Fancy Black Dresses and The Mile x2!

I had the most awesome dream the other night. David and I were in England in front of this really beautiful fountain at night, and I had on a fancy black dress and was SO THIN! And then I woke up. C’ est la vie. But really, you should have been there. It was great. But it may have been weird to have you all there in my dream. No offense, but you may have spoiled it. After all, it was a romantic getaway for me and David. But you may have commented that I looked great in my dress, and I would have loved that (and then told you to get lost, with love of course).

Anyway, enough talk of dreams; let’s talk reality. And the reality is, I have some really crazy news to share. Most of you reading this already know it, but I still can’t get over it. So here it is: Saturday, I ran two miles. Not terribly exciting, right? But you don’t understand! I RAN TWO MILES! And you know what? I didn’t have to stop (except that I stopped in between miles because at the time, I didn’t know I was going to run two). I wasn’t winded while I was running. I just kept going. Wanna know what was going on in my head? Maybe not; it’s probably scary. 🙂 But I was just thinking, “This is weird. I’m running The Mile and I’m okay with it.” Before I began running though I started feeling nervous, kind of like I used to feel before I ran The Mile in grade school, except not quite as frantically nervous and panicked. But I reminded myself that I didn’t have my PE teacher’s approval to gain, no grade to think about; I was just running because I wanted to (which is pretty crazy in and of itself by the way). So, yeah, I like, ran and junk!

Now here’s the frustrating part. I had these visions of an 8 or 9-minute mile floating around in my head, thinking that I had been working out for awhile and surely my time would be around that. Well, I was sorely disappointed. The time for my first mile was 11 minutes, 29 seconds. The time for my second mile was 11 minutes, 10 seconds. I did better in grade school! But I’ve been thinking of a few things that may help me out. The first one is that I need to figure out something different with my breathing. What I had been doing was inhaling every time I stepped on my right foot, exhaling on the left. When I picked up my pace, though, I thought I was going to hyperventilate so tried to slow it down and breathe deeper but was having a hard time concentrating on that and running, so I think I need to practice it. The second thing I think will help is to run faster. That sounds like a no brainer, eh? I don’t think I was pushing myself enough during my training days so on Saturday when I picked up the pace a bit, I could definitely tell I needed to push a bit harder. The third thing I think will help is to shed a few pounds. The lighter I am, the faster I’ll move, right? And then I may be able to wear that fancy black dress and be thin! Maybe shedding some poundage won’t land me in England though, but we can just pretend. There’s gotta be a slim Lisa in there somewhere! (I think I ate her!) So my friends, that is what is going on in my world of running. This week may be a bit harder to get my actual running in because we had lots of snow this past weekend. But, I found some helpful information on running on snow and ice, so I might just give it a try (or not).