My goal was to write every two weeks…hasn’t happened. I’m still plugging away. At running, at life, at job searching. Not much progress on any of those. The weather went from being a problem to being perfect. For about a week just after I wrote last time we hovered around 0* most mornings, had most of the snow we got this winter and ice and snow packed roads. All of that was finally enough to drive me back to the gym, and I did 5 treadmill runs at the gym in the space of a week. I’d have done one more at the gym, but I got there and didn’t have my card to get in (or any ID) so I drove back home and ran a loop of my street, over and over again. It doesn’t connect anywhere but to a road that is too busy (and has no shoulder) to run along. Out and back of the whole street is .8 of a mile. Not so fun, but no worse than the treadmill. It also works out as a bit of a hill workout. Not something I want to do regularly, but it worked in a pinch. The weather on my long run day went from 4*, to about 34* the next week, to about 64* the week after that. If that trend had continued through yesterday we’d have hit 94*. I’m very glad that didn’t happen. It was in the upper 30s to low 40s during my run. (To be completely accurate the 34* and 64* were the highs the previous two weeks, but they made the 30* warmer progression work…)

            I’m not running with much of an overall plan but within each week I’m doing 1 speedwork run (mostly), 1 steady pace run (no walking, but not fast enough to be a tempo), 1 long run, 2 easy runs (run/walk to keep my heart rate under a specific level) and 2 walks each week. Not in that order of course – I alternate the harder runs with the easy runs and walks. I did another mile test, and I’d improved from 9:01 in January to 8:54 in February. Still well off my mile PR of 8:04, but it’s improvement. I have a real in person race coming up Saturday – as all in person races have been here these days it will be a rolling start of small groups. It’s the St. Patrick’s Day Parade Run, normally a huge 5 mile race, but it’s shortened to a 5k and the location has been moved from downtown St. Louis to Forest Park. And of course there will be no parade. Next month I have an in person half (also a rolling start, also much smaller than the race would normally be). Both are I think about 10% of their normal size.

            No job news. I’ve only applied to a couple in the last month which isn’t good, but I’m having a hard time finding jobs I’d want to do and that I’m qualified for. I really wish I had figured some things out sooner – if I went back I’d do some things differently right after finishing undergrad. I will work on a shortened version of my master’s degree final project/paper to share here – it’s relevant and I’d share the whole thing but I doubt too many people want to read all 15 pages.

Weather Feb 21st (random family for scale) That frozen waterfall is normally a trickle (It's named Dripping Springs), so it built up to the dramatic frozen waterfall gradually, but it was crazy to see. All of Creve Couer Lake was also frozen over and it's a pretty large lake (largest natural lake in Missouri, though there are quite a few larger lakes formed by damming off a water source. People were walking on the lake, which is a bad idea, but in this case turned out fine. 

Weather Feb 27th. Every bit of snow and ice was gone and I was too warm in that long sleeve shirt.