Well, now I know I can... :)

Oh dear. I just noticed how far behind I am with regards to blogging! Liz, you're a machine! How do you find so much time to go to work, work out, travel AND blog at the same time!!!

Anyhoo. The last couple of weeks have been super busy. The first day in Turkey did indeed break Jason and pretty much destroyed my poor feet. So. Much. Walking! I took my running gear with me with good intentions, but with all the walking and lack of sleep, running didn't happen for me. Very proud of Liz and Marc for going for a couple of runs though - hardcore!

Speaking of running gear - my new Nike shoes were giving me a bit of trouble. Not cool. The right shoe just didn't feel right. Even walking around in them was giving me a sore calf muscle so on Saturday I took them back to the store and they swapped them for a brand new pair without any problems. Thank you Nike Amsterdam Store, you rock! The new pair are much better and my right foot hasn't given me any trouble (except for a big blister on my big toe, oh well!).

Back to Amsterdam on Wednesday night. Two birthdays to celebrate - Andrey's on Thursday and my own on Saturday. Feels like we just haven't stopped!

However, on Sunday, my first day of being 31 years old, I felt the need to try running a full 16km outdoors. I'm going to have to do this in just over a month so I can't keep putting it off. 

It was hard... but I DID IT!! In fact, I ended up running 17.5km, but only because my Nike+ Running app decided to pause itself randomly (I think it happened because I skipped a song on Spotify using the headphone controller) and completely miss 1.5km :( When I finally realized this had happened, I turned it back on and felt compelled to run the full 16km according to the app. I was not impressed by this. Luckily I had another app running in the background (Wahoo Fitness) and it captured the full run.

So how does it feel running 17.5km? Umm... pretty awful. The last 3kms or so were torture. I slowed down a lot and could barely pick up my feet. I'm pretty sure people must've been looking at me thinking, 'ok enough already. stop. you look like you're going to collapse'. It didn't help that I've had a strange chesty cough / cold since the second day in Turkey which made breathing a bit harder. I stopped once because of a horrible stitch that I just couldn't shake and another time for a drink. I think I probably needed to stop more often for water because by the time I got home I felt pretty dehydrated, sore, headachy and just all levels of wrong. I had to lie down infront of the tv for a couple of hours to recover!

But... anyway, I did it! So I'm happy. Now I know I can... :)