Juiced

A pint of green goodness

This is my new post-run pick me up - a yummy fruit smoothie. I got the idea and recipe from the No Meat Athlete website, which is a veritable treasure trove of interesting articles and recipes.

I used spinach and spirulina instead of greens superfood and made up a batch of super cubes on Friday. It was delicious, thick and filling, and it certainly hit the spot after yesterday's 18 miler.

And speaking of said 18 miler, I met Clea at 5am and we ran South to UT and cut across 15th and down to the rock where we picked up Steve. We then did a Scenic loop and parted ways with Steve at Duval and 38th to continue back up North and finish the run on the Eastside. We finished off strongly with 8:20s for the last few miles and we clicked over to 18 miles just as I tagged my car.

It was a nice run, we held it steady and chatted our way through the miles. Breaking it up into the three parts - dubbed pre-Steve, Steve and post-Steve - seemed to make the miles go by much faster, and a very good sign was that we increased our pace in the last few miles, even though they trended uphill. Generally you run a faster pace in a race than you do during training runs (for me it's about 30 seconds a mile), so I think we're right on track to hit our goal at Frankenthon.

Next week we're up to 20 miles, and we have some ideas to tinker with the route to get an extra water stop as we nearly ran out yesterday (huge kudos to Mike - Clea's husband - for having some iced water waiting for us at the end).

This morning it was an 8 mile Danish run. There were four of us, and I paired up with Frank. As we joked during the run, we seem to bring out the competitive edge in each other because we always seem to push the pace and egg each other on. Today we averaged in the 7s and dipped into the 6s at numerous points - I think that's the fastest I've ever run that loop.

But it was gratifying to know that I could hold that pace after yesterday's 18 miler.

So we waited until the bakery opened and I got to take some cupcakes home again. We have visitors this weekend, so I took a selection. Dylan certainly went to town on his portion of the chocolate one as the picture below demonstrates.

The remnants of a chocolate cupcake

He got dumped into the shower with daddy.

Tonight our visitors are looking after the boys for a few hours while I take Nancy out for a meal at Hudson's on the Bend, a posh eatery in West Austin. This is probably going to be our last chance to have a date night for a very long time, so we're going to make the most of it.