Trick Or Treat

First the kids turned our house into a spooky mansion, then they set off to relieve the neighbours off their sweets. Even though this was made slightly awkward by the fact that little Maia was utterly terrified of Shea's mask, even though she knew it was him ("when he takes off his mask he will be my Shea again"), they succeeded on both counts and came home laden with treasure. Cian announced that Halloween is his second most favourite holiday, after Christmas but ahead of Summer and Easter. Naturally the evening turned into a "eat as many sweets as you can" party and they all refused dinner. Later that night Maia woke up crying and demanded another sweet party. Apart from the fact that it was pitch dark outside, she'd already had a pre-birthday party in Nana's house on Thursday and will have a birthday party on Tuesday, so we found this demand slightly unreasonable and eventually managed to get her back to bed. Oh the joys!

Turning back the clocks gives me one extra hour of light in the morning which means I don't need a headlamp but I pretty much forgot to take the opposite effect in the evenings into account and left for work without reflective clothing and a light source, which made the commute home far more dangerous than it should have been. Since this is my fourth winter of cycling to work you might have thought I would have caught on by now, but obviously not. I made it home in one piece and my first trip was to dig out the required gear. That should make things a lot better from now on, but the fact that a lot of drivers don't bother dipping their headlights for a mere cyclist remains an unsolved problem. They obviously have no clue just how much they are blinding me. I have a decent health insurance package but don't actually want to test it out.

The post-marathon soreness in the quads had disappeared by Friday but on Sunday I made a mistake and ran much too hard and probably too long as well. I set off feeling pretty good and did not check my Garmin until well after 3 miles when I saw a pace figure of 7:20 and immediately eased the effort, but probably not enough. By mile 11 I was pretty knackered and had enough but was still 2 miles away from home. I've just run a marathon, there really is no need to overdo it right now. Consequently I took it much easier this morning, running only 8 miles and at a much more sedate pace. It felt a lot easier, despite the windy conditions.

Talking about the marathon, apparently there are 30 seconds of footage of me in the extended highlights package. One of our pace team ran with a head camera and from what I've heard my attempts at whipping up crowd support on Nassau Street made it into the coverage. Unfortunately I don't think I'll be able to see it for myself. It will be repeated on Wednesday, but Niamh might not be too impressed if I subscribed to Setanta Ireland for an entire month just for an ego trip.

Running a marathon seems to miraculously have healed my achilles, I have not felt a beep from it since Tuesday. Unfortunately my back is more than making up for it, sitting in the office chair for several hours is pure agony. At least it's not a running injury!

31 Oct

13.1 miles, 1:39:10, 7:34 pace, HR 163

1 Nov

8 miles, 1:04:01, 8:00 pace, HR 147

Weekly Mileage: 70+