"Dear God, please get us through these last two minutes..."

I thought last week Wednesday was difficult (Gone with the Wind blogpost)! We had a great day today, slept in until 10am and the sun was already blazing so we decided to do another night run. We went to the zoo, Nick prepared an amazing rib dinner (his first time cooking ribs and I am telling you, the meat just fell of the bone beautifully!), played bocce ball, and prepared for an evening run. As great as that BBQ dinner was, it hurt us tonight, in combination with the heat and not enough hydration to compete with the humidity. As exciting as it has been, getting into running, and being motivated to exercise with Nick, I need to train myself to not only run, but to hydrate through out the day and eat smaller portions! Tonight definitely became a matter over mind run. My body felt like lead and when I would attempt to take a deep breath while running to calm my breathing it would only worsen. Tonight was also a step up in our training program, it was the second day in a row that we ran and instead of running 1min/walk 2min x10 it was run 2min/walk 1min x10. I am so grateful that in between our 2 hard runs we have had 2 really great runs. This encouraging and motivates me to push further. And not to mention, I have the greatest running partner ever. He pushed me tonight when I felt like wimping out. There were a couple times tonight where he would say "40 seconds left" or "1 minute mark" and I would just say "shhhhhh...."; this is where the matter over mind game fell into place because I was focusing so much on how hard it was tonight, instead of realizing how great we were doing!  He consistently encourages me, and protects -- there were at least two different times tonight on our run where he asked me to switch places on the sidewalk -- when we would be running by darker areas he would have me run closer to the road. He said it was because he can see what's on the road but not in the darker areas -- he did it to protect me. I am so grateful that God has placed such a great man in my life who loves me, challenges me, and protects me. God is going to do awesome things in our life, I hope for it and I believe it!

This is what week 2 will look like for us, I know that day 2 of running is going to be even more of a challenge. Last week we ran the same routine every time where this week, it increases each time.

Monday (done): Run 2min; Walk 1 min; Repeat 10x
Tuesday: Walk easy 30min
Wednesday: Run 3 min; Walk 1 min; Repeat 7x; Run 2 min
Thursday: Walk easy 30min
Friday: Run 4min; Walk 1min; Repeat 6x
Saturday: Run 4min; Walk 1 min; Repeat 6x
Sunday: Rest

Click this link to see the book we have been reading, also includes training programs!