20 miles, appartment hunting and getting snowed in at Stowe Mountain Resort :)

As Betsy commented under my last posting, it has been a full week since my last post and it is about time I gave an update.

This past weekend I ran my second 20-miler of my training from the Mount Auburn Club with Dana Farber. Aimee, Betsy and I stuck together for the entire, hard, hilly 20-miler, battling the winds on our way out and (interestingly enough) a little bit on the way back as well. We managed to also negative split (meaning run the first half faster than the second half) by a full 2 minutes! My legs were definitely not so happy about the fact I decided to push them with 2 back to back 20 milers in seven days. But having Aimee and Betsy to chat with and push me along helped me to keep going rather that turn around or stop early.

After the 20-miler I did a lot of stretching and then my mom picked me up to head up to Burlington, Vermont to do some condo-shopping in hopes of finding a place to live when I move up there this summer. It was COLD up there. And looking at apartments for two days straight can be a bit exhausting, to say the least.

On Monday, my mom and I were watching the weather channel all morning and afternoon, debating about how good or bad of an idea driving the three hours back to Boston would be. We decided we would start heading south (at least to Stowe, Vermont where a friend of ours lives) and make the decision about the weather over that hour of driving. Well, the snow started to fall more heavily and there were lots of signs along the highway warning of "severe winter weather advisories". So, we decided to play it safe and hunker down at the Stowe Mountain Lodge. We got there fairly early and it was snowing pretty hard, so my mom and I took advantage of the fitness room and she did the elliptical while I did 6 miles on the treadmill. I usually hate treadmills, but this wasn't so bad. I think I had a lot of pent up energy from apartment shopping all weekend.

When we woke up on Tuesday morning the sun was shining and the mountain looked extremely inviting! We decided to ski for a few hours before heading back south to Boston. The conditions were not amazing (though I thought they would be from the snow the night before), but it was not too terribly cold and my mom and I took advantage of the enclosed gondola for our three hours of skiing. We found a couple of runs that we really enjoyed and just kept going up and down.

We left Stowe around 3pm yesterday so that I made it back to Boston just in time for ... track! How lucky.... Last night's track workout was brutal. Very difficult and I think my skiing may have made it even that much more difficult on my legs. We did 3 x [4 x 800] with 200 recovery between 800's and 400 recovery between sets... It was a long workout and I definitely slept well last night.

This morning I did an easy swim with the BU Master's swim program and I am going to stretch out a bit tonight (no running) before I log my long run in for the week tomorrow. This week I am scaling back my long run to anywhere between 13-16 miles depending on how I feel. I head up to New Hampshire for a Winter Mountaineering course with my Dad this weekend, so I have to get my long run in before that.