Another night of awesome

Tonight I ventured out to do another workout with the local running store weekly workout group called Project Awesome.  It truly is a great group of people.  They are all excited to be there and super encouraging.  I was all pumped and ready to go.  Beth was leading us tonight.  She starts with telling us our warm up.
"We're going to run over to the parking garage..."
So far sounds good.
"Then we're going to run up it.  That's our warm up."
That is our WARM UP?!  Right.  Have I mentioned I'm not a fan of hills?   This group pounded up this parking garage like it is their job.  I did not.  Pretty sure I needed a warm up for that warm up.  Going down sure was fun though.
Then we proceeded to run down to the track for the next part of our workout.  I think it's about .75 miles to the track.  It was about 65-70 degrees tonight but it already felt like 85 and I was thirsty.  It was going to be a long hour.  Like I mentioned, everyone is super friendly.  They enjoy chatting while running.  Chatting while running is not my thing.  Mostly because I can't do it.  I need every ounce of my breath to properly function.  I'm happy to listen to someone else talk though.  But I didn't want to be rude of course and I'm still new to this group...so my .75 mile run went a bit like this:
"So what do you do?"
"I work...huff puff...at...huff puff...State Farm...huff puff."
"Oh I know a lot of people that work there."
"You?"   Because one word questions are the bomb when you can barely speak because you are still trying to recover from running up a 7 floor parking garage.
"Own my own photography business....weddings...etc...." continues to say about a paragraph's worth of sentences here.  "You have kids?"
"One. Huff...puff.  I had her...huff puff...young...huff puff...she's....huff...18...puff...graduate...huff...soon..puff."  Thinking to myself how much I want to walk.
"Wow you don't look old enough..." continues to chat and make me feel young.
"You?"  Picking up on my strategy here?
"What races you have coming up?"
"2 fun runs in April...huff huff puff puff...2 in May, huff...Jay...puff Dix...huff and Go Girl."
"Oh cool you doing the full or half for Go Girl?"
I hold up 5 fingers.  "5k."  Judge me.  I don't do halves in Columbia and I don't do marathons period.  But by this point I couldn't explain I have done 2 halves because all I had left were the huffs and puffs.
The great thing was chatting did make it go faster and it made me not stop and walk even though I would have loved to.  Again a great part of the group, the guy was obviously faster than me and runs more but slowed to my pace to keep chatting.  This is common with everyone so nobody is working out solo.

We proceed to partner up and do relays of walking lunges and burpees.  Which earns a groan from me.  Then Beth announces we are doing 2 laps around the track.  1 easy, 1 hard.  Or in my case, 2 easy.  We come back and do more partner relays.  This time planks and walking planks.  As I'm doing my walking planks I glance over at Beth and say "Great idea Beth."  Those suckers are WAY harder than they look.  I was hoping nobody would notice my modification on the way back to my partner but I heard someone laugh and say "Shyla is crawling."  Caught me.  I owned it.  Heck yeah I'm crawling.  The workout was so hard I literally was crawling to the finish.  Literally.

Next we did some wall sits.  I was next to Beth and I said "Isn't this hour about over yet?"  Then I remembered I am trying to complain less and I said "These are my favorite."  I don't think she believed me.  We did two more "easy" laps around the track.  I was in desperate need of a drink and someone pointed out a water fountain.  It was a mirage.  They didn't work.  Womp womp.  Beth asked how I felt when we finished up...I said "I'm out of gas."  So after all that then we run .75 miles back to the store.  I mostly walked this but did run some.  Until a bug flew right into my eye.  Then I called it.  I think I would rather swallow a bug than have to dig one out of my eye.  It is truly unpleasant.

Lessons learned tonight:
Running up a parking garage is just as hard as it sounds.
Walking planks are a lot harder than they sound.
The fitness community is truly awesome.
This group gives the best high fives.
I need to eat more during the days before a Project Awesome workout.
There's no shame in crawling to the finish line.