Happy Fourth of July

Even though I had the day off of work I decided it was not a day to take off from my running schedule. As is usually the case on days off of work I slept in later than I probably should have. I didn't start my run until about 9:30 which turned out to be a big mistake. This Fourth of July was absolutely gorgeous and also terribly hot. Here is a picture of the sky from my porch, the temp according to my phone was around 85 degrees.

Goal: 4 miles

Actual: 4ish miles - somewhere in the 13min/mile range 

Right now I am working on just getting my miles in and not really worrying too much about a time goal. So I started my run in the bright hot sun. It definitely was not easy, about half of my path is shaded which was great. But there are also a couple of long stretches of complete head on sunshine. It made it super hot and caused me to stop a couple of times and even take an extra water break at a nearby park. All in all I'm happy that I got out there though. It's very rare (if ever) that I actually regret a run. 

One thing that does suck about running near my house is that the GPS on my phone just does not work properly. It only records about half of the distance that I have previously measured out. Honestly, I trust my instincts on it too, after you have run so many 5Ks you can sense how far three miles is. My GPS is just all over the place and really starting to frustrate me. Even when I finish and I'm able to edit the distance it still doesn't really update correctly. I have been using Nike+ for a while on my shoes/iPod but when I changed to my new shoes I no longer had a place to put the little chip for my shoe. So I switched to my phone which has been quite annoying :( I'm also just not used to it yet so when I got a phone call in the middle of my run I had to listen to it ring off of the hook before my music finally came back on. 

Since I've been bringing my phone anyways I've been running to Pandora Radio as well. I'm enjoying the mix in music from my usual iPod playlist but it's definitely not something I am going to expect on race day. I've stood at the ING Miami race with 35,000 people and seen my friend frantically try and get her Pandora to work. I figure it had to do with the sheer number of people trying to do the exact same thing that she was doing and the cell services just not able to handle it. So for my big race I'm going to have to figure out a hell of a playlist. My current one has about 3 hours worth of songs on it, and I'm going to need about double that for this marathon. Just something else to add to my to do list for this race. 

Here is a picture of me all sweaty after my run, I tried a fun angle because, you know, it's the Fourth of July! 

After my morning run I did manage to make it to the beach with some friend and had a glorious time. Here is some freedom sand that we claimed for America. 

As of right now it is only 106 Days: 7 Hours: 37 Minutes until the start of the marathon! 

Yay! - Emily