Baby, it's cold outside!!!

Brrrr! It is cold! The high temp yesterday and today added together was still 10-15 degrees colder than Tuesday. I felt a little like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man with my 2 pairs of pants and 5 layers on top. At least it was sunny out! I only ran about 3 miles each day. Sometimes the gusts of wind just took my breath away.

One thing I learned today: when you leave your running clothes in a below-freezing car for 8 hours while you're working and then put them on, they are very very cold.

By The Shore Of Gitche Gumee...

On Saturday Nov. 25 (the day of Eddie's baptism and the day after Ellen's quarter-century birthday) I went on a run with Meg and Ellen. It's always more fun running with other people, especially my 2 sistas. However, it was not a great run for me. On a scale of 0 to 10 (zero being "I am Joan Benoit Samuelson" and 10 being "Someone grab the defibrillator!") I was a 6. Meg was a 7. Ellen was a 2. I suspect she was actually a zero but didn't want to rub it in.
This whole week I am at Abbott Northwestern Hospital for training in new computerized charting. I spent 8 hours sitting in a small room with 20 other nurses. I almost scratched my eyes out - not good, since they just recovered from whatever was wrong with them last week.
On the way home, I stopped at Lake Nokomis to run. I felt so good that I went around twice, for a total of 5.4 miles. I usually have songs running through my head - today's were "Out Tonight" from RENT and then Billy Joel's "The Longest Time". There was also a strange combo of smells - grapefruit and hamsters. The rain held off until I was well on my way home, and Prison Break is on tonight. Yessssss!!

Gobble! Gobble!

Happy Thanksgiving! There's nothing like a belly full of turkey, stuffing, yams, wine, and 8 home-made pies to make you feel like going for a run. Ok, I didn't actually eat any yams. Thanks to the Gronau family for hosting!
Ellen and I squeezed into our new black spandex get-ups (thank goodness it was dark out!) and ran for 45 minutes tonight. She is so dang fast. It felt so good to run, and there was very little wind, which helps a lot.
I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Let the excuses begin!

So yesterday, the nurse became the patient. At some point during the night as I was working, my right eye started bugging me. I thought maybe an eyelash got stuck way back there, and despite multiple efforts to flush it out, it still really hurt. So I trucked down to the ER to get it checked out. The doctor (looking less like John Stamos and more like John Goodman) looked deep into my eye and found.......nothing. He sent me home with some antibiotic drops. I was hoping for an eye patch, but it actually hurts more when my eye is closed.
He also told me not to wear my contacts for a few days, so today I will attempt to run with glasses. It's really sunny out and almost 50 degrees, and I'm looking forward to a good run.

Welcome to Jean's Blog

Welcome to Jean's blog. The purpose of this blog is to document Jean's training for the 2007 Twin Cities Marathon.

Today Jean and I went for a run (oh, this is Meg. Sorry. I'm just warming up the blog for Jean. She hates a cold blog). We ran around Lake Phalen. We think it was like 3 miles. We didn't actually time it. Did we? No. Oh wait, we left my house at like 11:15 and we drove there and when we got back in the car it was 12:07 which means we are running approximately 15-minute miles which means Jean will complete the marathon in a time of 2 weeks: 1 day: 6 hours: 40 minutes: 27 seconds. She has a long way to go.
Okay, we neglected to mention stretching and cool-down walking so they were closer to 10-minute miles. Oh! And Jean's clock is 7 minutes fast so maybe like 9 minute miles. WHATEVER. We felt great and sprinted the last bit.
Jean will be adding more later. We hope.