF 5+2 miler that I might do since it corresponds pretty well to my training schedule.  I just need to check to make sure that we'll be in town that weekend and not at the beach one last time!

That about wraps it up!  Have a great weekend everyone!

As always, don't forget to please donate for our upcoming race!  

Team Steph B. and Steff S. Half Marathon Donation Page