34 posts tagged “dad”
That's right, I survived my very first half marathon! Today was such an amazing day - I'm still floating on adrenaline! I was super nervous this morning... if you know me, you know how I get. I'm cranky and, well, a little bit on the bitchy side when I'm really scared about something. So you can only imagine the sorts of things I was saying to other drivers on the road who cut me off at the exit.
My good friend Susan left me some great advice on Facebook last night... she said "the challenge in marathon running is getting to the starting line, knowing what lies ahead and having the guts to start. The rest will take care of itself." Honestly, it was so true. I was so freaked out until I actually started the race. Once we took off, it was "just run"... like every other run I've done for three months. Amazing.
And, of course, my fantastic family was there to support me! Adam and Eva brought some "flair" with them to make sure that our family was the loudest most visible group on the course:
And cheer they did... I know some of you are skeptical, but let me tell you, I was happy to have ANYONE cheering for me. My friend Jess also came to cheer... it was so amazing having all that support! Here's the family and I before the race:
The weather could not have been more perfect - it was cold, but once I started running, it was enough to cool you down without cramping your muscles. I started out pretty fast (hooray for adrenaline). My goal was to run 10 minute miles, which would have given me a final time of around two hours and ten minutes. Instead, I ended up doing roughly nine minute thirty-three second miles which gave me a final time of two hours and five minutes. I'm so super proud of myself! Towards the very end of the race, I seriously wanted to cry. I'm not sure if I was just that tired or if I was overwhelmed by it all or both. The only real pain I have going on is some seriously screwed up feet. I spilled some water on my shoes at one of the aid stations and managed to get it to soak through my socks... leaving me with some great blisters. Other than that, just the normal soreness!
Mike was stuck on a fire all night but was still sweet enough to drag his tired self down to catch what he could of the race. I honestly didn't think he'd make it, so I was blown away (and probably a little delirious) when I saw him standing at the top of the stairs. Here's us (don't I look great after 13.1 miles?):
After the run we headed over to Mom and Dad's for a delicious lunch (trust me, today I'm ready to eat just about anything!). I then went over to Betty's for a little going away party for one of our CERT members, Cheryl, who is moving to Texas. We did an offical "couch picture" for Cheryl to remember us by:
I spent the rest of tonight working on the pictures and catching up on some work... I think I'm just about ready for bed! For those of you who are wondering, yes, I'm still contemplating doing the full marathon, although I'll need some time to think about it. Here are the final stats for this run:
Half Marathon Final Stats
First Day Training: January 4th
Race Date: March 15th
Final Race Time: 2:05:08.3
Total Miles Logged: 178.6
Well, tomorrow at this time I will have just started my first half marathon. Yup, I'm a little nervous. No idea why - I've done 12 miles for the last two weekends, so I'm pretty sure that the extra 1.1 miles won't kill me. Oh well... today I'm heading over to Mom and Dad's to hang out - the whole gang is here! Adam, Eva, Mom, Dad, Kati and Oma are all there ready to chill and BBQ later tonight. It looks like it's supposed to rain, which is a little bit of a bummer, but nothing I can't handle!
Ok, off to carb load! :)
Marathon Update
Miles This Week and last: 27
Total Miles: 166
Well, this weekend pretty much sucked. I had some pretty cool plans with Mike for Valentine's Day on Saturday (hooray for wine tasting), but somehow managed to come down with the flu. Fantastic timing, right? Let me rewind to the one cool part of the weekend...
Dad decided to surprise Mom and fly in for the weekend, which was awesome. He had to fly into Oakland late on Friday, so Kati and I drove to pick him up. Mom had no clue (despite some pretty terrible lies on my part) and was completely surprised. It was awesome! I got back to my house at about 1:30am and went to bed. I had been feeling pretty tired that whole day, but I was figuring it was from my 10 mile run. Saturday morning I woke up with a fever, a rash, and a headache. Definitely not Valentine's Day material. As much as it killed me (and those of you who know me know it killed me) I stayed home in bed. I pretty much slept the whole day, went to bed at 9pm and still slept until 8am on Sunday. Crazy. Kati was awesome and made a delicious Valentine's Day meatloaf and we watched movies together until I passed out. The good news is that the fever is gone now and I'm feeling a lot less tired. I spent all of Sunday at Mom and Dad's house relaxing and most of today reading and napping. I guess my little body needed some rest! Shadow was a trooper... he was more than happy to hang out in bed with me and take lots of naps... I have to admit, it was pretty relaxing!
Marathon Update
Miles This Week: 19
Total Miles: 101!
Well, the last few days have been pretty cool... I had a fantastic birthday. I celebrated my birthday with Mom, Dad and Kati on the 1st because Kati had to work on my actual birthday - we went out to dinner at the Olive Garden and had a wonderful time! On my actual birthday, I had the whole day to do absolutely nothing, with (this should be a HUGE surprise) I actually did! I stayed in my pjs until almost 4pm! Mike came down to take me out to dinner but wouldn't tell me where we were going. We went downtown to The Broiler Steakhouse for a fantastic dinner. Well, the waitress did try to poison me with mushrooms, but I managed to survive! :) After that, Mike took me down to the Community Center Theater to see Stomp! If you ever have the chance to go see them, DO IT! It was a great show! We did have a pretty funny dude sitting in front of us... he was a super loud laugher and laughed at weird parts of the show that weren't funny! All in all, it was an awesome night! Mike rocks!
Today we went ot the Bay Area to visit Grandma and Aunt Sandi who were up in Washington over Christmas. It was so good to spend some time with them and see them for a while!
Tonight has been a super relaxing night - I've been chilling on the sofa with Shadow watching Season 1 of "ER" - I'm a happy girl!
Ok, I know it's a few days late, but apparently I've been really bad at blogging lately! Here's the 2008 recap:
January
- January 1st: Shadow breaks my nose. Happy New Years!
- January 13th: I get smacked in the nose again at a CERT drill and realize that my nose really is broken.
- January 17th: I started EMT school - so exciting!
February
- February 28th: My first of many encounters with the neighborhood turkies.
March
- March 8th: Houseboat weekend with Brigitte and Amber!
- March 15th: Mather Air Show Day One: lots of patients to practice on!
- March 16th: Mather Air Show Day Two: more patients!
- March 26th: My hospital rotation - a life changing experience!
April
- April 18th: Rivercats baseball game with Dad, Brigitte and Amber
- April 19-20th: CERT Mobex - disaster drill in Clovis
May
- May 10th: Kati graduates from UGA - Mom, Dad and I flew back for a fantastic weekend in Georgia!
- May 13th: NREMT exam - I passed and am officially an EMT!
- May 24th: EMT party - absolutely hilarious - everyone came dressed as some sort of victim... it was great!
June
- June 10th: Metro's CERT team is called up to help out with the local grass fires
- June 21st: Saved my first patient at a CERT event
July
- July 14th: Visited my customer in Houston. Hot and sticky. Ate more steak than a girl should!
- July 20th: Kati moves home from Georgia!
August
- August 8th: Joanna and Chris come to visit!
- The rest of August - Kati and I go to Germany, France, Italy and Greece... it's the trip of a lifetime!
September
- September 14th: Met Mike! :)
- September 24th: Had a close encounter with a tomato hornworm. Had to call Julie in for backup.
- September 26th: Went to the Neil Diamond concert with Kati!
October
- October 9th: Went to the New Kids On The Block concert with Julie, Mindy, Amanda and Chris.
- October 16th: Selected for the Sarah Weeden jury - little did I know it would last two months!
- October 31st: Halloween party!
November
- November 1st: Went to the Madonna concert with Adam and Eva!
- November 4th: Barak Obama is elected president
- November 26th: Thanksgiving vacation at Lake Almanor
- November 15th: Second Annual Friends Thanksgiving!
December
- December 11th: Sarah Weeden trial ends
- December 30th: Kings game with Mike
- December 31st: Mike's New Years Eve Party - LOTS of pig!
All in all, I'd say it was a fantastic year! Who can complain?!
Hope everyone had a wonderful New Year! Mike's party was a blast - they roasted 120 pounds of pig! It took four of them just a few minutes to cut it all up (lots of practice apparently!). Here's a picture of the pig on the spit:
It was insanely delicious! The party was a blast!
As you probably know, today is my birthday. It's been fantastic... it's 2:30pm and I'm still in my jammies! I've watched a bunch of episodes of "ER" (thanks Mike!) and some "Friends" reruns. It's been wonderfully relaxing!
Well, it's been a long few days! Christmas was spectacular - Mom, Dad, Kati and I made the trip out to the Bay Area to Oma's house where we were joined by Adam, Eva, Tante Cati, Emy, Jake, and Jared. It was so great to see everyone again! I'll be posting pictures on Facebook soon (hint hint - people who took pictures, SEND THEM TO ME!). Jake ended up cooking the whole dinner for us... who knew he was a chef?! We had ham, schnitzel, mashed potatoes, veggies, bread and lots of wine! It was a fantastic meal - well done Jake!
The next three days were basically spent glued to Mom and Dad's sofa. I hadn't really intended to park there, but they bribed me with hash browns and bacon. I can't resist potatoes in almost any form. It was fantastically relaxing... I don't think I've actually done NOTHING for three days straight in a long time!
Santa was good to me this year and I decided to treat myself after Christmas... introducing my new Coach addition:
It's gigantic and I love it!
In sad news, today we lost a member of our family - Adam and Eva had to put Onyx to sleep. Eva has had her for the last 19 or so years - she will definitely be missed!
Those of you that know Shadow know that he can be somewhat of a pickle on occasion (read: pain in the ass), so generally on vacations he heads over to Archie O'Brians Summer Camp (read: the kennel). This Thanksgiving we ended up at Lake Almanor and since there was NO ONE else up there, I decided to take Shadow up to see how he did in the great outdoors. This pup had the time of his life... he sniffed everything, went in the boat, took long walks and just generally enjoyed being a dog. It was so nice to be able to let him have a little fun time too! That said, we had four people (mom, dad, Kati and I) as well as three dogs (Tucker, Darcy and Shadow) in a two bedroom cabin, so after a couple days, it was definitely time for us to go home!
We normally go up to Almanor in the summer, so it was very strange being there in the "offseason". I think the entire time we were there I saw about one other boat on the lake. The water was flat as glass... but a balmy 49-51 degrees. It was killing me not to waterski, but I didn't bring my wetsuit and I think I would need more than a spring suit for that! That said, the weather was beautiful, but cold while we were there. Here's a great picture of the fog sitting on the lake:
It would hover there until about noon and then burn off. Beautiful! Here are a few pictures of Shadow enjoying his time at the lake:
His cute little ears kept flopping in the wind... then he would squish them down to stop them and the wind would sweep under and blow them back. Too cute.
He wanted to see EVERYTHING. The ducks, geese and various other birds really caught his attention!
As with everything else in life, he HAD to help fish!
The fruits of our fishing labors. Dad caught a nearly three pound small mouth bass! That sucker was THICK! Sadly, I got skunked this trip... a couple of good bites, but no fish for me. It's been a long time since that's happened!
It's nice to be back home... today was a day of relaxing for me... I did pretty much nothing all day long! I feel like the next couple of weeks are going to be busy, so I think it's well deserved!
Remember how I said I spent all weekend cleaning and that my house was all neat and tidy? Well, on Monday Kati decided that she wanted to move in with me.
My house looks like a tornado hit it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm BEYOND excited that Kati is moving in and am so happy she wants to live with me. It's just that all my hard work is completely gone. There's dog hair EVERYWHERE (Mom, Dad, Darcy and Tucker came to help) and there's just STUFF everywhere. We've spent the last two days cleaning, building furniture (hooray for IKEA!), arranging (Kati is living in the office and we've moved the office to the guest room) and organizing. This weekend I'm going to go through and clean out the garage so there's room for her car.
At some point during yesterday's fun and games, we let all three dogs outside. My neighbors are currently fostering a lab/chow mix who wanted to join in the fun and busted through some of the fence boards. I'm not kidding, it was like a zoo. Shadow had the time of his life playing with Darcy and Tucker as well as overseeing the building/cleaning/organizing. I love that little guy!
I can't wait for Europe!
A whole lot happened this weekend!
First of all, the birds nest that I found in my yard is a mockingbird nest, which explains the songs that I've been hearing and the night singing. Today I noticed the bird (who I will now call Mama Bird) going in and out a lot with worms. I carefully climbed up without touching the tree at all (so I wouldn't scare her away) and peeked in. Lo and behold, baby birds:
I know, it's not much to look at, but just remember that I was teetering on the top of a ladder trying not to touch the tree. They are definitely little babies and I counted at least three. It makes me happy!
Speaking of happy... KATI CAME HOME TODAY! Woo hoo! I'm so happy she's here! She has some amazing pictures from her and Dad's roadtrip (stay tuned for her blog and/or MySpace). I headed over to Mom and Dad's this afternoon to let the dogs swim/play together and then went to dinner with Mom while we were waiting for Kati. This morning I forced myself to relax... I actually sat down, watched a movie and did nothing else. That's very hard for me to do, but it felt great!
Friday/Saturday were spring cleaning days... my house is spic and span! The only area I didn't get to was the garage, which I'll probably save for another weekend. It was totally relaxing and productive!
Now me and my tired dog are off to bed!
This was a much needed three day weekend - I'm finally feeling rested and ready to go - it's been a while since I've felt "caught up"!
On Friday I hung out at Mom and Dad's - Shadow had the most fantastic time swimming with Darcy and Tucker! I was hoping that all of the running, swimming and playing would poop him out and he would sleep through the fireworks. More on that later. Mom and Dad had Fran and Chuck over and we had a declicious BBQ - nothing says it's summer like chicken, corn and pasta salad!
Mom, Fran and I headed out to the Folsom Rodeo - I got tickets through work. I'm not gonna lie, it's not the best rodeo in the world. In fact, none of the bull riders stayed on the bulls for the full 8 seconds. Most of them were bucked off in about 2. I did get to watch the Folsom Fire Paramedics hard at work - they had a few people in the stands that needed attention and a cowboy who took a nasty fall. My favorite part on that one was the announcers medical play by play ("Ladies and Gentlemen, as you can see, they're putting the collar on. This is just a precaution in the event of a spinal injury"). My favorite part of the whole rodeo was the parachuter that they had - he's done over 5,000 jumps and specializes at landing in small spaces, while pulling a gigantic American flag behind him. As he came down, they played "God Bless the USA" by Lee Greenwood - the ENTIRE stadium was singing along and the whole thing gave me goosebumps. I managed to get some pretty cool video of it:
After the rodeo ended, they did a nice little fireworks display and we headed home. For those of you who missed out on last year's play by play, I had just adopted Shadow and thought I would take him out to see the fireworks, to get him used to it. The whole thing ended up being a total nightmare - he barked and went completely insane and I ended up having to go home. This year I decided to put him in his crate in my room with some music on since I know lots of people do fireworks in my neighborhood. The plan worked brilliantly - when I got home from the rodeo, he was totally calm and happy to see me. I then made the mistake of letting him out into the backyard. At which point some neighbor down the street decided to set off a piccalo pete (Shadow's absolute FAVORITE) and he went nuts. It was all downhill from there. The neighbors did fireworks until 2am and he barked the entire time. I even put him back in his crate with music on, but by then he was all worked up. I ended up sleeping in my guest room.
I had to work a CERT event the next morning at 9am - which amazingly, I was not exhausted for. It was a nice event - nothing really major happened and I got to show a lot of little kids the ambulance. It was still exhausting... I think it was being in the sun and being tired that all hit me on the drive home. I ended up going to bed at about 9pm.
Today was fantastic - I slept in, went to the mall, and took a nap. Shadow got a walk and got to play ball in the yard. Tonight I decided to give him a treat, so I mixed some peas and carrots (from my dinner) into his dog food. Being the genius that he is, he took a mouthful, spit it out on the floor and then sorted through for the peas and carrots. Eventually, he ate the rest of it, but he took his time. Crazy little dog.
