lost track due to epic battle

Yep, I got slammed by the Antivirus system pro Trojan thingy which hid deep in a random serious of folders, well out of sight of McAfee and Norton and AVG....even when I got the .exe name from another program, a search on my computer couldn't dig up the path. Eventually, I downloaded a free trial of Kaspersky, got the path, got to the file but couldn't delete it. I'd already downloaded Malwarebytes--it was great for cleaning up the registry key issues, but it couldn't get to the heart of the virus BUT it had an additional 'assassin tool' which did the trick. I ran a few more scans, got rid of the detritus, updated everything, switched my browser from IE to Firefox finally, lol, disabled system restore once everything was going well to get a new, better reference point, and things are running a LOT better. This took a few days, though. I'm no pro. lol

Anyway, this is why I've lost track of what I ran.

Tues: definitely jogged for 22 stiff minutes.
Wed-Thurs-Fri: a day off, a 30 min stiff run, and a 40 min fartlek run which actually went well. I was happy with it and I think that approach will work when I'm not in good enough shape to tackle a tempo run.

Saturday, no run, but plenty of walking, plus standing and eating at the Food and Wine show. I gorged.

Sunday, today, I woke up and saw that I weighed about two pounds more than yesterday morning--I now weigh myself every morning to keep track of what's going on--my weight has been creeping up, but I figure that that's because I've gained a bit of muscle from resistance exercises earlier in the summer, I'm perhaps retaining a bit more water, and I've gained some fat because of winter, and then the two pounds at the Wine and Food show, lol, so I'm not going to worry much about it. Last year was my first Canadian winter after a hiatus, and it was a bit of a shock. This year, I guess I've reverted to my old pattern of gaining in the fall. The scale is more to see if my weight starts to plummet or rise steeply at any point so that I can tell the specialist. over the last umpteen years, I've gotten better at keeping my weight from crashing too much, but who knows what may happen?

Anyway, I saw the two pound gain, sipped some water, and got dressed for a run. Took the dog. It was an average gut day but I figured that this was going to be just a warm up for a (hopefully) long run tomorrow. We jogged around and after a 1/2 hour, we met up with my running club. I decided to run with the folks at the back a bit, but they were going on a route that was unfamiliar to me, so I figured that I might as well hang in there and check it out. My friend gave me a sip of water around 40 min--my mouth was dry--after that, I was fine.

Including a few potty breaks for the dog, a long wait at my least favourite set of lights in the region, and a bit of a walk when we were figuring out that we were going the wrong way, I went 2:30. I figure about 2:20 running time, maybe a few minutes more, and I caved in and checked it on mapmyrun: almost 14 miles. PHEW!

I'm really happy with it.

I took some iron pills, had my whey and molasses shake and some meat pie when I got home, and I'm going to be stuffing myself royally tonight too. I guess that the two extra pounds this morning went to good use. I'm eating a lot, but not enough is sinking in properly as I'd feared, I guess, but I'm not at the point of losing weight so it's a bit hard to figure out exactly what's going on. It feels like my muscles are holding onto water because of the inflammation/arrested repair, which might explain things. Will see.

But at least it seems pretty clear that I have to really gorge the day before long runs. But not on wheat. I didn't eat much yesterday. ok! maybe I'll manage this Winterman thing after all--I was seriously doubting it this week before this run, and now I'm a lot more optimistic about it. I felt more like my old self.