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10 Running Questions

Katie of runlongkatie and runner of insane 50 and 100 mile races I am pretty sure I’ll only ever dream of, tagged me to play a little game that originated at another of my favorite running blogs, Another Mother Runner. 10 Questions on Running. Thanks for the tag, Katie – here are my answers:

1. Best run ever: It’s so hard to pick a best run ever. My run at the Stonehouse 8 last year pops into my head – that was my first trail race and I really loved it. Fording streams, hurdling boulders, dodging cacti, falling flat on my face around mile 7. I also raced my best half marathon time last year (2011) at The Colfax Half and I did it without music, which seemed absolutely insurmountable when I started. But I had a great race and I was so happy to crack 2:15. Good times!!

2. Three words that describe my running: social, therapeutic, slow 😉

3. My go-to running outfit: For tops and bottoms it depends on the season, but being well-endowed, I can’t imagine running without a great workout bra. Moving Comfort’s Fiona is my favorite. Inside (on the treadmill) I usually wear a headband to keep my hair out of my face and outside I love the Sweaty Bands hats.

4. Quirky habit while running: if the going gets rough, I start repeating the same sentence or phrase over and over in my head – nothing particularly motivating, just words that pop into my head (“drug store sunglasses,” or “pink and purple elephants”) and I will also repeatedly count on my steps up to a certain number.

5. Morning/midday/evening: mostly morning though sometimes evening

6. I won’t run outside when it’s: Too windy!! The wind we get in my area is unbelievable – like blow away small dogs and patio furniture unbelievable and it makes running pure hell (at least against the wind). It feels like being on a treadmill and yet you know you should actually be moving forward. I’ve run in loads of other conditions including some pretty fierce cold. I also don’t really do ICE since I worry about my clumsy self falling, but luckily my favorite routes usually clear up pretty quickly so this is not usually limiting.

7. Worst injury and how I got over it: So far I’ve been really lucky to never have a major injury and now I’m finding some wood to knock on. My left heel is painful now and again but stretching it helps and it’s never kept me from running. Knocking on that wood again …

8. I felt most like a badass mother runner when: My kids wear my race medals around the house and proclaim they want to run with me in my next race and also anytime I finish a run over 10 miles.

9. Next race is: I’m running the Golden Gallop on October 7 … 5.280 miles around Golden. That will probably be my last race of the year.

10. Potential running goal for 2013: I am not entirely sure yet. I know I want to run (and actually train for) at least one half marathon – maybe Colfax or Platte River. I also want to run the T9K again. Lastly, I would really like to do a sprint triathlon. Whether or not 2013 is the year for that, we shall see. 2012 has definitely not shaped up the way I thought it would!

I’m guessing I’m supposed to tag, but none of my other bloggy friends (at least ones that are still blogging) run! I need to find some more mother runners (who blog).

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Ace

A few weeks ago when we went to Stueben’s for lunch, we looked in on Ace, a new restaurant in Denver’s Uptown neighborhood that’s just down the street from Stueben’s. It’s a different sort of restaurant – not just about food. Once I saw what the deal was, I knew we had to come back.

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Carnival!

Friday was the carnival at Tabby’s School.

 

 

The event kicks off with the fun run, just a 1 mile jog through the ‘hood. The fun run kicks off the school’s mileage club, a club where they run laps on lunch recess two days a week and they earn charms for various achievements. The fun run earned them their first charm and the necklace to put them on. Continue reading “Carnival!”

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The Deluge

You know you’re from CO when you get excited about rain. Even when we haven’t had a particularly dry, HOT summer like this one, I am always excited to see rain. It started last night when I was heading home from the PTA meeting and I had little drops pelting me the whole (2 blocks) home. It hadn’t gotten much worse when I went to bed but when I got up I could hear it hitting the roof and the windows. Our streets are covered and we had to hold bootcamp entirely inside. Tabby wore her rainboots (we bought them while in NYC) to school. No one minds though – I think it would take a week or more before we’d get sick of rain. I look at it as a great excuse to drink tea – just wish I was doing it from my own kitchen instead of my office. Oh well!

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LunchBot

A few weeks into this deal, we’re getting pretty adept at sending the kids off with healthy lunches each day. I have become the LunchBot and crank out lunches for myself and the kids in about 10-15 minutes after dinner. I have a simple formula I follow. Main Dish + veggie + fruit = lunch. I ask them what they want from a small array of choices (2-3 for each category) and then they tell me what they want. I’d love to let them help pack, but usually there’s just not time. Tabby is somewhat more limited in her choice of main dishes – she has to have something that taste good cold. Even if I send a thermos, they put the lunch bags in a walk-in and its tepid at best by lunch time. So she takes a sandwich a bit more frequently than I’d like – I think I probably need to go back through all of my lunch-related pins and see about finding some other options for her. Luckily she does seem pretty happy to take a sandwich a couple times a week and we’ve found some things that are better cold – the shepherd’s pie, for example, was a huge hit cold.

In addition to our family’s food, I’ve been making some extra meals for a meal train. A family friend has cancer and we are keeping her well-fed so she can kick its ass. This has mostly just meant doubling whatever I’m making for our family and dropping it off. But today, there was a hole in the schedule, and so I filled in and I had a few moments of wishing I hadn’t. I’d been going since 5a and my feet were killing me, but it’s a small thing, something simple to do to help someone out. It’s always worth it!

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What a Weekend

This weekend kind of reminded me of what weekends were like before the kids were born. We did a lot, though nothing real specific. We spent LOTS of time at home. We cooked. We cleaned. We ran a few errands.

Friday Tabby and I sent Ben off to preschool and went for a duathalon (she rode her bike and I ran). It was halting and slightly frustrating, but we got into a rhythm and had a nice time. Then we had a smoothie at our local coffee shop. We had a trip to Target, lunch and then we watched a movie. Before we knew it, Matt had arrived home from his trip (YAY!) and he picked Ben up on the way home from the airport.

Tabby and I had picked up the ingredients for some blueberries and cream cookies (we left out the white chocolate chips  – I forgot them and they aren’t a favorite anyhow) and the kids were eager to bake – with Daddy. Eventually Kelly joined us and we spent the rest of the evening watching movies and hanging out.

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Yogurt Cake

I think I might’ve mentioned that a couple of weeks ago, I read a book called Bringing Up Bebe, a comparison of French and American parenting. I really liked the book and enjoyed reading it and I was definitely intrigued by a passage in the book where a French woman was letting her 3 year old bake cupcakes … unassisted. And it hit me that Tabby can really do more than I let her. Granted, I let her do more in the kitchen than most other five-year-olds we know, but she is capable of more. It’s just because I’m a bit afraid of the mess. I’m the mom that makes the kids do playdough outside because I have no interest in cleaning all of those little bits up.

Anyhow, the book goes on to mention that most French children start out making yogurt cake when they’re around three. It is a neat idea because you use yogurt as part of the cake and then measure most of the rest of the ingredients with the empty yogurt containers. So I endeavored to be a bit less crazy and let Tabby and Ben have at it tonight.

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Four Foodie Tricks

One of the things I love most about the internet and Pinterest specifically is the dissemination of information with such speed and ease. I have learned TONS of things and I thought it would be fun to do a post on what I have recently learned about cooking and lunch boxes and the like.

One of my favorite new “tricks” is the hasselback potato. The kids love sweet potatoes but I don’t always remember to chuck them in the oven as soon as I should. This is an easy trick to get them to the table in short order. You just take the potato and cut it into thin slices almost all the way to the bottom, like in the photo. Then you can bake or nuke it. I usually nuke it and since you’ve given it thinner flesh and more surface area, it cooks really fast. The kids love it too because it’s pre-cut and we just sprinkle it with a little salt for them. If you do it in the oven, you can spray it with a little EVOO and then it gets nice and crispy. mmmmmm Continue reading “Four Foodie Tricks”

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4th of July Hike on Labor Day

It was a busy weekend, good, but busy. So this morning we decided to sneak in a hike to have some family time together. We chose the 4th of July trail to hike. I hadn’t been there since high school and I’m glad we went back. Unfortunately, our timing was pretty off. With the kids tired from their weekend and Tabby fighting a cold, the hike was long and whiny. This photo pretty much sums it up. Ben, in the backpack, was pretty low maintenance (but poor Matt, carrying almost 40 extra lbs!) and Tabby was miserable most of the time. Continue reading “4th of July Hike on Labor Day”

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Crafty Plans

What happened to summer? How are the kids back to school and the trees turning already? HOW? Oh right … it went buy in a fabulous blur of swim lessons, weekend trips, sweltering days (still here, unfortunately) and frozen yogurt. It was nice! But it was busy.

Now I am looking directly at an entire three-day weekend … a weekend where we are not traveling, a weekend where we don’t have too much planned. YAY! I am hoping to get some things sorted out around the house, like my insane “office” (aka. the dump) or the ever-present evolution of children’s clothes and toys or Tabby’s still-broken shelf.

But I’d also like to do some fun little projects too: Continue reading “Crafty Plans”