Life Happens Part 1

And when you don't blog for months, it's cause it was really happening.  We moved into our new house.





It's amazing.  I waste an hour a day staring out the windows.


Puck has chased a multitude of wildlife.


We've seen even more wildlife. Up close and personal.


You thought I was kidding.


We ran out of water on the first weekend.  We used our handy dandy water truck that came with the house to retrieve more.

We've tried out just about every restaurant and bar in town.  We've been amazed by this community...for a tiny town there is SO MUCH going on here, from live music every single night to an array of festivals and events.

We've had snow, we've had rain, we've had warm sunny days and our whole valley has gone green.

 My closest neighbors are cows.  And we now have baby cows too.

We've wood chipped wood, we've burned wood.

A Tale of Two Races

I might as well catch up on races first.

In March, a few days before we closed on the house, and 2 days before Jeff moved to Colorado, I raced down in Arizona.  It felt like a comedy of errors that morning...my wetsuit tore a giant hole across my ass when I put it on, the race director allowed the volunteers to play all bible music in transition, and the swim was a giant clusterfuck of panicked people.  However, I felt phenomenal on the bike course that involved climbing over 1000 feet from the lake before turning around and then I felt horrible but went fast on the run that required 500 feet of climbing over the 1.25 miles to the turnaround.  I wound up 4th place woman overall!

Last week I raced here in Colorado, a reverse tri where you start with the run.  The upside is this allows for a pretty good spread of the field early, the downside is it's damn hard to jump in the water and swim after redlining it for an hour and barely being able to breathe.  I had my best 5k run at altitude and threw down the fastest run in my AG, then followed it up with one of my strongest race bikes to date.  The swim...was difficult to start while still panting for air but I finished it stronger than I started it.  Ended up 2nd in AG and 5th woman overall.

Turns out when you are on the pointy end of the field, there are a lot of photos of you.

 

 

When I crossed the finish line I got a rose "as thanks for being a mom."  This is what happens when you race on Mother's Day weekend.

And THIS is how we do post-race recovery in Colorado.

Return of the Blog?

A certain someone *cough*Tea*cough* thinks I need to resuscitate the blog...now that I'm officially done with the spring semester and ONLY have lab work and training and dogs to deal with, it could happen.  I'm not even sure how to catch up on the past 2 months of moving and new house-ing and racing and schooling and life stress but I'll give it the college try.

Stay tuned...

Catching up on 5 weeks in one post

12 more days till I can enjoy the view from my house every. single. day.

Stanley and I did a dog show in Denver on Valentine's weekend. He was Select Dog both days and most importantly we had fun!

Typical morning dog walk views

The boys and I hiked Rabbit Mountain on a VERY cold day a couple weeks ago.

Random sunrise colors

Stanley turned 7 on March 1st.  Birthday croissants were mandatory.

Then - whoops - I left him at home to go to a beer festival

But I did let him play with his best buddy in the snow after that!

We also visited the dog park in our new-future town last weekend.  10 acres of fun!

The aftermath:

On Friday the boys and I made 2 trips to the park.  One at 8am...

And one at 4pm...

And then - this should be a novelty because I DON'T take stupid selfies all the time - we had a little fun with it :)

It was all melted and sunny and beautiful and warm Saturday.  Because Boulder winters rock.

Chilly Cheeks Duathlon

Yeah, yeah so it's taken me 2 weeks to get around to writing the report of a race that took just a little over an hour…grad school life is exhaustingly busy. As it is I've missed talking to my husband 2 nights in a row because I fell asleep before the appointed hour.

Anyway…a couple weeks ago I rolled on out from Boulder down to Cherry Creek State Park in Denver for my first multisport race since moving to Colorado.  I've been riding indoors since, oh, the flood? So…it's been nearly 6 months since I biked outdoors.  Fun times.  We were lucky that it was a beautiful clear day and there was no snow on the ground.  It wasn't especially warm and it was VERY windy but I had a few layers on to stay comfy until close to race time.  Then I shivered at the start line.

The format of the race was a ~10.9 mile bike and a 4 mile run.  We went off in randomized pre-determined waves of 10-15 people every minute.  They started with wave A.  I was in wave R.  So there was a little waiting but it gave me time to spin my legs out and do a warmup run and roll on up to the start with my R homies.  I looked around - we were indeed a Random group, everything from me to some folks on mountain bikes to some CSU tri team guys.  I was pretty sure the collegiate athletes would drop me like a hot potato off the start.

They did…for the minute it took me to get clipped in on the downhill start.  And then…I caught and passed them?  WTF?  I figured from then on it was just a challenge to hold 'em off.  I hammered as hard as I could, uphill or down, and passed people from various waves ahead of me and wasn't passed too often.  We wound our way around the reservoir and back.  Finally, the end was in sight and I hopped off to run into transition.

Bike: 10.89 miles, 19.3 mph average, 33:54

Transition involved a long run in, drop the bike, run away with helmet still on (hey, it's FEBRUARY!  Thanks to the volunteer who grabbed it and put it in my spot for me!), run waaaaaaaaaay up a hill and finally cross the mat.

T1-and-only: 1:39

And then it was up up up the hill for a long time on the run.  I felt like complete ass from the start.  Welcome to altitude, bitch.  So I dialed my effort back and hoped my run would come back to me.  We kept on running up and finally turned onto a trail where we at least alternated up and down.  At one point I saw Peyton Manning jog by; I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine it.  Mile by mile I dropped the pace so that I negative-split the whole 4 miles.  Definitely not the kind of pace I'm used to for a sprint race but again it's February at altitude.

Run: 4.02 miles, 8:45/mi, 35:10.

Tea showed up right at the finish from HER race to cheer for me and kick my ass into gear a little harder (and take pictures).  It worked, I chased down the woman in front of me by the end!

And with that my first race of the year was done - phew, let's hope we worked out all the kinks :)  I was 5th/18 in the 30-39 age group…if we had had *proper* age groups, I would have been 3rd in 35-39.  I'll take it.

Just Another Marathon Monday

Mondays this semester are no joke.  I spend a good portion of every Sunday planning, prepping and resting up for my worst day of the week.  The schedule looks something like this:

5:30-7 - Masters swim.  Coach has been giving me masters on Monday because that's really all I have time for.  And this is the only time slot I can attend.  Sometimes I manage to get up early and make it there, sometimes I…don't.  There have been days where the extra sleep has felt more necessary, especially with the schedule for the rest of the day.
Anytime between 7 and 12 - Seeing patients for our clinical trial visits.  It all depends on what I am assigned when the schedule goes out on Friday afternoon.  This week I was assigned to run two hour-long patient visits at 8:30 am and 10am, but I had to be at work by 8 to get their files from the lab and go to clinic from there.
12-1 - First class of the day: department colloquium.  Weekly presentations, either a professor in the department or an outside speaker.
1-2 - Race home and walk the dogs, then race back to campus
2-3 - Genetics/genomics class
3-4 - Grad student recitation for the colloquium.  A chance to ask questions of the week's speaker.  Graded on participation and a paper written about one of the talks.
4-5 - Grad student recitation for the genetics/genomics class.  Each grad student presents a paper and leads a discussion about it.
5-9 - I teach physiology lab during this time slot.  I'm lucky I got a great group of students who make it fun. And also that they are understanding about how insanely caffeinated I am at that point being at the end of my long days.
9-?? - When I am done teaching, I come home, give the dogs their evening walk and dinner, sit on the couch, force food into my mouth, and try to decompress enough to fall asleep.

Clearly Tuesday-Friday have a lot of making-up to do for Mondays.

Getting It Done

(2 blog posts in a row? It's a February miracle!)

Remarkably, I haven't had to add an awful lot to my winter running wardrobe to survive outdoors in a Colorado winter.  I had tights, long sleeved tops, gloves, I just learned how to layer them. But thanks to Tea, I did pick up one huge winter running tip: Ice Spikes.  What a great, effective and inexpensive way to turn a pair of running shoes into shoes that will keep me upright on ice and snow (and snow on top of ice) without a lot of advanced gadgetry.

My Sunday long run in the ice and snow was at a far faster pace than I could have done without added support - it was slippery out there with a layer of fresh snow on top of the old frozen-melted-refrozen stuff.  I'm getting better and better at identifying non-human footprints in the snow too :)  Tromping around our future property last week, Jeff and I saw lots of deer and rabbit tracks, as well as some coyote poop.  On my long run on the trail, I saw more deer, bunny, lots of dogs (of course), and some very clear raccoon prints (shown below).

Jeff has gone back to Arizona until our closing date on the house. In the meantime I get to ride out the last 6 weeks of winter here and coordinate the small stuff, like movers, renting a PO box for our future house (no mail delivery out there), etc.  Boulder winters are mostly quite enjoyable, with lots of sunshine and reasonably warm days even after a dump of snow (a FAR cry from my days in Chicago). We've only experienced 2 weeks of stupid-cold temps (one in December and one this last week) - my threshold being that when it's so cold the dogs can barely walk much less do their business (the day of -10 degrees, everyone went on poop strike) and I get close to frostbite no matter how many layers I wear, this is no longer fun.  Thankfully we don't get a lot of that here and I'm hiring a voodoo priestess optimistic that we'll get through the next month and a half with pretty snow and more moderate (i.e. highs above 15 degrees) temperatures.