Running

Sharing, working, and working out

Hey!

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I feel like I have a lot of random things to share. I’m going to try to be organized and share everything in a list!

1. My brother and sister-in-law are home from their honeymoon in the Dominican Republic. My brother developed some sort of stomach bug, and I feel really bad for him. They shared some photos with me. The resort they stayed at is gorgeous!
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2. I visited my dentist today for a cleaning, and he said my dry socket is slowly closing. Hurrah!
3. It’s Shark Week. Enough said.
4. School is starting up for me in a few weeks, so I’ve been savoring my last bits of extra free time by baking nonstop. Baking makes me so happy.lemon cookies

On working:

I resigned from my position as a Spinning instructor a few weeks ago. It’s not that I didn’t like teaching Spinning–I really did. It’s just that I wanted to work for my family’s business.

My dad is a real estate broker and owns his own real estate company. My mom and brother are both agents and work under my dad. Since I quit teaching Spinning, I’ve been doing real estate marketing work for my family’s business and I love it!

On working out:

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Working out kinda fell to the wayside for a bit this summer while I recovered from my wisdom teeth extraction and subsequent dry socket. Then I was busy helping prepare for my brother’s wedding.

At the beginning of the summer, I planned on training for this fall half marathon, but I can’t really see that happening now, and I’m totally okay with it! Life happens. Unexpected things come up. It’s all good.

I’ve been running a little bit lately, but nothing longer than 5-7 miles. I’m hoping to run more in the coming months, but I’m not sure how busy I’ll be at school with my new position and some tough classes coming up (senior research project, I’m lookin’ at you.)

Whether I get to up my running mileage more in the coming months or not, I’m not too worried about it. If it happens, awesome. If not, oh well! At least I have an awesome stretching buddy.

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Have you ever quit a job you loved for a better opportunity?

We Mucked It!

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Hannah and I met up with some friends on Saturday to run MuckFest MS Pittsburgh!

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MuckFest MS is a 5-mile mud and obstacle fun-run. 100% of fundraising dollars for the event go towards the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

I will preface this post by saying that I didn’t want to run this race. True story. Hannah’s friend asked her to run it about a month ago, but they figured out that they weren’t old enough to run it by themselves.

Hannah begged my mom, dad, and brother to run it with them and they said no. I felt bad, so I decided to run it with Hannah and her friend’s family. I figured that it would be something fun and different.

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I’m pretty sure I have really bad luck with race day weather. The weather has been gorgeous in Pittsburgh lately, with temperatures in the 70s and 80s.

Not the day of MuckFest. I woke up and checked the weather. It was 35 degrees outside. I was shivering just thinking about having to jump into muddy water pits. It reminded me of doing an open water swim in August when the temperature was 50 degrees. Not cool at all.

Thankfully, our starting wave didn’t begin until 11:30 a.m., so it warmed up to about 55 degrees.

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We stretched a bit, and then headed to the starting line.

I don’t even know how to describe how much fun I had running MuckFest with Hannah and her friend.

I knew the race was going to be crazy when we were sprayed with water before we even started running.

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Within 30 seconds of starting the race, we were all 100% soaked because we had to run through–and up–a pit of mud. I could not get myself out of that pit! It was so slippery and my shoes felt like they weighed about 10 pounds from the mud.

I looked over at Hannah and saw that she had a mud mustache. I lost it and started laughing so hard. Then I kind of freaked out because I remembered that over 100 people were behind me in the same mud pit. I felt like I was going to be crushed to death. Over dramatic? Yes. But the pure fear propelled me out of that pit and onto the next obstacle.

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We had to run through these huge balloon-type balls. So many people were hit by the balls, lost their footing, and fell into waist deep water and mud. We moved on and ran to the next obstacle.

I can’t remember all of the obstacles we did, but we skipped one because Hannah and I were afraid of going underwater underground. Did that sentence even make sense? Oh well.

We saw my mom at mile two, and she took some pictures of us going over another obstacle.

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We climbed a big rope obstacle, got some water, and I picked my mud wedgie. Then we ran up some massive hills for about three miles.

We also ran through a mine. Kinda scary.

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At the end of the race, we had to jump into more muddy water…

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So I just went for it. Tongue out and everything.

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We finished feeling muddy, cold, and happy. The only bad thing about the race was the amount of mud I swallowed. I had a fever that night and my nose was running like crazy. A little dirt never hurt anyone though!

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