Winter Waddle (or more like Struggle...)

Ok so the holidays have been eating up a lot of our spare time the past few days so I'm a few days late in posting a few updates.

1) Mark and I went to the Tonic Sol Fa Chrismas concert last Monday.  Those guys are incredible and seriously funny!   Greg...you and the plastic snowman had me in tears I was laughing so hard!

2) We also went to see A Christmas Carol at the Guthrie Theatre on Wednesday.  That was by far the best production we've seen there so far in my opinion.  

3) Saturday we went out for a geocaching event in Waconia and also saw the Holidazzle parade in the evening (post-Winter Waddle).  You can catch the recap of those on our other blog

4) But the main reason for writing today is to recap on the Winter Waddle 5k.  Mark and I have been completely sloughing off on our workouts and enjoying a break from it all.  Although once we get past the holidays I need to get back into some sort of routine.  Feeling fat and lazy!!   And wow did that 5k kick my arse!  Granted these were very different conditions than I was expecting.  
Here's the starting line:

It was 20 something degrees I think and the race was at 4pm.   The run route was actually on a golf course AND I was not prepared to be running through spots of up to 6 inches of snow!   You can tell they went through and groomed the trail but the loose snow and breaking through the top layer as you were running made it pretty much impossible to get up any kind of speed.  

Mark managed to run backwards for a few seconds for me to get this picture.  I would have fallen flat had I tried that manuver

After about 1/2 mile, a lot of people had to stop and walk.   I managed to keep moving but only because I had Mark to pull me along and after about 1.5 miles we figured out (along with pretty much everyone else) that it was WAY better footing to run in a single file line and follow the tracks of the person in front of you.  

I wish my heart monitor battery wasn't dead.  I would have liked to know what my average was for that race.   At the end I estimated somewhere in the 180s.  Ugh....yeah that was tough!  Quite the experience, likely to not be repeated :)

Here is the sheet showing our final times.   WAY slower than what my "in shape" times but like I said, the super soft footing took a toll on everyone.  For reference, most of the 5ks I've been too, the winners come in around 15:30 - 17:00 total time.  At this race, the winner came in with a final time of 21:23.

The past two nights Mark and I have been gift wrapping for donations at the Barnes and Noble at the Galleria.  We donated the money to Home for Life.  I think our final total on the two nights was $193 so I was very happy about that.  Likely we will be volunteering with them again on Saturday this weekend at the Mall of America.

Next up.....the ALARC Ice Dive!  Yes I have committed to freezing my entire body in the name of fun and insanity on Jan 1st.   Mark and I will be jumping with my friend Jessica's husband Andy.  He is a newby diver too so it should be fun.   Jess gets out of it with the excuse that she's pregnant :-P

Hopefully I'll have a post-Christmas update this weekend and also start updating my race list on the right-hand side of my blog for the tentative 2010 races.

Merry Christmas!!