A month has gone by since my last post. That is inexcusable.

Now I will proceed to make excuses…or at least try to explain.

Until today, I hadn’t run in a month. It’s hard to write about running when you’re not actually running. The last time I ran, June 4th, I ran 3 miles and during those 3 miles I did 4 quarter mile sprints at paces of 8:06, 8:04, 8:41, and 9:46. I felt good about that. But we were busy all that following week working on the house.

Then on June 10th our dog got into an accident chasing a squirrel in our fenced in yard and had to have about 20 stitches. I started bringing her to work with me everyday to keep an eye on her (so she wouldn’t scratch her stitches). She’s a greyhound so she can’t go running with me. She only does one or two sprints then she wants to sleep. She doesn’t not want to run long. So that meant no running on my lunch hour.

Nights and weekends for the past month have been spent fixing up our house. We really want to sell it so we can move up the coast a bit. It had been on the market for a year at the end of May, so we decided to remodel the kitchen instead of dropping the price again. This really messed with our ability to be healthy because there were several weeks that we couldn’t prepare food in our house.

The stress was pretty bad, so we decided to go easy on ourselves and not worry in the short term about what we were eating. When you’re working all day at a job and then staining cabinets and doing repairs all evening every night of the week, you can’t really beat yourself up for not taking the time to prepare a healthy meal. Is it possible? Sure. Was it logical for us to spend our time doing this past month? Not really. Something had to give and that was it.

The hard work did pay off though.

The before picture of our kitchen:

The after picture. Buyers love granite:

And our house is under contract! Hopefully if things go well with the buyer and their finances, it will be sold two weeks from now. The house passed its inspection on Thursday (more late nights of DIY leading up to that!) so we’ve now done all we can do, and we are relaxing this weekend for the first time in quite a while.

I went for a run this morning, and surprisingly I felt good. My cardio felt like it had lost a bit of fitness, but my legs felt good. I ran 4 miles in 50 minutes and never stopped to walk for even a second.

We keep saying once we get to our new house, we will refocus our eating and we’ll have more time to run. That’s been the whole point of moving. Our new house is in an area where we love to run (see this post), and we designed the kitchen ourselves so we know we will use it. Plus, we won’t be spending all our free time fixing it up, because it doesn’t need work.

We are scheduled to move on Friday. I cannot wait.

p.s. Our dog is doing well. She got her stitches removed a week ago, but one part hadn’t healed properly, so she got 6 staples put in to a small 2 inch area. I’m still bringing her to work everyday. Her staples are scheduled to come out next week.