Starting on November 1st, Oiselle issued the #chasethebird challenge. I started off the week with a bang! I ran 2 miles to the gym, did Oiselle’s Dirty Dozen core workout and ran 2 miles home. All of this after having had a few drinks on Halloween night. Ok, so it was more than a few drinks and I was a bit dehydrated and hung over! But I still got my ass out on a run and to the gym.

Monday and Tuesday I worked at job #2, so I did some body weight exercises and yoga in the store. Unfortunately, work is slow at this time of year as most major fall races are over and no one is quite thinking about holiday shopping yet.

Which brings me to Wednesday. I ordered a pair of long distance track spikes. Saucony Velocity to be exact. So I tried them out on Wednesday afternoon. I felt a little weird running by myself while the Valley XC team was finishing up their workout. My workout was Yasso 800s. I did 4 of em, trying to keep them at 4:30. Well, I was a bit too fast on 3 of them. I’m still not quite sure what to do during the 4:30 rest between each 800 either. Pretty sure that sitting on my ass is playing into the subsequent achy calves I’ve had for the past two days. Well, that and I probably should have only done a couple 800s in the spikes and the other couple in my regular shoes.

So when day 5 of #chasethebird rolled around, I hobbled around the grocery store and that’s pretty much all I could manage to do after standing on my feet all day at job #1. As for today, it’s been another day of 8 hrs on my feet at job #1, slow evening and still on my feet at job #2, but wearing compression sleeves on my sore calves. And the kicker! I’m running a 5k tomorrow. Well, I’m thinking it will likely be me hobbling a 5k tomorrow. I’ve realized that I might not have been as recovered from the marathon as I thought. I was getting a bit antsy at the end and definitely did push it when I did get out and run. And now I am paying for it.

But I got my custom poster from the IMT Des Moines Marathon in the mail today. I think it looks pretty fricking sweet.