Week in Review (May 23 - May 29)

Tuesday (10,509 steps) - Work in the office. Did my cross training at work. Really need to remember to bring my headphone case to the gym so I can link my headphones to the bike. I had to leave right from work to A's school for the Athletic Awards. Note to self for next year: I do not need to go to this.

She *did* get an award, but it was underwhelming and it was in the last set of certificates. After THAT, we moved to the gym for the track/field banquet. This was really mostly a celebration of her teammate that won two events at state. It was also long. Another year, another letter!

Rushed home to feed the zoo and of course to eat dinner myself. Longest day, yet seemed like I barely got anything done. 

Wednesday (20,866 steps) - Work in the office. My coach, for some reason, has decided to give me more speed work. So today, I had a "faster" run and strides I also needed to incorporate. I decided it wasn't worth it to go to any sort of run club, and figured the 6 miles I needed to do could be done on my lunch hour. I'll be honest, I was REALLY apprehensive about running "fast" since I haven't been doing anything like that for a LONG time. It actually was fine, and I even nailed all my strides at a mid 7 pace, which is really fast for me. 

The creek is INSANELY high right now, thanks to our rainy May

It was REALLY nice to have this workout out of the way. Took Olive for a walk since it was a nice, not rainy evening.

Thursday (21,125 steps) - Work from home. Had yet another "fast" run on schedule. This time I had FOURTEEN (14) reps of 70 second "sprints." I figured I could still do this on trail. I did not account for the heat - holy cow, has summer finally arrived?? 

I only have a selfie because Be Real came on during my run

I hit all my paces but felt EXHAUSTED (and a little sore) when I was done. As soon as I got home, I took Olive for a walk. Today was also A's last day of 11th grade?!?

I wasn't sure if I was going to go to Belmar after work, but it was another rainy evening and I figured I'd rather just skip than be in the rain. I ended up watching "A Man Called Otto" and it was a REALLY good movie.

Friday (16,454 steps) - Wash Park and coffee. I was SO HAPPY that we were getting an early release for the long weekend. The day still felt really long, and it was CRAZY stormy. So even though I could have left at 3, I stuck around another 15-20 minutes because there was hail and thunderstorms. Ben and I were going to go camping again, but the weather put us severely behind schedule. We were headed to Buffalo Springs campground, which is between Fairplay and Buena Vista. We hit horrific traffic in the Conifer/Pine area, but it was smooth sailing after that. The sky was still moody.

We managed to get to South Park Brewing in Fairply about 20 minutes before they closed. 

We had brought food for two nights with us, and with it getting late, we opted to go into Fairplay and have dinner. Most places closed by 8, but we found a pretty delicious Mexican restaurant that was open. It was after 10 before we arrived, so we didn't even have a campfire. 

Saturday (33,698 steps) - Was woken up around 2 in the morning because it was POURING. Otherwise, actually slept pretty good. Had coffee and breakfast under some gorgeous blue skies.

We had plans to run the Spirit Trail half marathon course. We actually didn't have any trouble finding parking in town, which is crazy, since there was some sort of festival happening. Started a LOT later than I had hoped (nearly 11 am), and the trails were fairly crowded. Thankfully, even though I had the race course loaded into my watch, the race had put up the flags early (official race not until Sunday), so we didn't have to look at the map. 

I have no real idea why (other than a late night and drinking?), but this sucked. So bad. There wasn't even "that" much gain, but I just felt like complete garbage the entire time we were out on the trail.

Another one of those days when the best part of the run was when it was over. We walked through town a bit and sat on this cool outdoor furniture that's actually made out of glass or rock or something.

Went to Eddyline and had to sit outside, but we were still able to get some snacks, so it worked out.

Before heading back to the campsite, we went to the grocery store to pick up some additional food for breakfast and more coffee. Had a nice night hanging out by the campfire and having burgers. When it got cold we went into Shelly and watched a little bit of "You."

Sunday (19,259 steps) - Had a better night sleeping. While we were having coffee and breakfast before heading out for the adventure of the day, Ariel called to say that she wasn't able to get her car started. We tried some trouble shooting on the phone with her. Eventually Jeramiah was able to stop by and help her get the car back in the driveway and she took my car to work. Ugh. Headed out to run part of the High Lonesome course. The lot we parked at was very small and we were lucky to get a spot. Expectations were VERY low after how bad the run had been on Saturday. 

Initially, it didn't seem like it was going to be too crazy, but then we had a pretty big climb about a mile in, and that was fairly technical. 

We got to a nice plateau and there were two girls with dogs and we commented that they dogs were so cute. One girl said "that's not our dog." And then the adventure of the day began. So apparently ONE of the dogs belonged to them, and the other was a "lost" dog that joined up with them. The other girl was on the phone, and when I noticed that the dog had a collar with a phone number, figured she was calling the owner. I was wrong. They asked if we could take the dog, but didn't have any extra leash or anything, so I held onto the collar while Ben called the owner. We discovered that there were actually TWO dogs that were "lost" and belonged to a local in the area. While on the phone, the second dog ran up. This one had joined a different group of hikers. We now had TWO dogs, and had to coordinate with the owner how to get them back - without having any leashes and without wanting to "lose" them.

Sunny

Stitch

Luckily, as long as we didn't see any other people or dogs, they listened fairly well and were fine running with us. Any time we saw other people, we would grab their collars and apologize for them being off leash, and letting everyone know they didn't belong to us and we were trying to reunite them with their owners. Thankfully, this section actually WAS runnable, so it went pretty quick. 

The owner had thought he was about a half mile down the trail, but it was more like 1.2 miles. Either way, we were able to return the dogs and the guy and his kids were super grateful. The guy is a rancher and was really friendly. We continued on the trail for another mile or so, and it was really pretty (and also still runnable).

After finishing up, we stopped at Browns Canyon Brewing Company. Tiny TINY place, but it was fun to knock another brewery off my "list." Headed back to the campsite with plans on having hot dogs and a campfire. 

As it was getting dark, I saw another "lost" dog wandering around the woods behind our site. We rescued Remus and called his owner on the tag. Long story short, Remus belonged to our campground host, Gabe, and it took him nearly an hour to retrieve him. 

Long day of rescuing dogs. 

Monday (18,923 steps) - Wanted to get out early so we could get home and figure out what was going on with A's car. First we still had a run to do and we decided to just run on the road by the campground. It was really nice because it was closed to traffic, so we didn't see a single person out there. It was also pretty challenging to be running over 9,000'.

We left later than planned, around 11. We got stuck in some nasty traffic in Fairplay, but the drive was otherwise not bad. Hilariously, we actually saw Kristin and Doug hauling Tic Tac in Fairplay and ended up driving "with" them most of the way back to town. We arrived at home around 2 and looked at A's car, and could not figure out what was going on. Being a holiday, of course nothing was open, so it was going to have to wait another day. After we got Shelly put away, we met Kristin and Doug at 4 Noses. 

Stats:

• 140,834 steps
• 37.43 miles run
• 30 minutes of cardio
• 30 minutes of strength training