recovery month

Since the Seattle half marathon I have been in a state of rest and recovery. Kainoa continued to give me work outs but with teh instructions that I could miss some and the only thing I had to do was the strength workouts. So that is pretty much what I did all month, I ran at least once a week, spent some time on the spin bike, got in the pool a few times and did strength training 3 days a week.. and I struggled with the concept of resting and not doing twice a day work outs and that sort of thing.
I did manage to completely destroy my normal eating habits - healthy things were replaced with egg nog and or cookies.. lots and lots of cookies.

Luckily the week before Christmas I was distracted by snow, lots and lots of snow at my house. It snowed enough to shut down the Seattle region and I just played outside. The first day I did everything and anything I could outside just to spend time in the white stuff. I started with a walk to Starbucks, then pulled out my mountain bike for some riding, then talked Kyle into riding with me, then made some snow angles, dragged the cats out for a little bit. Pretty much I spent the entire day out in the snow. We got over a foot of snow and it was the perfect snow day.
The crazy part was that unlike most times when it snows in Seattle it stayed cold and kept snowing till Christmas so I only managed to go into work for a couple of hours on the 24th and the rest of the week I worked from home and took snow breaks. We went to REI and got some winter gear and picked up a pair of Yaktrax Pro for our running shoes. They worked perfect the first couple of days while the snow was compact and not covered in road sand. I managed to get a couple of runs in which felt great and was a lot like trail running. There is just something about being in the snow - it is quiet, calm and just so pretty.

On Christmas eve we had a blast building some snow people - A James Bond snow man and a snowy Bond Girl.
But a neighbor down the street went even further and build a snowman that is taller than his house..

And with that the fully successful recovery month ended yesterday (Jan 1). I feel completely out of shape and ready to start the hard work back into better/faster shape.