229 when I woke up this morning.
Since my last post I haven’t really run at all – I have been working heavily on our yard, deck and fence – our in ground pool has gone in and there has been a massive amount of work put in to try to get the yard and the pool area sorted out.
Our yard is a big L behind that wraps around the south and east sides of our house – the entire south side is where the pool area is and where our deck and gazebo is. As of this morning I have finally finished the pool area but the east side where we will have a big grass area for the kids still needs to be completed. I can’t get to that portion until the builder gets back with their bobcat to fix the drainage and smooth out the ground there – hopefully by the end of the week.
So instead of running this week I have been doing heavy labor in the yard instead…in 30 Celsius heat with a UV index approaching 9 most days. In the past 8 or 9 days I have:
- put in over 300 sq ft of landscaping fabric
- moved approximate 10 cubic yards of 1.5 inch river wash stone (over 105 wheel barrows full of rock – the joints in my hands are destroyed)
- laid 3 patio areas with 18″ patio stones (and redid one of those when we made a design change on a decorative fence)
- put up a 40′ decorative fence (hand made fence panels 3′ by 6′ with rope hand strung into a net – each panel took probably 2-3 hours to build and paint – around an hour to string the net alone)
- put up a new hammock chair
- installed 2 new street lights style deck light stands
- painted several areas of the deck
- adjusted the height and position on our 12′ by 16′ deck so it was squared better to the pool
- moved the stairs on the deck so that they line up directly with the pool stairs
- cleaned up significant areas of the yard
- mowed the lawn (in the front – their ain’t no lawn left in the back right now)
- dug up and fixed underground sump pump hose that was damaged by the bobcat when they were digging the pool
- ran 100′ of electric cable to the deck
- cleaned the entire garage and did a bunch of cleaning in the house as the mud from the back yard was getting everywhere
…plus have done a crap load of swimming.
My weight has gotten down to 225 this week and has bumped back up – I think I was overcompensating for the calorie loss and ate a crap load of licorice one day and that will take a few days to balance out.
I still have about 5 days left on my vacation to get all the yard work done but I’m not sure what I will be able to do next in the yard – once the bobcat gets back to finish up I should be able to get the top soil and sod I need to do done in a day or 2 but that is up in the air as to when I will be able to do it at this point.
I did go for a short run with my son this evening after supper – just around the block to stretch his legs – he had been asking for a couple days but with the work I have been doing I haven’t had the energy. My legs were not happy with running though – I have been using some old shoes to do the work I was doing and that probably put some extra strain on my legs that I felt on the run. I was also surprisingly out of breath for the first little bit of the run definitely a wake up call to get back to the training.
I did then try to go for another run after the kids went to bed to get a fuller run in but I managed to get only a little past the first corner before the sky opened up and unloaded on my – I was outside for less than 5 minutes and was fully drenched. I wasn’t wearing a hat and the angle of the rain made it so that I could barely see due to the water hitting my face. The rain lasted about 15-20 minutes in total and I could probably have given it another shot but I took it as the universe telling me that I shouldn’t be running tonight and came in to do some clean up on the blog which I have been neglecting.
I think I have come up with a set of goals for the next 3-4 months and I will be writing about those in another post shortly.
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