Running Faster and Lizi's Granola Giveaway WINNER!

As I get closer and closer to this design exhibition, work just gets crazier and crazier.  Without giving away too much, we are basically working with a theme which includes my boss and I having two vintage style dresses made - this has been our only light relief in an otherwise chaotic environment.  Today, I went to try on one of my headdresses (I will post loads of photos - promise!) and was literally blown away, I cannot wait for Sunday!

In addition to working full time, I have also sold some of my "fat clothes" on Ebay and it was getting to the point where I'm sure I would get emails from people saying "hey where's my stuff?!", so when I got home from work tonight it was a case of throwing together the ingredients for braised meatballs - shoving it in the oven, packaging up the remainder of the clothes I had to send, literally ran over to the post office (thankfully just around the corner from my house), post those, come back home, check the final proof of our new pricelist for work - email it back, put the linguine on - and then serve the food (keeping mine aside for post-run) before getting changed into my running clothes.  My daughter has Girl Guides on Thursdays (that's the British version of Girl Scouts), so after I dropped her off I did my 2 mile run.

Frankly, I was happy to be running to try to melt some of the stress of the day away.  I honestly think I just switched off during tonight's run and that's exactly what my brain needed - some downtime!  Now the past two runs I have had an annoying side stitch just after the first mile - on Tuesday it was quite painful, so much so that I had to walk briefly twice (which I hate!).  Tonight, thankfully, I just kept the pace steady and slow (when needed) - but when I finished the two miles I was TOTALLY thrilled to see that for the first time since I started running on 17th June, I have busted the 5mph average speed barrier!  OK - this may sound slow to some of you more seasoned runners, but when I started running my average pace was 3.95mph - yep, that's barely faster than walkin!  So to see my speed improve like that is really encouraging!

My next run is actually scheduled for Sunday, but of course I will be at this design exhibition, so I'm going to do this week's long run on Saturday.  Next week will require a bit of juggling too and I'm toying with the idea of taking a Jillian Michael's DVD with me to the hotel in London - I may not have any energy but at least if I have it with me, I will have the option of doing it.  I have a feeling that my running next week might have to be three days on the trot, which isn't ideal, but needs must.

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So - thank you to everyone who entered my very first GIVEAWAY!  Thanks again to Lizi for giving me the opportunity to share her wonderful granola with one lucky reader!  Without further ado, the Random Number Generator picked comment number 14:

Which was:

Congratulations!  Please can you email your name and address to me: pilliepop@aol.com within 24 hours and I will make sure that lovely granola is on it's way to you by Saturday!