So...It's Been A While

I was originally going to post about Date Night (Part 2), but there's really very little to say about it.  It did NOT go well. No matter what we did, our pace didn't match our efforts (running a 10:20 mile while putting forth 9:30 effort), the whole thing was riddled with horrible GI discomfort, we cut our planned 10 miles down to 9, and eventually the I had something of a nervous breakdown.  I seriously wanted to cry from pain and frustration for the last 3-4 miles.  On a positive note, Coach Husband refused to leave my side - even when I begged him to so I could fall apart alone.

Last week was a damn disaster in the running department.  The weather sucked. It was hot. It poured down rain. Nothing went well.  We managed to sneak in one little run in between rainstorms last Tuesday night.  Since we knew we didn't have long between one storm ending and another beginning, we settled on a series of intervals (15x30 seconds w/ 1 minute rests).  It was a good workout, but it. was. brutal.  Starting out, it felt like 'Hey, this is easy. I could do this all night!'. By about the 6th interval, I was pouring sweat, gasping for air, and digging way down deep to make my legs keep going.  I resorted to repeating the mantra: It's only 30 lousy seconds' in my head over and over.  I'm pleased to say that all the interval paces looked good - between 5:56 and 7:19.

I had grand plans of running Friday night after work, but that got pushed aside for a much needed night out with The Husband. We realized we hadn't gone on a 'real' date in...too long and decided to rectify that situation. It was fun getting dressed up and going out downtown - as evidenced by my Twitter feed!

We started off at Balzac - a wine bar with some of the tastiest upscale bar food I've ever eaten.  We shared a 1/2 bottle of wine and two items from the Small Plates menu: crab cakes and duck nachos.  The crab cakes were good. The duck nachos were out of this world delicious! The nachos consisted of tortilla chips topped with roasted duck, bacon, gruyere cheese, scallion creme fraiche and pico de gallo.  I usually don't eat duck - or bacon - but once we saw them being delivered to another table, we had to try them, and I'm really happy that we did!

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After dinner, we moved on to Indulge for dessert. We'd never been there before, and were pleasantly surprised when we walked in.  It was gorgeous inside!

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We chose the  Made For Eachother Truffle/Wine flight. 5 truffles were paired with a 5 wine tasting - perfect for sharing.  My favorite pairing was a merlot/fleur de sel combo. The Husband's favorite was the blueberry truffle paired with a zinfandel.  We agreed that our least favorite truffle was the bananas foster.

The rest of the weekend was filled with yard work (there is now a granite rock border around one of the trees in the front yard and flowers in one of the flower beds) and other domestic chores.

This week...well...we'll see.  The Madison Half Marathon is this weekend and the temperatures are expected to top out near 90 degrees again.  If it gets that hot, I'm not even bothering to put a pace prediction out there, because at that point, it's all about finishing without passing out.  There's also a very real chance that the race will be stopped at some point due to heat - much like what happened at the Green Bay Marathon this past weekend. 

I squeezed in 5 miles yesterday and I'm hoping to cram in a 4 miler and a 3 miler before the weekend, but again...we'll see. Life always seems to happen when I'm busy making other plans!