ESJ

Oh, where do I begin?  My day yesterday was just.....interesting.  I had the best of intentions.  Get my workouts done in the morning so that me and the girls could meet PIC and Annie for lunch and pick up a bit of LOVE (more on that in a moment).  But what happened to that plan?

Isabelle woke up complaining of a tooth ache and had been complaining for a couple of days.  So, being the great mom that I am, I usually wait a couple of days before calling the dentist and/or doctor.  Like last week when Charlotte was complaining of stomach pain and always in the same area.  No fever and it sure didn't stop her from playing all day long.  So I waited a few days just to make sure it wasn't an attention getting behavior or some weird attempt to get in to see the doctor and just say hi (who would want to do that??? but with kids, you never know).  If the bitching complaining persists, we make the call.  What was wrong with Charlotte?  Nothing a good stool softener wouldn't take care of!!!  The girl was not pooping enough!  Knowing that a tooth ache was probably not the result of constipation we canceled the morning workouts and went to the dentist.  It's kind of weird that she is now old enough that she doesn't want me to come back with her.....but I digress.  She goes back, they take an xray. The dentist calls me back.....what could this be???  Something completely normal he assures me and then says that EVERY kid goes through this.  That's right.  She's got a tooth coming in that is pushing the baby tooth out, it's just that this tooth "normally" comes out at age 12, not 8.  Oy vey.  The dentist kindly offered to take it out for her but she smartly said she'd try to get it loose on her own.  There went my morning.  A loose tooth.

No worries but it did mean we had to miss lunch and miss picking up some awesome LOVE Grown Foods granola!!  See, PIC and I met Maddy - the cmo/founder/chief love officer - at the Jingle Bell Run in December and sampled her granola.  It was the best stuff I've tasted and I feel like I'm a good judge on granola since I eat it all the time.  I'm always looking for the goods that aren't too sweet, all natural, not too much of the "bad" stuff, and all of the good things.  Love Grown Foods offers exactly that, all of the good and none of the bad - like no refined sugar, no HFCS, no hydrogenated oils, no preservatives, no artificial flavors and no gluten!  Yeah for Sonja and I, Love Grown Foods wanted to try a partnership with us, we get the word out about their total yummy granola and they give us some yummy granola to munch on to support our training!  They are about to start distributing nationally so keep your eye out for them at your grocery store.  If you see it, buy it.  You won't regret it!!  It is yummy:)  And, keep your eye out for some LOVE contests on this blog in the future.

My favorite so far?  Cranberry Pecan - but I haven't tried Cocoa Goodness yet!

Back to my workout day, I did finally manage to make it to the gym for a super secret workout (if I told you, I'd have to kill you, Chuckie would kill me, it would just be bad) and a jog. But not any jog peeps.  I am still laughing at this description:  easy jog - embarrassingly slow and easy.  Hmmmm.  Embarrassingly slow? So, I "hid" on a treadmill in the gym - you know, the one that's out of all the action, in the corner and in low light.  I thought about wearing a disguise but just put the towel over the metrics and went about trying to figure my ESJ (embarrassingly slow jog) pace.  It turns out it earned me 2.41 miles in 30 minutes!  How'd I do Coach?

But I still wasn't done with my workouts.  I needed to make a masters swim.  All this training this week has made me extra tired so I chose to sleep in rather than go for the 4:30am wake up call for morning masters.  The only one left for me to do was tri-masters at 7:00pm.  I can't even remember the last time I swam that late.  I fretted over when/what to eat before, fed my family, and then I headed out.  Now, here's the "funny" part.  I figured that since it was tri-masters and not regular masters that it would be an "easy" swim for me.  You know, I might have a couple of small challenges but it was only an hour, how bad could it be? Right?  Wrong.

Paul was coaching and he put me in a lane with a girl that had clearly swam in college.  She was underwater gliding after each turn to about the halfway point in the pool.  I still wasn't too worried.  Until I was in the middle of the rev-up/drill set and my heart rate was well over what I had intended.  I needed to catch my breath after 75s!  And then Paul put the first set up.  9x100, with the middle three on 1:20.  WTF?  There is no way I can make that, I mean I really haven't been swimming for awhile, didn't he know that?  Why wasn't he being kinder to me?  So fast girl leads and I do my darndest to keep her in the same zip code.  Then the 1:20s hit.  Relax Michelle, there's only 3, HTFU.  I made them and felt pretty good about it.  Then the next set....2x800s broken at 400 with some easy swimming and pulling and ending with a fast 200 on the last one.  Coolio.  Pulling. I got this.  But fast girl kept me on my toes and pushed me to attempt to keep up with her (OK, she didn't push me I just didn't want to get lapped).  Oh, the last 400 swim I didn't think my arms were attached to my body and when I tried to pick it up for the last 200?  Yeah.  No.  Not gonna happen.  I almost regretted my time out of the pool!!  I haven't felt like this in years!

I managed to wash my hair (arms still didn't feel attached), go home, put the girls to bed, get a snack, and fall exhausted into bed.  I wonder what tomorrow has in store for me??!!