I know I haven’t really been around lately. I finally read The Hunger Games, which really explains only some of my absence. The other excuse that I can give is that I have been in such a crabby mood all week and I don’t want to talk to anyone and I’m sure no one wants to talk to me. But you know what? Everyone has crappy weeks so let’s commiserate, shall we? Just this once (ha!). Here’s a list of the gripes I have against life this week:

• The lack of planning on your part does not, and should never, become my emergency.
• Facebook
• Poor use of grammar and a general lack of writing and speaking skills. Either you slept through grade school or the education system sucks. It’s probably the latter, but I’ll still blame you. Read a book!
• How judgmental I sound in the previous point.
• Shin splints
• The lack of self-awareness in difficult people.
• The lock feature on spray bottles like Windex and other cleaners.
• Celiac disease and my digestive system.
• My fear of flying.
• Stinky bathrooms
• Internet Explorer
• People who talk to me while I’m reading.  If I could peel my eyes from the text, I’d probably beat you for interrupting me.

I may have listened to this song on repeat at work.

But now that I have vented it all, I will walk away from it all. Movin’ on.

What is making you ragey this week? Vent it here and then move on.

…And the Pittsburgh Penguins have lost their mojo, but I won’t bore you with that.

I will, however, bore your with details of some of the decisions I made tonight.

Rain showers, 40 degrees, feels like 32, wind @ 15 mph. Ashley and I decide to meet at the track for some 800s.

We may also have decided to cut the workout short since we were frozen and soaked to the bone. Also, a wind gust knocked me from the track onto the field. Wicked.

3.5 miles in that was more than enough. When I got in my car, I changed out of my soaked wind-breaker jacket (I was hoping it was waterproof, but apparently not), and into a black running pullover. When I pulled up to my house, the rain had mostly stopped and I may have made the decision to run another mile and a half… dressed entirely in black… at night…with no reflectors.

Like I’ve said, my decisions tonight reflect the fact that my mind is MIA.

I survived, no thanks to myself. And I managed 5 miles with an 8:34 pace. I had a couple miles in there under an 8 minute pace. Go me!

And speaking of running paces, have you ever used the McMillan Pace Calculator? It’s an online tool for you to plug in your race times and it calculates training paces for you.

Basically, you pick a distance and enter your most recent time and it tells you how fast you should be running different runs and workouts. I was shocked at how off my times are. I had read somewhere (I think it was in “Born to Run”) that most people run their slow runs too fast and their fast runs too slow. This calculator confirmed that. A long run between 10:05 and 11:05 min/mile?!

This is based on my 1:59 half marathon (from 9/10…a long time ago!)

The website also suggests inputing your goal time so that you can watch your training times get closer to those results as your get further into your training.

And there you have it. I may have made some idiot decisions tonight, but it was a good one to play around on that website.

Now if only the Pens would decide to start playing again, that’d be great.

Have you used a pace calculator before? What’s the worst weather you’ve run in?

As gross as tonight was, I’ve run in much worse weather…long runs negative degrees with bitter wind chills. Running makes you crazy, I guess.

Have you head of Garmin connect? Yes? No? I got my Garmin Forerunner 2 years ago and I just learned about it yesterday when Dave set up his new Garmin Edge 500 (for cycling).

It does a lot, but I don’t know all of it and I’m too lazy to go look it up, but here’s what I will tell you:

It just made training and mileage tracking super easy. Below is a screen shot of the January’s training schedule. The gray bubbles are my planned runs (starting 1/8) and the blue bubbles are the runs that have been uploaded from my Garmin.

Dave set my half-marathon training up for me! You’ll see that each week has a goal in a gray bubble on Saturday and it shows how much of that goal I have reached. You’ll see the “Weekly Totals” for this past week says that I ran 25.40 miles, but the MH Week 1 has my goal at 26 miles. Which is why “98%” is in parentheses next to the goal. I reached 98% of my goal. Not bad.

If you have a Garmin, you can go to http://connect.garmin.com and set up an account for your training.

You can create your courses and workouts online before you head out to run (or ride your bike). The information is downloaded to your device so you have it with you. And you can search other people’s courses and workouts if they have chosen to make them public.

The “Goals” tab is really cool because you can create a plethora of goals (mileage, time, speed, calories, frequency) and check your progress.

And obviously you can view each workout in depth. Here’s a screenshot of my run this afternoon:

Dave and I are enamored with this program.

Seriously.

Are you familiar with Garmin Connect? Are there other programs that you use to track your runs and training?

It was twenty-eight degrees when I met Ashley for our run tonight. We wanted to do speed work, but the track had about an inch of snow on it, so laps around the high school it had to be. We chatted as normal, but our conversation quickly turned to the cold weather and vitamin C.

And then I remembered this fall I read an article about the importance of Vitamin C for cold-weather runners. A little Google-action led me to the article at Naturally Engineered. (Great blog. If you don’t read it, you should.) There are a number of other results relating to the cold weather/running/vitamin C connection, but this is the original article that I read a few months ago.

Basically, runners who spend a lot of time in the cold need extra vitamin C for two reasons:

1. The obvious boost in immunity. Cold weather lowers the body’s defense to germs which increases the chance of infection. Vitamin C supports the immune system.
2. Vitamin C is critical in the anti-inflammatory response the body performs after intense exercise to heal the muscles.

So it’s one thing to take vitamin C because it’s cold outside, but our vitamin C intake needs to increase dramatically because, as runners, we need twice as much! And the good news is that vitamin C is a water-soluble vitamin, so you can essentially take enough to make your pee turn orange. You obviously don’t NEED that much if you’re peeing it out, but the point is that and excess of vitamin C won’t harm you.

So whenever I came home, i added a packet of raspberry Emergen-C to a cup of green tea. Deeeelicious! And good for my cold, sore legs.

Drink up!

What are some ways you get vitamin C in your diet?

It’s January 1st and time to write that obligatory “new year’s resolution post.” But I don’t really want to.

I’m not exactly big on the new year’s resolution fad and I also know and accept that I never finish anything I start, so even if I made it my 2012 resolution to finish what I start, I know I’m just setting myself up for failure and who wants to start a new year off like that?

Exactly.

But in 2011 I had an unspoken resolution to not step foot on a treadmill, which I’m happy to report I was successful at completing. AND I trained for a marathon during the harsh winter months in Pittsburgh. Spring marathons rock. So does running in the snow. I suggest you try it this year.

I feel like I write the same thing every new year. So this time, I think I’ll just write down some things that I’m looking forward to in 2012 and maybe some things that can help me as I work towards them.

1) Run the DC Rock ‘n’ Roll Half marathon with my college roommates Amanda and Amanda on March 17th. Since my “Back on {the} track” challenge I have worked my weekly mileage up to about 20 miles, which is still really low for me AND for training. I want to run this race as fast as my little legs can carry me (I don’t have a specific time goal right now), but I do know that to optimize my speed, I need to do two things:

1. Run A LOT. The more familiar my body is running, the easier it gets and the faster it goes. I want to build my weekly mileage while training to about 40ish miles. I will be writing a specific training plan this week so I’ll let you know as I know more.
2. Hit the track. Speed work sucks, but I have found that it is both effective AND entertaining. I’ve never had a 9 mile run fly so quickly as when I’m running intervals around the track. It doesn’t make sense, but trust me. It works.

2) Go the Rome! The trip is booked (just a few days after the half mary!). Not much to do except justify all clothing purchases with the phrase, “It’s for my trip!” It’s amazing how those four little words can so easily soothe my conscience. They have yet to prove effective on my husband.

Those are my only two big plans for 2012 at this point. I may run some other races around the half marathon distance and I at this point I have not committed to the Pittsburgh marathon, but I haven’t ruled it out completely either. I know I have a sub 4 hour marathon in me, I just am looking for the impetus at this point.

Or just a really flat course.

My other plans are to focus much more on the eternal. Reading my Bible more, praying more, serving more, and reading more books that will help me to better understand God and His word. These things aren’t and never have been the focus of this blog so I don’t know how much of that adventure will end up here. Mainly because I think a lot of that is personal and I don’t want it on the inter webs. But I want you all to know the REAL Abby. I hope that if you ever met me in real life, you would say, “she’s just like how she is on her blog.”

Which brings to another thing:

This blog.

I don’t know where it will go in 2012. I don’t know what I want Abby Normally to be. I love to write and I love all of you, but I’m in awkward growing stage and don’t know where I want to go. I don’t want to write just to write, but at the same time, I love to write just to write. But above all, I want to be genuine. So I’ll be working on that this year too.

And now I’m blabbing. Maybe I’ll try to quit rambling in 2012. But like the resolution to finish what I start, I’m just setting myself up for failure.

Did you see that? I brought this blog post full circle. It’s like I actually finished it as one complete and coherent (no comment please) writing. Who am I?

The 2012 Abby. That’s who.

Look at me. Finishing things.

What are your 2012 plans?