Frontier Bound

I’m off to Alaska on Saturday for a cruise with my family. This trip is only my parents and sisters. Sorry husbands, you have to stay behind to watch the unwanted children. Unless you are my husband than all you have to watch is our furry child. The last real vacation I remember with just the 6 of us was Europe when I was in middle school. That just can’t be right but I can’t think of any others where a fiancé or husband or kids weren’t involved or where all of us daughters were there (older ones are still pissy about getting cut off from vacations).

Two of my monthly goals were about this trip. Goal one is “Spend my Alaska cruise enjoying quality time with my family and don’t get caught up in training for just this one week”. Training is constantly on my mind and while I know I won’t stop thinking about it, I’d like to scale that back significantly. My family isn’t going to want to listen to me talk about training or races or heart rate all week and I want to be engaged in conversation instead of being off in my training la la land. Am I still going to train? Well duh, of course. Will my training plan get messed up? Most likely but I’ll readjust accordingly. I planned so this would be a recovery week with a heavier focus on running since I’ll be a bit limited in what I can do for the other categories.

Goal two is “Don’t over eat on the cruise”. Haha umm yea. Let’s just say I’m pretty sure even right now that this isn’t going to happen. If I can’t even convince myself right now that I’ll muster up some self-control, there’s no way I’ll be able to control myself in the moment while drooling over endless amount of yummy food. I know I’ll be pretty good about drinking though since my parents are Mormon and therefore don’t drink. What I’m really hoping for is that feeling after you get back from a vacation where all you did was eat and once you are home you have no interest in pigging out anymore but instead eating decent food in decent quantities. Please PLEASE let that be the case because I only have 3 weeks between when I get back and my first race. This is the only cruise I’ve gone one where I’m actually concerned about the several lb weight gain that happens every time.

In general I’m pretty excited about the vacation though, food stressing out aside. It will be good to get away. My head needs a break. More importantly I’m happy I’ll get some quality time with my family. And although I’m realllly not looking forward to treadmill running for a week (ug), I’m really excited to escape the heat for a week. This of course makes treadmill running even more frustrating because I’d love to be outside in that cooler weather. Sigh. Gosh, complain enough?

Oh and it's official...