New Year's Day 5k...that turned into a 4 miler

Happy new year!  We're starting the new year off in a typical way....SICK.  Ugggg!  For as long as I can remember, I'm sick over most of Christmas break & well into the new year.  Lucky for me, this respiratory virus I'm rocking at the moment didn't hit until AFTER our New Year's Day 5k.  [Phew]

Here's a summary of how our new training plan for the new year was kick started...

We start all of our runs from home with a quarter mile "warm up" walk up the big hill behind our house.  At this point, we were trying to convince ourselves it wasn't cold out....or slippery.

As soon as we entered the neighborhood by the WSU campus, I could see the snow capped mountain range!  

A closer look at the mountain range.

One of our favorite parts of running through campus is the view.  If you stand in the middle of the fountain area, you have a view of all the big mountains.  Here's Mt. Hood.

It's rare to see Hood this time of year!  We're usually socked in with clouds.  Lucky for us, it was abnormally sunny out.

And of course, St. Helens.

Here she is up close.  (The mountain...not the speed walker.)

We had a pretty light snowfall a few days prior to the new year, but the temps stayed cool & the snow stuck around.  

Well, it stuck around on the foliage.  Everywhere else had turned to crunchy, slippery ice.  

Too bad we ran across this sign at the end of our run.  It's a warning about the ice (hospital parking lot).   We could have used a warning like that the second we stepped out of the house. lol

See all of the shiny stuff???  That's black ice.  This picture pretty much sums up what we endured during our New Year's Day 5k.  Cold and slippery.  All of the ice made for one of our slowest 5ks to date. lol

And of course, as with most of our weekend runs, the finish line was the local coffee shop.  You can see in the background reflection that it was getting fairly dark by the time we left. Top that with a trip inside the grocery store next door AND a quick run through to see if Goodwill had anything I couldn't live without, and it ended up dark and cold. Miserably cold.  It must have dipped into the 20's by that point.  Being dressed for day time temps and lighting, we ran all the way home just to get it over with.  That made our 5k a solid 4 mile run.

As I said above, we were off to a good start until illness hit.  I ended up having to skip this weekend's 7 mile long run.  If you check your calendar, you'll see that that was the first official long run of our training season.  Not a great way to start off a training plan.  As of today, I will get back on schedule with my shorter mid week runs.  The coughing is under control as long as I stay medicated and have my asthma inhaler on hand.  I still have that feeling of chest pressure.  It feels like someone is sitting on my chest...making it difficult to take in a deep breath.  So the plan is to keep is short and simple until I'm 100% again.  

PS....I'll be sure to post our 2013 winter training plan soon!  We've kicked up the weight training and cross training even more than last year.  Here's hoping we see results of all our hard work come race day.