Happy 2009!

I am in quite a bit of pain at the moment due to the ridiculous amounts of Smithwick's, champagne, and an irish car bomb consumed last night. It was a fantastic new year's, I'd say one of the better ones I've had, and staying in Milwaukee turned out to be a great idea. The drive back to Madison today was horrendous, and I am still hungover. Hooray, national hangover day!

So obviously I haven't run quite as much as I should have in the past week or so, but I'll be stepping it up now that I'm back in Madison. However, the runs I have done have been pretty awesome - all at pretty fast paces. I also busted out the new XC skis when I was in Elkhart Lake with the BF and that was pretty ridiculous/fantastic. We skiied 6.5 miles on this huge loop so when we got tired at 3 miles we couldn't stop. I fall a lot, and we go pretty slow, but its a lot of fun! And after 3 hours of skiing, I definitely did not feel like I needed to go running! I was sorrre.

I also did a road race on New Year's Eve, the RACC Run Into The New Year. It was pretty last minute, and I mainly signed up because you got a long sleeved t-shirt and a bottle of champagne (Andre...keeping it classy). It actually turned out to be an OK run though...I went out in 6:30 because apparently I enjoy being ridiculous. Obviously I wasn't going to maintain that pace...I'm not really in racing shape at all right now so that was just absurd. I ended up finishing in 21:58 which actually was quite a bit better than I was expecting! However a couple of things were just ridiculous: first of all, I got beat by a 10 year old girl who ran like a 21:30...she was a little powerhouse! And second of all, its pretty much my goal in life to win my age group in a road race - I realized that I've literally gotten 2nd or 3rd in virtually every race I've ever done, but the only road race where I've won my AG was the first 5K I ever did, which I ran in like 29 minutes or something ridiculous like that. They gave out medals for the top 10 in each AG at this race, and it was 4 year intervals, so I was basically guaranteed a medal, and I ended up getting second so my name was announced at the awards ceremony and that was kind of cool. BUT...the girl who got first beat me BY LESS THAN A SECOND! Yeah. 21:57.xx. Absolutely ridiculous. All I had to do was kick 2 seconds earlier...but what are you going to do. Anyway, it was fun and I got to try out all my fancy new cold weather running gear I got for Christmas since it was like 4 degrees out.

Well, happy 2009! I don't really do new year's resolutions but I hope this year will be happy, healthy, and full of PRs! =)