Vermont Brewers Fest with a small side of running

Happy Monday, friends!

Normally, I’m not such a fan of Mondays. While I always enter the weekend with good intentions and high hopes for productivity, I usually leave it with an untouched grocery list, a pile of sweaty laundry, and a sink full of dirty pint glasses from one last gasp of weekend fun.

This Monday, was really no different, and after rolling into town from the 10 hour trip (thanks for that, summer traffic) back from Vermont, the situation was even more dire than usual.

20 hours in a car for less than 48 hours in Vermont. Totally #worthit

And instead of tending to my neglected chores when I collapsed through the door at 7pm, I ate tacos and drank cocktails with a running friend, which was a pretty perfect end to a pretty perfect weekend full of delicious beer, Vermont sunsets and good friends to lust after the views with, lamenting our decisions to ever move out of the state that is clearly the most perfect in the nation.

But unlike most Mondays, when I am tempted to play snooze chicken with my phone, this morning, I was ready to jump out of bed and hit the road…this time gloriously sans car.

While my weekend was full of many things, running was not one of them.

Beer, friends and good Vermont air. Check check and check. Garmins and gus, not so much. 

There was no race. No long run. No back to back runs, no double workouts, and no speed sessions. The only time I spent in my hokas, was for an unclocked 12 miles along the waterfront on Saturday morning. And I’m pretty sure that if the garmin didn’t see it happen, it didn’t really happen.

12 is not only the number of miles I logged this weekend, but also the number of hours I spend consuming craft brews at all three sessions of the Vermont Brewers Festival.

The only athletic feat of the weekend…and it was most definitely not mine.

I’m all for a healthy balance between playing hard and training hard, but matching my weekend mileage to the number of hours spent imbibing might be pushing it, even for me.

Year after year, I join my fellow brew fest A-Teamers to experience the special magic that can only be found through attending all 3 sessions of the Vermont brew fest in a mere 28 hours.

Like every other year, we dominated. But as you can imagine, dominating 12 hours of craft brew consumption, while not dominating miles, leaves your body in a special place.

So this morning was game on. The benefit of not adhering to a color-coded, google doc, spreadsheet training schedule, is that when you take an unplanned rest day, you can’t really freak out about missing a run, because really, there was no run to miss. I don’t remember the last time I took a full rest day, pretty sure I was either on crutches or traveling back from the Eugene Marathon, but when it happens, I choose not to fret, chalk it up as something my body will probably appreciate, and then hit my next training run hard.

This morning included. I headed out the door for an 11 mile run, which quickly turned into an 11 mile sub goal pace/progression run when I decided a weekend of hard play left me wanting nothing more than a hard workout.

I could tell that my body still has some words for how I treated it this weekend. It says “torture”, I say a record-breaking number of servings of the best belgian strong ale I’ve ever tasted is a sign of undying love. But I wanted to push my legs a little and they were willing to get pushed. So pushed I did, until the last half mile, where I decided a gentle cool down was in order, which thanks to all the pushing and humidity, was a very ugly, very slow shuffle through my neighborhood. This obviously happened to be the half mile that I ran into a very fast friend from college who just moved back to DC. He suggested we hang out some time, I suggested we go for a run. He pretended not to hear me over his music. I’ll probably spend this evening texting him my athlinks profile to prove I could hang for a run.

And again, I will say, Happy Monday! I hope you hit your weekend harder than I did on the working out front, and matched me on the playing front, but if not, don’t stress, giddy up for a hard sweat today. And if you’re also in the swamp of DC, that shouldn’t be hard at all.