I'm not sure what I'm talking about

How do I look today? Verging on positively mental.  With an unfortunate arrangement of crispy, wild hair, not a whisper of makeup and to make matters worse I've been gorging on quorn scotch eggs since late morning.  What's happened to me, Monday? Some sort of crazy ups and downs.

Believe it or not, despite my unruly appearance I'm on my way up.  We might need to start fresh with the not-looking-like-a-crazywoman thing tomorrow, but I promise I'll even wear deodorant and I promise we're still on with this Janathon thing.  (Illustration above done for Whitelines magazine issue 106, January 2013)

It's just been - well - you know, sometimes you just gotta stick up for yourself and say what you want.  (Sometimes that involves taking a day off, whether you like it or not.)

When in doubt: hibernate, cry if necessary and say what you feel.  Cake also helps.  As does cheese.

I didn't take the whole weekend off, nooonono.  Just Friday.  Although snow+rain+freezing temperatures makes for very challenging running conditions, so Saturday was almost a no-go as well!

Fortunately the pretty blue sky on Saturday morning was too hard to resist so I got my butt outside for 5 miles and I didn't land on said butt once.

Turns out the run was a perfect start to a top day that involved lots of time with my other half, coffee, new runners, and a lunchdate.  I was back in the game :)

PS: LOOK AT MY NEW SHOES LOOK AT MY NEW SHOES LOOK AT MY NEW SHOES

And yesterday I put these pretty things on my feet and went out for a slow and steady 13.6 miles with my training buddies.  It was followed nicely by another lunchdate - delicious sweet potato sandwich and hot cup of tea.  mmm.

And here's an absolutely irrelevant photo of some dried chillis from our chilli plant.  Give me a break, it's Monday, and I have spent a large amount of it consuming imitation meat with egg.  I need to lie down now.