Bee sting update

Still not back to normal :/

Day 3 - still swollen, itchy and got to love the red color. I was able to do my strength training in the morning but really did not like being in running shoes. It was hard to keep it elevated at work but i did manage to ice it a bit. Then in the evening I squished it into my bike shoes which felt really weird and not much fun but it was worth it.


Day 4 - mostly just feels itchy and a bit swollen. Kind of reminds me of how it feels after your feet go numb and start "waking up". At least it does not hurt o walk as much and I can bend my toes again. I am about to go on a 10 mile run so it should be interesting..


Fingers crossed tomorrow it will be completely back to normal..

better late then never

Finally finished up my race reports from both the Seafair Sprint Triathlon and the Swedish SummerRun...

In other news my foot is still swollen but it did fit in my bike shoe tonight for a tempo/hill ride with Kyle :) Ok night night early morning as always.

the bee sting

So yesterday as I was loading the truck to head out to my Mom's garden party I managed to get a bee sting on my toe. I screamed and cried so loud. I had some how gotten a bee between my sandal and my toe and it stung me on the inside of my 3rd toe on my right foot.. I ran back in side screaming the whole way and grabbed an ice cube. I had never had something hurt so bad. The ice seemed to help a little bit. the stinger was gone. I washed it and since Kyle was out on his long ride and the cats were no help at all. I figured the best thing to do was drive to my Mom's house even though it was my right foot and it hurt so much. I wound up crying the entire :15 min drive. Pour Kyle called me and had to listen to me cry after I txt him about it and he was all the way in Issaquah on his bike ridding to my Moms house.
I got to my Mom's in one piece and by now my toe was starting to swell up a little bit. She got me some Benydryl and an ice pack and I joined the rest of the her Garden party in the backyard. The ice helped but it hurt to walk on... so I kept icing it and made all the guests even more scared of bees (sorry Mom).
After the party Kyle drove us home and I put my foot up on the dash. When we got home Kyle went and got some epsym salt for me to soak my foot and some bee sting stuff to help numb it. At this point I could not really move my toes and it hurt to walk so I was limping around. Of course all I could think about was if I could do my bike ride the next day.. Kyle was very good sport and I spent the rest of the night with my foot up watching a movie.

Picture from last night. Both feet were a little swollen from my run but still pretty obvious swelling on my right foot..


Luckily the swelling has seemed to go down some this morning. Though it is still really stiff and hurts to walk. So I have a little limp. I think it will fit in my bike shoe for my ride tonight :)


Hopefully by tomorrow it is completely gone so I can run 10 miles on it. fingers crossed

weekend recap

It has been a while since I have updated my blog which feels weird but I do have two race reports half done... Mostly I blame the insane weather last week. It got up to 106 °F on Tuesday and stayed well in the 90 till the weekend so when I was away from the AC at work the last thing I felt like doing was turning on my laptop.
Anyways.. Training has been going really well. I had a week full of tempo and hill repeats which was extra challenging in the heat. But with a lot of gatorade and ice I got through it all with out any real problems. I do find it kind of funny that the first week I get to do a lot of tempo work it was so hot.
Luckily it cooled down to mid to high 80s over the weekend for my long workouts. On Saturday I got the ok from Kainoa to tag along with laurie on her long brick workout. So we got started around 7am to get out before it got to hot. Laurie mapped out a great route: out the Marymoor trail to Woodinville then a right onto Paradise Lake Road, to Mink Road to Union Hill into the Valley and over to the Beaver Lake Tri course and then over the Plateau and back to her place. It was a great mix of hills and a little bit of flats in the middle. She had ran 20 miles the day before so I was able to keep up on the flats and my legs were kind of tired from the full week of intervals so it worked out perfectly. My nutrition was the only lack luster part. I have not really found a replacement gel since Accel gel changed their recipe.. so I ate a hodgepodge of stuff and the Cliff shot turned my stomach pretty bad. Thankfully with the heat and hills helped settle my stomach.. But I never really felt like I was very well fueled. Oh well I got time to keep trying things and hopefully will find something sooner rather than later.
Once we got back we headed out on the East Lake Sammamish trail for her :60 min run off the bike.. I only had to do :30 but figured it would be more fun to tag along with her. Since my nutrition was not perfect on the bike the first :30 running out were a bit rough. It was hot and I was way under fueled. Thankfully we ran toward Whole foods and was able to run in and refill my hand bottle with cold water and even just stepping in the AC for a min helped so much. So the run back was way better and we even picked up the pace the last couple of minutes.
The best part of all was once we were done we immediately jumped in the lake to cool off. It felt SO good. Not to mention Eric had just made fresh bread and they had cold chocolate milk ready.
So after a snack and short visit I headed hoem for an ice bath and what turned into a 3 hour nap with Toko (my cat) till Kyle and I headed to his Mom's pace for dinner :)

Now since I decided to tag along with Laurie on Saturday I moved my long run to Sunday.. I knew it would kind of hurt since it was a 2 hour run and the past 2 weeks I have been more focused on shorter stuff and then with the long brick the day before..I headed out around 8a and decided to run flat so that I could at least survive. Laurie was nice enough to let me run from her place even though they would not be home. So I ran the East lake Samm trail again. I did not want to have to carry more that my hand bottle so I did 2 :60 min loops with whole foods at the :30 min mark.
My first loop felt surprisingly good. I stayed in my low heartrate zones like I was supposed to and kept a nice little pace going. I did find out that my hand bottle did not seal very well anymore so my hand was getting covered in gatorade :/ but at whole foods I filled my bottle with plain cold water and it was fine..
I headed back out on the second loop and I forgot to grab a gel so by 1:30 mark I was starting to hit the wall. My legs were tired and it was getting warmer so I went into whole foods and got a pack of luna moons to eat with the 3 cliff blocks I had. As I headed back I did not feel good and my pace slowed a lot. I wound up motivating myself by running for 10 min and then let myself grab a few black berries along the trail and repeated this till I was done. I immediately jumped in the lake to cool off and drank a recovery shake before heading back home for an ice bath. I ate a little bit of left overs and headed to my Mom's house for a Garden party :). Toko was very annoyed that i did not stay home for a nap.

All in all not to bad a weekend and time to bring on another week full of training :)

Swedish Summer Run 10k 2009

A while ago my Mom decided on a 10k to run in preperation for running the nike half marathon in October. She choose teh Swedish SummerRun because she liked that it was in support of the Marsha Rivkin Center for Ovarian Cancer Research. I decided to run it in support of my Mom and because why not it is a 10k and would be a good bench mark for my marathon training.
On July 27th my Mom picked me up at 6am and we headed to the start. I have to say I looked at the course map a bit but there was no elevation map and since it was "just" a 10k did not really worry about it much. So it was not til that morning that I really figured out that the course is actually very hilly. Oh well no really time goal mostly Kainoa wanted me to run negatives and push myself and see what I could do.
Ok so we got there super early, got front row parking pretty much, no lines at the porta potties and I had plenty of time to do my :20 min warm up. My Mom fallowed behind me and we ran around the block a few times and added a few pick ups just to get the heart rate up.
The 10k runners lined up at the start after they did a aerobics warm up thing that i have never seen at at he start of race before but most people seemed to have fun with it. We started not to far forward but not to far back either. We wished each other luck and we were off and running.
My race plan was to start conservative and then pick up the effort through out and finish as strong and fast as I could not leaving anything for later. Just run hard.
I think teh chart from my garmin shows it best. The grey line is the elevation and the red is my heart rate.

I did my best to keep at it even up the hills that seemed to go on forever. I seriously think it was 2 miles of flat/downhill and 4 miles of uphill. The weirdest part of the race was how quiet it was all you could hear was shoes hitting the pavement and nothing else except one lady that every time she saw a volunteer she thanked them.
Since they had water on the course and it was only a 10k I decided not to carry my own liquids which was kind of nice except I did manage to get water up my nose at one point which was fun... After that I mostly just tossed the water on my head.
The kind of annoying part was when the 5k merged with the 10k course and a lot of the 5k people were all over the road with strollers and everything.

Since I did not know the course I just focused on increasing my effort as I went hills or no hills.. well there were lots of hills even up to the finish line. I heard Chris (Kainoa's Husband cheer me on) and then saw Jerry and the finish line.


My mile splits were
1 - 7:59
2 - 7:54
3 - 7:35
4 - 9:16
5 - 8:30
6 - 7:20
.34 - 2:48

Gun Time 00:51:34
Chip Time 00:51:23
Average Pace 00:08:17

20-29 AG 5th/134

Not a PR for me but I am happy with the effort and I followed my race plan so I would call it a good race :)

My mom also did a great job. She kept running up all the hills and I am so proud of her. She is so cute look at that smile :)
My Mom's final times
Gun Time 01:04:50
Chip Time 01:04:37
Average Pace 00:10:24

50-59 AG 10th/24

A good day all in all for Team Super Cute