!

I jogged 12.7 miles in the backyard yesterday. Yeah, we're still here. Anyway, I wasn't planning to run so long, not after such a lackluster month. Since my last "long" run in April, my longest run had been 3-5 miles, something like that. I was sick for about a week (not COVID-19), the weather didn't cooperate, I didn't get up early enough so had lots of interruptions especially early on which wrecks my warm up and thus makes the entire run a struggle, etc.

But, yesterday, everything went right. I got up early enough to get a good 1/2 hour in before the first interruption, and clouds came. The temp got up to 29 but it was overcast by then, plus I turned on a sprinkler. If I had planned ahead and put my fuel on the patio, and thus not had to go into the house and get waylaid by something for a few minutes (long enough for my legs to decide "that's a no, dawg"), I think I could've kept going, but I'm still really happy with the run. I'm still really slow in the backyard, particularly since I am trying to avoid the 3 tracks I've worn in the yard so far, so it took me almost 3 hours (!). Yeah, 9:30/mile is like tempo effort. Whatever, these are strange times.

However, I managed a lovely ~3 mile recovery run out there today, and that might be the true turning point. I've gotten into this habit of running 2-3 times a week (okay, sometimes closer to 1) that whenever I do manage a "long-ish" run, I don't do a recovery run the day after. But recovery runs really help!

I think we'll be down here for another month at least--I'm still figuring things out. well, everyone is! To document my present real-life knot of knots would take more time than I have, but these days I'm applying and cold-emailing to find places to rotate at for the next year, and meanwhile my school decided to change my email address this past weekend. I think stuff is migrating where it should now, but ehhh, timing sucks. Also, the testing centre where I'm supposed to write my board exam in August had a major fire and is supposed to reopen in June, no July 1st, no, July 31st....and writing in August was already kind of messing my timeline, but now my August school-mandated rotation is no longer mandatory, but I haven't heard if I'm still going or if I was even accepted in the first place (it's complicated) so I've applied to a couple of virtual rotations because since my son's school is reopening now (he's not going back yet, no way), they'll probably take the usual first week off in August and I'm SOL with childcare. Yeah, I could pay someone, with maybe a little extra virus on the side? So every month is kind of like this, but August smells the worst. However, I think it'll all pan out. A while back, I was freaking out because I couldn't get a seat for my boards in July, but then the place caught fire.