So you guys like it when I’m sassy and kick your ass into gear, it seems. Noted.

Perhaps you’ll see some more sass around here.

What you’ll definitely continue to see a lot of for the next 53 days is running. (Yes, 53 days till the marathon. Ah!!)

Last night, I was not hypocritical at all, and I didn’t make excuses, and I went for what ended up being a 6-mile run. When I only had 5 planned. Rebecca and I hit up the Athleta/Urban Girl Squad running club. She met at my apartment, and we ran the 1.5 miles from here to the Athleta store on the Upper West Side.

We started out at the store (at 70th and Columbus) and then walked over to the park, entering at the 72nd Transverse.

All of these lovely ladies were our coaches for the evening.

There were three groups: beginner, intermediate and advanced.

Advanced was under-9:00 pace (which I probably would have tried if I weren’t training for the marathon) and included speedsters like Megan; intermediate was 10:00-11:00 pace and…I didn’t pay attention to beginner since it wasn’t me. (Sorry.)

The group ran about 1.5 loops of the lower loop of the park. As we started, Rebecca and I were a little frustrated that we were completely in between the two pace groups: faster than intermediate, slower than advanced, but that lady up there raising her right leg caught up with us and chatted with us and pushed us a little harder than we had expected. She’s run Boston and done crazy 12-hour running races, so she’s no joke. It was fun running with her and chatting with her–it almost made me forget that I’d run 18 miles two days earlier and my legs were pretty damn sore.

Overall, I like the idea of running groups, but my experience with the two I’ve tried (this one and the Nike one) is that the pacers are usually off what they say they are. In our case last night, that was fine, since the intermediate group was a bit slower than we wanted to go.

We skipped the stretching to run back to my apartment. Rebecca had planned to take the bus cross-town but it never came, so that rockstar ended up doing nearly 8. The day after she ran 18.

Speaking of the marathon…

I found out my bib number and start time this morning! (If you’re running it: log in and click registration. You can download your registration card and it shows you this info.) I’m starting at 10:40, and I’m in the 52nd corral! Things seem a lot more real now.

Just in case you’ve been missing my food posts (although I’m not sure why you would?)…

…here is some oatmeal with pumpkin spices, almond milk and sunflower butter. I later added a banana, obviously.

And some leftover pasta with added kale and chicken sausage.

I haven’t been doing many food or day-in-the-life of posts lately because my life has sort of been all over the place, but I actually miss these posts myself, so I’ll be trying to add some of these back in when I have time.