Guest Blog Post – Mom’s view on running on vacay

Hey, it’s Carol, aka MOM, and while Solana and Jay are in transit to their own holiday, I thought I’d do a little post on how I handle traveling & running…

First off, it’s not easy, not easy at all, even when you enjoy the running! So many things get in the way.  It’s too hot and if you don’t get out there really early then forget it!  And there is so much going on, so how does one get to bed early enough to get up early?  Especially when our nights look like this :

A little backstory : We are SNOWBIRDS!  We travel south to Mexico when it starts to get cool at home and we don’t come back home until its Spring!  We travel south in a 37-foot Georgetown Motorhome and its pretty comfy!  We have been doing this since 2006 and we have been having a pretty good time AND packing on the weight a little bit at a time.

This is Richard in front of George :

Both my husband, Richard, and I decided to lose weight to look good for Solana’s wedding June 2011 and we did!  We worked hard, changed some bad habits and dropped about 30 lbs each.

In Spring 2012, after coming home from being south all winter again, and trying to stay active, walking and bike riding, and after doing the Vancouver Sun Run, I decided that I wanted to do more running as a way to keep the weight off, plus I was enjoying it (who knew??).  I was feeling good and I liked how running made me feel.  Also, living in the same house with Solana is like living in Boot Camp Central!  It’s a lot harder to be lazy with her around, and we were compelled to get off the couch!  Solana challenged me to do a half marathon and she devised a training program for me, a very aggressive one, I worked hard at it and had an awesome half Sept 30^th in the Surrey World Music Marathon.  You can read all about my training program here, and my race recap here.

Oct 17, 2012, we headed south, once again, and part of our itinerary was 2 cruises out of Florida before we headed to Mazatlan, Mexico.  How do you ever stay in shape and not put on weight when on a cruise???  Especially hot & humid cruises!  We cruised from Fort Lauderdale through the Panama Canal to San Diego.  Over 2 weeks we managed to run 5 times on the ship…funny thing was the first time we ran on the ship’s jogging track, we could not figure out why our GPS’s did not make any sense…DUH…the ship was moving…lol!

We finally arrive in Mazatlan, our warm spot for the winter, and I was really excited about finally being able to settle into a routine and get back into the running.  But that was not to be as we picked up salmonella our first week and that really set me back another 2 weeks.  I missed doing the 10k that is part of the Mazatlan Marathon because of this.  I am still not back to my running base although we have managed to get back running.

It’s been really hard to fit it in!  You have to be on the road before 8:00am or its just too hot! And there are so many things that interfere, like …walking on the beach, reading on the beach, going for breakfast, going shopping, doing laundry…etc, etc, etc, and of course we like to go bike riding.

We like to do hard bicycle rides a few times a week and on Sundays we like to do a long ride with friends.  This usually includes stopping for a few ice-cold cervezas!

Another thing that we love to do is on Thursdays we take the old bus all the way to the end of the line, about 45 minutes, to El Faro…Lighthouse Hill.

This is what our luxury transport looks like :

The Hill is our mini Grouse Grind and we time our climb, gate to gate, to see how fast we can get to the top, and every time we knock off more seconds!  Last year we went from 24:00 to 11:00!!  This year, we started out at 13:40, and are aiming to beat 10 minutes before we head North!

After climbing back down from Lighthouse Hill we walk about a kilometer to a killer set of steep stairs (188) to a restaurant that has a great view of Stone Island, the yacht basin and Lighthouse Hill.  Sometimes we stop here for much needed refreshment.  aka cervezas!

As you can see, our days are very busy and very full and when I wake up in the morning and want to roll over and go back to sleep, I tell myself “you can’t wear a bikini if you don’t get your butt outta bed!” or “you ate too much at dinner last night, get to work” …and when I am not listening to these inner voices, Richard will pipe up and say “Are we running today?”  I hate to admit it, but we’ve really become a family of runners now.  I’m not sure whether to thank or curse Solana.

Often, when running in Mazatlan, around our area, I see this man (I was going to say old, but that’s not nice), and he’s got to be 80 yrs YOUNG, and he’s running (shuffling along), and he always smiles, and say to me “Keep up the good work!”  This puts a smile on my face, and reminds me that it’s never too early or too late to become a runner.  I hope we’ll still be out there shuffling along in another 20 yrs.

Oh, what’s that I hear?  A cerveza on the beach calling my name?  Gotta go…

- Carolina