Happy New Year!

It's already 2016! I'm looking forward to a great year.

It's going to be so much fun watching Myles as he grows and develops from this little (big) baby into a toddler. Right now he's enjoying things like playing with his feet and putting all his toys in his mouth. He also seems to take pleasure in confusing me by sleeping 6 or 8 hours at a time for a night or two, and then going back to waking up every 3 hours.

I have some goals I'm really looking forward to.

• Physical fitness
• Run a half marathon 
• Go for a walk/run 3-4 days a week. On rainy days, a yoga or pilates video is an acceptable substitute.
• Spiritual
• Study and follow along with the Gospel Doctrine lessons. (It occurred to me that I don't usually try to pay attention and get a lot out of Sunday School. It's always been my least favorite hour of church. But I bet this will make a huge difference in how I perceive it!)
• Do the basics! Morning and evening prayers, scripture study, Family Home Evening. Why are the basics always the hardest?
• Other
• Learn to bake bread. Grandma Briscoe's recipe, to be precise. And hopefully foccacia bread.
• Make and stick to a monthly budget, especially in groceries and extra spending (clothes, stuff for the home, etc). This is a big one for me. Maybe THE goal of the year. 

I'm also going to get back on track with this whole blog thing (since I'm no good at journal writing, except my gratitude journal). But that's more of a plan than a resolution.

And now, a cute picture of my little boy. Because I can't publish a blog post without putting one in. Just can't.

P.S. I'm sharing these goals with whoever reads this blog as a form of accountability. If other people know what my goals are, I'm more likely to follow through with them. So feel free to ask me how I'm doing on any of them, at any point this year!

P'tree Road Race

Yesterday, to celebrate the Land of the Free, I joined roughly 60,000 other people and ran 10K under the hot, Georgia sun.

Ok, it was actually only about 58,000 people, and it was mostly overcast until about mile 4 (although I have no idea what time that is on a normal clock). Still, it was an interesting way to spend the 4th of July. I've never participated in a race that big, and it was an Experience.

I didn't really want to get out of bed at 5:30 on my day off and wasn't really in the mood for running (oh also, I haven't gone running once since my last race, the ten-miler. Oops. Not good training. Again). Getting ready, etc, blah blah blah... It took a lot longer to get to the start line than we expected, so I didn't start with my assigned wave (D) but with wave G. Which I was actually good with, because I was nervous about starting with such a fast wave. There were something like 25 waves, and several thousand people in each wave. So crazy. 

I entertained myself for the first four miles by waving at people and watching the crowds of runners. I liked to try to get people to cheer for me specifically. It was nice and hot, but luckily for everyone, it had rained nicely the night before and cooled the city down. By mile five, I was just going into running zone mode. And trying to keep my pace up enough that I would finish under an hour. The sixth mile seemed very long, but that's mostly because they didn't have the mile marked, and it just went straight to the finish line. It got very hot once we finished at Piedmont Park. Lots of sweaty people and no air movement.

Overall, I am very pleased with both the experience and my performance. I met my sub-hour goal with a time of 58:01. I bet I would do better if I actually trained though.

Rope Mill Adventure Run

Today was an adventure. Literally. For the past two months or so, I've been signed up to be in this 10-mile trail run. Naturally, I haven't trained for it very well. This time my excuse is work, which I find to be an almost valid excuse. I have trained some, just not enough to be ready for ten miles of trail running.

I woke up early this morning and drove up to the town of Woodstock to Rope Mill Park, an area developed for mountain bikers and dirt bikers (although my co-worker Josh tells me you can't ride there much anymore because of all the runners). Checked into the race, noticed the sign that said transferring between the 10 mile and 4 mile races was not allowed on race day. (Dang it. I would be able to survive a four mile run.) Then I had a while to hang out, stretch, admire the park.

We started on a concrete path and ran on that for about half a mile, then continued on a gravel road, then a single-file dirt trail. It was kind of nice to be in a single file, because then I was running with people who I thought were about my pace, without the awkwardness of "Mind if I run with you?" As usual, I started at a moderate pace and went with that for a while before deciding that I would actually prefer to go a bit faster, so I passed and left that group. From then on, I would follow behind someone for a while, and eventually pass them. And got passed myself by randomly fast runners who were behind me. It was fun. Lots of up and downs, but never any huge hills. The trails were mostly clear of rocks and trip-able roots, which was really nice. Because we were running through the trees, it never got super hot. Here's a map of our course.

Gotta love switchbacks!

Around mile 3, we had the pleasure of crossing the river, which they told us was only knee-deep. I suppose if you kept to the shallowest part it would've been only knee-deep, but there was a large number of slow-moving people there, so I went off to the side and ended up wet to my waist. But I passed a bunch of people, so that was cool. Shortly thereafter the course routed us down onto a creek bed for a little ways. Not a dry creek bed, although I suppose if you were really trying you could make it through without getting additionally wet. I didn't try to do that, and passed a couple more people. Fun fun fun. Next we had to "scramble over boulders"...for about 20 feet. Again, passing people. I don't know why they stop running just when it gets fun.

Just a little further on was the shoe change drop. The ten-mile runners had the option of sending a spare pair of shoes and socks in a bag with volunteers to change into after finishing the water portion. I considered not stopping to change shoes, but the wetness and sand didn't seem pleasant for the next 7 miles. So that took somewhere between 3-5 minutes. A lot of the people I had passed on the fun parts passed me again.

After that, we were more spread out, and I was rarely with someone for very long. I thought running by myself I'd have difficulties pushing myself to run instead of walk, but it really wasn't bad. I did walk some, but never for very long (apparently Ms. Ryan's insistence on only allowing us to walk for ten steps at a time has stayed with me for the past ten years, although I went with the more reasonable "30 seconds" rule. By keeping walking times short, you don't lose your pace so much). This is when I really appreciated having my iPod and armband with me to run. I'm afraid I've gotten attached to having either music or talking as I run longer distances.

There were no mileage markers along the trail, so when I came up on the concrete path that we had started on, I was rather surprised - I'd expected at least another mile still. However, I was perfectly happy to merely run the half mile to the finish line. Couldn't make myself go very fast on that part, but no one passed me, either. Hooray, finish! Time 1:41. That's an average of ten-minute miles, but with the shoe change, it means I was running faster than that. That's a really great pace for me! I can't wait to do a trail half-marathon in November.

A Simple Existence

This past week my life settled into a very simple little routine. Which left room for very little else.
5:30 (ish)AM Wake up and get dressed. Eat breakfast and pack lunch.
6:45 AM Work.
5:00 PM Home. Collapse onto my bed for a few minutes before getting up to shower. Check email, etc.
7:00 PM Dinner.
8:30 PM Get ready for and go to bed.

Eat, work, shower, eat, sleep. Simplistic, right? It's been kind of nice, not to have other things to worry about, and to be going to bed so early. Who needs a social life, anyway? I do have some time on the weekends to do other things. Friday night I went to a church dance (not so fun, actually. But I was being social!).

On Saturday morning, Kara and I ran in a 5K road race, which was pretty fun. I haven't run a 5K since high school, I'm pretty sure. I've only done longer distances, which makes the 3.1 miles seem almost laughably short. However, I haven't been training very well (a big surprise to all of those who know my training habits...) and really had no idea how to pace a 5K. It turned out ok. My mile splits were: mile 1 - 9:00, mile 2 - 8:27, mile 3 - (about) 8:00, last .1 mile - about 0:44. For a total time of 26:11. Not a PR, but it is up there with my better times from high school. Cool, eh?

Other things that spice up this life are the weather - it's hit 80 degrees, but now we're back down to a high of 45. I've been informed that this has been a remarkably mild winter. Lots of rain, a little bit of sunshine. Friday night brought a huge storm including several lightning/thunder combinations that woke me up in the middle of the night. Spring is definitely here, whether it's supposed to be or not. We've had daffodils and magnolia blossoms out for several weeks now, as well as more subtle signs like silver maple blossoming, leaf buds swelling and even breaking, especially on sweetgum. More recently it's been obvious, including redbud trees blossoming, cherry trees, red maples flowering, crocus, hyacinth, and tulips, and the viney yellow jasmine. I love spring and all the spring flowers!

I'm sure I'll have more spring flower pictures to post soon!

Stone Mountain Morning

This morning, Kara and I went to Stone Mtn - Atlanta's resident mountain. Which is actually just a "quartz monzonite dome monadnock" (Wikipedia). It's a big rock, which counts as a mountain here, since it's the closest thing to it for at least an hour.

The weather was supposed to be sunny and clear, but chilly (aka, 45-55 degrees). We planned to hike/run on the 4.something trail around the mountain, and then decide if it was warm enough to have a picnic lunch. 

As it turned out, it was absolutely perfect weather for a nice jog through the woods. We took it nice and slow, with plenty of time to appreciate the weather, views, and the fact that running across slanting rock is not actually a good idea. It took about an hour and a half to go around the mountain on the non-extended Cherokee trail. I took a lot of pictures.

I was told the straight hair and pigtails look makes me look sporty and Swedish. 

Perfect for trail running.

Slanting rock that has water running down it. Not the best for running.

Absolutely gorgeous running next to the lake.

Cool old-style building with a water wheel! and bridges.

After the run was over, we decided the weather was beautiful and we would have a picnic. Honestly it was just like an idyllic morning of exercise and outdoors. I'm hoping to spend a lot of my time in Atlanta doing stuff like this. 

It's good to have a goal

This past April I ran the Moab Marathon. Quite slowly and very painfully (great scenery though!). And I hadn't been on one run since then. However, in the last two weeks, I've added two new running goals to my life. Events to work up to. 

     The first to come up is the Moonlight Half Marathon...in four weeks. Though the training for this will be intense and quite frankly stupid, I'm really excited. The idea is that the runners choose when to start the race, with the goal of being the first person to cross the finish line after midnight. I love running at night and this will just be fun. I'm training and running the race with my friend Beth from work. Goal: 2 h 5 m, on Aug 12.

     Next up is probably more insane, but I'll have more time to train. Ragnar Relay Race: Lake Mead to Las Vegas. I'll be in a team with 12 runners, and we'll rotate three rounds of taking turns running. The total distance is 195 miles, but I'll probably only be running 15 or 16 of that. "It will be fun." So far the team is my friend Kalie, her mom and sister, some of their cousins, maybe my boss Max and his wife, and some other people I don't know yet. I'm excited for this because it's not just a race, it's an experience! And probably also because I'm kinda insane. Either way, I have until October to get ready. Goal: survive and help team, on Oct 21-22.

     I have started training, and hopefully I'll keep training enough such that I don't die in either of these endeavors. That would be not so good. Also, any good training tips are welcomed. I need help.