If you're a mom …

or if you know one or if you have one, then Happy Mother's Day!

We had a little cold front pop through overnight and it's quite lovely today – cool temperatures and low humidity. Whaddya wanna bet I take a walk on a rest day?

The first half of yesterday's eight-mile run was great. I deliberately left the stopwatch at home; I just want to get the joy back. At about the five-mile mark I had to walk for a couple minutes and found myself alternating between a fast walk and a slow jog the remainder of the route. Mr. Shrinking Knitter came by at Mile 7.5 and I hopped in the car for the last half-mile back to my car.

The joy is not completely back, but it's getting closer.

I logged 24.1 running miles last week and did three half-hour weight-training sessions.

I haven't registered for it yet, but I've definitely decided to do the Rex Healthcare Half-Marathon in Raleigh in November. Leading up to that, I'll be doing the Army Ten-Miler on October 7 in Washington, DC. Training starts in three months.

You know what that means, don't you?

Two new t-shirts! Heh.

Seriously, it means I have 12 weeks to work on losing some – or maybe even all – of the excess weight I've been lugging around since last fall.

I don't mean to imply that I haven't been working on losing it; y'all know I have. Three months of non-training fitness workouts and non-training meal plans should yield some lower numbers between now and the first of August. I'm not setting a number goal; I just want to be lighter, leaner, faster and meaner when I start training than I am now.

Is that too much to ask?