It has been a GREAT day so far. This morning I made my usual pre-run breakfast: peanut butter banana sandwich.

Then Dana and I headed out to St. Paul for a run along the Mississippi River. We had nine miles on the agenda today and mother nature surely lined up beautiful weather for us. It was about 60° and blue skies.

I ran with my iPhone and jammed out to 90’s Pop Radio. I was serenaded by the Spice Girls, LFO (what happened to them?), Meredith Brooks, Backstreet Boys, you name it. I knew every song that came on and thoroughly enjoyed having them cheering me on. It helped  keep my mind off of my aching knees, lower back, and hip flexors which I began to notice during the last couple of miles.

Please excuse the extremely unattractive photo. Who’s the nerd? Will run for Powerade!

After completing this 9 miler today, I am beginning to regain confidence in my endurance, and in my half marathon training progression. The half marathon is now just 3 weeks from tomorrow. We are going to be heading up north next weekend, which means we really only have one more weekend at home before the race. Yikes. However, I remind myself that I’m not out to set any world records, I’m just out to finish the race and then stuff my face with food.

I do know I need to keep working on the mental aspect of running because I can so easily tell myself that I’m struggling with a run and allow myself to call it quits early, when in retrospect I really could have kept running had I mentally told myself I was just fine. Last night, I pictured myself having a good run today, and finishing the run strong. I also read inspirational running quotes, and reminded myself of my personal tips for getting through runs such as using my arms to help pull myself up a hill and thinking about what I have to look forward to once the run was over (in this case: Powerade, family, pizza, and cake).

I felt incredibly accomplished after this run today. The last time I ran this far was August 2011 when Dana and I participated in a 15k in Edina, MN.

Once again, having Dana running by my side today made this run a whole lot better and much more enjoyable. I encouraged him to pose with his Powerade for this photo on our car  ride home.

After our run, we headed home. We cleaned up the house and I got busy in the kitchen in preparation for company. My mom, dad, and brother Kevin were coming over to celebrate my dad’s birthday and Mother’s Day.

I was in charge of the dessert today, and since I’d really like to improve upon my cake-making skills, I decided that this was a perfect opportunity for me to practice. I made two cakes and I baked them last night. I used a standard white cake recipe and a standard chocolate cake recipe and made one round pan of each because I was planning to make a layer cake. You know me though, I just had to try to make the cakes a little bit healthier, so I cut out the butter from the batter recipe and instead used Greek yogurt. How do you like that? The cakes turned out well! They were more dense than normal cake and we all seemed to enjoy the more moist texture, not to mention the flavor was great!

I made the two-layer cake starting with the vanilla white cake on the bottom, a layer of homemade buttercream frosting, then the chocolate cake, and lastly a whole lot more buttercream frosting. I did my best to decorate it but I’ll admit it looked pretty amateur. The frosting was NOT low-fat by the way.

The most important part was that everyone enjoyed it and I had a really fun time making it. I can’t wait to practice again.

Let’s back it up a tad here because we did eat lunch before dessert although I’m not opposed to doing the opposite. Dad wanted to compare two of our local pizza places for lunch, so they picked up one Hawaiian Pizza from one restaurant, and one Veggie Pizza from another restaurant. Mom also brought a fruit and veggie tray and we put out some snack mix.

Mmm..both pizzas were delicious but I preferred the Hawaiian Pizza which was from Red Savoy’s. Num. I went back for more goodies after this first plate of food.

Then we all hung out for a while and enjoyed the beautiful day together before diving into dessert (described above).

We sang “Happy Birthday” and dad blew out his candles. Another year younger, right dad?

I love my family so much. I don’t think I will ever be able to put into words just how much they mean to me. I know I have said this before and I will most definitely say it again.

They took off about an hour ago. Now the hubs is out cutting the grass and then we have a couple or errands to run before relaxing for the night. I am very excited to have a quiet night tonight.

I hope everyone is having an equally wonderful day, or has at least found one thing to smile about today. 🙂

Sorry this post was a little bit all over the place. I am in a very lovey mood. I’ll leave ya with this. Check out what mom brought me today.

Absolutely gorgeous. Thanks mama!

Don’t forget to stop and smell the flowers.

What made YOU smile today?