This is the week of Thanksgiving. We’ve purchased all the groceries (although I can tell already I’ll need to buy more potatoes). No one is joining us on Thursday; we’re planning to head west to visit family – and deliver leftovers – on Friday. This takes some of the pressure off, but I still have a lot to do this week. I need to make several pies Tuesday evening. Tonight’s NFL game may be a preview of the Super Bowl. I need to fry up sausage and make cornbread for one batch of stuffing. (I do a cornbread stuffing and a white bread stuffing.)

All this made for a too-busy week. I’m not going to want to do my workouts in the evening the next few days. That leaves me with getting up early in the mornings — it’s predicted to be 25°F at 6 a.m. tomorrow — or trying to do them at lunchtime. (That’s at least possible, but difficult to do if I have to be in court at 1:30.)

Hence, I decided that this is a recovery week. I didn’t have one in my schedule. I’m training for a 5K, not a 50K, and a recovery week seems silly when my workouts are all under an hour. The ‘race’ is in four weeks; taking it easy this week won’t negatively impact my progress. It might even improve it. Most importantly, I won’t be stressed out about missing training or missing sleep to try to squeeze in the training.

The air quality isn’t very good right now. We’ve been sitting at “moderate” for over a week, and I think it’s taking its toll: I’ve been sneezing a lot the last few days — so much so I feared my nose was going to start bleeding — and I feel stopped up. I’ve been rinsing my sinuses, and it hasn’t been ‘productive’ as it usually is when my sinuses feel this way. I’m not sure if my sinuses are just super irritated from the ozone & particulate matter and how that results in sneezing fits & a general feeling of nasal congestion. I fear this means running on a treadmill until the air improves. *sad face*

Yesterday broke my 9-day streak of making my step goal every day.  I’m okay with that. I slept in because I’d only slept 5-6 hours the night before. I went to church – that’s about 90 minutes of sitting, with about a half-hour of sitting during the drive, and then standing around for 15-20 minutes at coffee hour. Then I drove to Walla Walla (60 minutes each way) to watch a concert – at which I sat for nearly two hours. It was dark and very cold when the concert was over, so I rejected the idea of going for a walk in Walla Walla. And I had a bunch of chores to do last night – laundry, soup-making, pumpkin roasting, bread-cube making (for stuffing) – so walking last night wasn’t in the cards, either. I could have walked around the living room, but sometimes it’s best to just let things go.