I came home to these flowers a couple days before my birthday. Brett said this was my gift.  They were beautiful, I was excited, but I didn’t believe that this was all he got me.

Finally, he told me that in fact the flowers were the “wrapping paper”. Hmmm…

You can see in the picture above there is one fake flower, with a little iPod shuffle in there! Yippee! I don’t have to be the geeky girl with the HUGE iPod tucked in my pants anymore.  He’s so clever.

My work friends took me out for drinks too!  The introduced me to fried pickles too.  What a birthday! It was a good thing the bar closed at 9…I should always celebrate birthdays on Sundays.  It will keep me out of trouble.

I was doing laundry and the washing machine just stopped!  Full of water and everything! ugh.  What do you do?!?  Well, I’ll tell you what Brett does:

He takes it apart.

I was really excited when I heard Brett say he’d figured it out.  I yelled, ” is it the cupplers!?!”.  I had googled, “washing machine won’t drain”…..and that was google’s best guess.  Sadly it wasn’t the cupplers (I only say sadly, because I love shouting out random things and being right and sounding smart).  Brett just continued to tease me and said, “you’ll like this”.  This isn’t a great picture, but it was easily identifiable to us as my missing sock.

My missing sock in some tube thingy that goes in the washing machine.

I was wondering where that thing went!  I think I drove Brett crazy during this process.  He’s definitely more of a jump in the tear it apart kind of guy, where as I’m the let’s-do-it-carefully and look up each step online kind of girl.  At one point Brett wanted to check to see if the motor worked (before we found the sock).  

So he took the motor out…..and was just going to plug it in to see if it ran! WHAT?!? you are standing in puddles of water, with tons of open electrical thingys!!  I couldn’t watch, I had to leave the room.  Long story short, the motor ran, then he found the sock and the mystery was solved.  We even put the washer back together almost perfectly  ;)

I made it.  I made it to the NIKE women’s marathon and I made it THROUGH the NIKE women’s marathon, well half-marathon.  This race is very near and dear to my heart because it was my first FULL MARATHON way back in 2005, wahoo!  I loved ALL of it,  I always wanted to come back to race it again!!! Many of my BIG dreams started there!  Maybe I COULD qualify for Boston? Maybe I COULD race and Ironman?!

This year’s race was supposed to be very exciting and fun.  I was planning to race at NWM (that’s what I’m calling it because I’m tired of writing it ok?)….back to the story….I was planning to race the full marathon this year.  I got really excited because…

1. I was going to get to race this race again, plain and simple.

2. This was going to be my first SOLO-marathon (marathon without an IM attached) since 2006!

3. Including my two IM races this would be a marathon distance run every year for the past 5 years!

Now, don’t those three things sounds exciting?!?!?!?  I was JAZZED! Then I found out I had a racing buddy doing it too.  Life couldn’t get better.  Well, a couple hundred-ish miles of running later, we all know the story of my stinkin’ plantar fascia and it’s plans to ruin my life.

After battling with The Fascia (I’m calling it that), I almost immediately wrote the full marathon off, but for a LONG time still planned to race the 1/2.  I mean, c’mon when “The Fascia” started acting up, I was already running 13 mile long-runs. Piece of cake right?  Well…Lefty over there (I’m talking about my left foot) didn’t agree.  Race day was fast approaching and I wasn’t running AT ALL.  Like ZERO miles for the past month and a half. gasp!  I was, however, water running, elipticaling, and cycling up a storm (more stories on those things to come), oh and not P90Xing (more on that too….I know I know…where are the HOT-Katy pictures? I don’t want to talk about it).

Suddenly it was race week, and I started panicking.  I REALLY wanted my TIFFANY’s necklace….and they always have great race shirts….but could I trust myself to NOT RUN…to save my foot?  Could  I walk a half-marathon…..how long does that take anyways?  It sounded REALLY boring. Almost torturous….to go to a RUNNING race and WALK and watch everyone else LOVING being able to RUN. UGH!   What had I done to deserve this!?

I went over every possible plan with Brett, about how I would/could walk this race.  Really, I didn’t think I’d be able to run the whole thing AND I thought it would be better for my foot to walk it.   So I talked about alternating running and walking  a mile at a time, then running three, walking one, etc, etc.   Literally, I think my wonderful Brett sat through me saying each and every possible scenario of how to run walk 13 miles (thank you!).

Race morning, my plan was to run three miles then see how I felt and then jog/walk the rest of the way.  Well,  I LOVE RUNNING!!!!!  So…when I got to mile three, I kinda decided that I should probably run to mile 6 since that was where the hills were.  Then at mile six, I decided to just run THAT hill….then the next one was so small that…..then I before I knew it I was at mile TEN….so I just kinda finished the race without walking.  I did stop and take LOTs o’ Pictures.  My foot feels the same (if not better) which is weird, but I’m totally ok with it.

My pictures from the weekend don’t really “go with” the actual blog so I’m just posting them here at the bottom.

Just Us Girls La Femme Sportive

Sporting our new gear!

Beautiful views looking back at the Embarcadero from the top of mile 6ish.

These signs were so fun to read on the hills!

Looking down on the finish line from mile 9.

Celebrating with Kristen and Cheree

Kristen ran the full marathon and Cheree ran the 1/2

(but only because she ran a full last weekend!)

after P90X

i became obsessed.   i was on P90X’s website almost everyday!  i was reading reviews and getting pumped. i had to have this program. i was reading about all these people and their 6-pack abs, and all they had to do to get them was a little P90X!?  i’m looking at these people and thinking….”i could actually LOOK like an Ironman triathlete!”.  their 6-pack abs were haunting me, they were everywhere i looked.  i wanted them, so i bought it. thank you amazon.com.

i don't look half bad in the dark.

i spent about a week and a half reading, studying, and planning the best approach to make my P90X experience the BEST it could be.  i WOULD have 6-pack abs. i wanted to start on the perfect day.  so, Monday August 24th, brett and i donned our P90X gear, printed our workout sheets, watched the first video labeled “HOW TO BRING IT” (talk about pumped up! not really), took our before pictures, and started.

the first video was chest and back which actually means, an hour of  pull-ups and push-ups….then after that you do “AB RIPPER X”…which is 16 minutes of abdominal exercise-hell.  like you might have to do this in hell…i’m not kidding. i think the devil co-wrote this workout.

it was sad when my camera started working.

after the first 10 push-ups (which is all i can do), and my first 5 pull-ups (using a chair to stand on. yes, i’ve completed two ironman distances races, jerks) i’m pretty sure brett and i spent more time laying on the floor laughing at ourselves than actually exercising…..but i clearly got a good workout, as i still couldn’t get off the floor when we were done.  apparently it takes arms and abs to get one’s body off the floor. ouch.

day two of P90X was plyometrics. which was basically high school volleyball practice without any equipment, and probably wasn’t very good for my plantar fasciitis.  it did hurt so good, so maybe i can do a  low impact version next time, and maybe i’ll even bring out my volleyball, just to make it more fun.

yep, i'm really flexing and that's all there is.

day 3 of P90X was arms, back, and AB RIPPER X! they want me to use my arms and abs again?! i was just getting REALLY REALLY sore from Monday’s workout.  so because i’m tough, i did pull-ups, i did bicep curls (more than i’ve ever done before in my life), i  layed on the floor laughing at brett, and i got attacked by my puppy. you see,  she thinks we are playing without her when we do P90X, it’s pretty hilarious.  especially during AB DEVIL RIPPER X when we are laying on the floor (working really hard)  and she’s barking and jumping on, over, and around us! hilarious.

let's play!!

imagine laying there on the floor abs-a-burnin’, zona attackin’, brett-a-laughin’, tony horton a-yellin’.  it makes for an interesting and fun workout.

i may not have 6-pack abs at the end of all of this afterall.

last thursday i was helping brett look for stuff in his storage unit, and noticed i could help him out a bit by pulling a desk out to give him some space.  not noticing that this very heavy desk i was pulling straight back towards my body with all my body weight pulling on it, was in fact about an inch higher than my foot (that it was headed towards) was .  well maybe not an inch, about big toe nail height to be exact. (can you see where this is going?)

just as i’m getting some momentum on this heavy desk, thunk!  it drops with all it’s might with backward momentum (cuz’ i’m pulling on it!) and rips my big left toe nail back (about half way i’m guessing by the partial crack half way down my nail).

now, having experienced a sudden big toe nail removal in the past, i knew that the first thing i needed to do was prevent my Birkenstock from filling up with blood from the gushing mess (i’ve had a blood filled TEVA in the past, hmph!) i instantly smash my toe nail back down on my toe and yell at brett not to look (he gets queasy), but my toe nail is off and bleeding everywhere and i need help with my shoe.

brett then begins the exciting journey of climbing out of the storage unit, i think he was kinda under and behind EVERYTHING. by the time he gets there the birkenstock is safely off (NO BLOOD AT ALL! wa hoo!) but there is a trail of blood already to the car, where brett nicely hands me a sock to absorb the blood from my dripping mess of a toe.

when i got home and inspected it, the toe nail was actually attached in a few places still so i could keep it on while it healed underneath. phew! last time the toe nail came off instantly (it actually was hanging by a thread, blah!).  i trimmed it back ever so slightly, took ibuprofen, cried, and laid in the floor with my foot up all day!  still unable to walk at 9pm i called in sick to work the next day. boo.  things were going pretty well, but after a long weekend of walking and swimming in a lake with friends over memorial day weekend……it was looking pretty gnarly (even though i was cleaning it all the time!!).

i decided to trim the nail back as far as i could to clean it really well and get a good look at the damage. basically, it ripped my toe nail off about half way back and it was REALLY attached because it pulled off a lot of toe meat in the process.  i have some deep gashes under there! YUCK. and suck. because this is going to take a while to heal. i’m already 1 week out and NO WAY i can run. cycling hurts….and i’m going to stay away from swimming especially in the lake since it’s still a huge open wound under my toe. so sad. this means no splash n dash this weekend. i’m bummed out.