everybody's gotta learn sometime

Happy New Year all the faithful readers and runners.
Here's on the East coast, we're starting of the New Year with arctic winds and below freezing temps. All the time. This is not fun. I'm continuing to plod along, running every other day. I have hit 2 mild milestones:
1. I'm up to 6 miles. I'm going for 8 tomorrow.
2. I had my first run where I averaged under 9 minute pace. So I'm making my way back. My HR was a little high, but I'm not going to worry about that. It was really cold and I'm just getting back into something that resembles shape.
I do seem to being having a little trouble getting motivated about Boston training. There are a couple of reasons for this.
(this is my entry of lists).
1. IT'S COLD. Ok, yea, so what. It was cold last year when I trained for NJ. Which brings me to #2.
2. Lack of the Eye of the Tiger as my pal Dr. Abbott put it. Last year, after several near misses for my Boston time, I was very motivated. Now, a bit less motivated. Makes the cold actually seem cold where as last year I was like cold? BRING IT!!!
3. I am a bit fearful about re-injuring myself. I know that's totally normal and I'm making my way back in a way I feel is smart so I need to just keep doing that and let go of worrying about my foot flaring up again.
I do think some new shoes are a good idea. I'm going to go and start from scratch and see what that does. My current every day shoes have a little over 300 miles on them anyway.
4. I haven't set my mind on a training plan. My plan right now, is to base build for a few more weeks. I was thinking of then going to Pfitz 12/55. Then Girl in Motion got me thinking about Higdon's advanced plans. So perhaps I'll spend some more time looking over those and adjust.
What it comes down to is (here we go again)
1. I'm not going to have a super high milage training cycle.
2. Boston may be more of a victory lap than a let's go for a PR here. That's fine with me. I have to work with what I have right now. Being that I'm about to age up, I have 5 more minutes for my BQ so I can always BQ again. Though given my feeling about the city of Boston, I dont think I'll need to run it again. But who know.
In other news, I've started the Hundred Push up challenge. That's going well and I hope the new found strength will help me when I finally get back in the pool.

And FINALLY one more thing. Last year, a buncha people over at RWOL started a New Year's weight loss thingie. Support group? Challenge? Whatever? Anyway, at the time I was going between about 125-128lbs. Yea, I know that's not a lot, but it was a lot more than I had ever weighted. I didn't think too much about it. I just figured, oh well, you get older, you gain weight. You move to Esalen, for a year, you gain weight. It's true. Just about everyone I know/knew there gained weight. There are a lot of reasons for that, but perhaps some other time. In short, that happened to me. About 10lbs actually.
My initial goal was to gain some where around 5lbs, get down to 120. I started monitoring what I ate, nothing drastic. I didn't completely cut out anything. I'm sure my higher milage help as well. I go down to 120. And it kept dropping. I think I got down to 114 or 115.
Here we are, a year later. I weighed myself for the first time in a while yesterday. 117. That's about where I've stayed, I bounce a bit between 115-118. Even with running less, the weight has stayed off and I'm really happy about it. I do believe this has also really helped my running. 10lbs or so is a lot to carry around.

Ok, enough on line therapy, now I'm really going to get new shoes.