run this amazing day

In general, puppy life is pretty sweet.  It's a constant rotation of love, eating, pooping, and sleeping, with lots of emphasis on the sleeping.  Ours have been adapting pretty well to life a mile high. I've gotten to take Molly running a few times, and she does really well off-leash.  She loves to tear ahead of me and dig around in the bushes, but she never gets too far and she always comes bounding back. We took all three on a long walk yesterday, on a trail where cattle roam pretty freely back and forth.  I run there quite a bit, and I've had to stop a few times to get around a cow in the middle of the running path. Molly in particular was really curious about the cows, and kept running up to one in particular and barking at him.  But as soon as he took a step towards her, she freaked out. Graham had no idea what to do, and just stood about fifteen feet away, growling and barking his fool head off until we moved along. So in general, puppy life is good.  T

I've been trying to find a way to talk about the running I've been doing over the past month, what's been going on as I've eased back into training after healing from pneumonia , and I just feel stuck.  Calling this a race report seems like cheating, but there was a bib on my shorts and a chip on my shoes, so here we go. I planned to run a marathon this spring, but that isn't in the plan for me anymore.  By the time we were done moving and I was done coughing my brains out, there just wasn't enough time to build to it, and half-assing a marathon for a medal and a pair of extremely sore and unprepared legs isn't on my list of things that seem either fun or smart.  So I'll drop to the half, I'll run a marathon later this year, and I won't lose even a blink of sleep over it.   Rebuilding my fitness from what I thought was zero has been a vaguely interesting process.  I had a couple of good weeks of training at the beginning of December after a l

It's been about six months since Graham was in the hospital, and I wanted to check in with an update on how he's doing. The overall answer is, pretty good.  He's still at the lean end of what a healthy weight is, despite the fact that we're feeding him more than we used to.  The vet thinks that because he lost so much intestine, his body can't hang onto as many nutrients.  So his morning and evening meals are a little bit larger, and he gets a little bit of peanut butter as a treat most days.  He isn't technically underweight, but he's still about 5lbs less than he used to be.   He isn't allowed to run, and that's sad but a fact of life.  I know that he misses it, because his eyes and ears perk up when we take the girls out.  The vet told us that he's welcome to run around in the backyard and exercise at the dog park, but extended runs we should probably avoid.  That's partially because of how easily he could become dehydrated, and part

I don't have words right now, so this may very well be the most boring update I have ever posted.  I have nothing that I feel the need or desire to discuss, to snark about, to worry about.  Maybe I will once training ramps up a bit more, but right now my life is calm.  It's easier, here.  I said it the first day I arrived: there is peace here .  I wake up - early, because I'm still on east coast time - in the morning and go train before heading to work. Most days I bring Graham with me.  He sleeps peacefully under my desk.  If I'm going to train at lunch, sometimes I bring Molly instead, and that girl loves to run, to get muddy and worn out.  My job is good, I'm happy here.  When my day is done, it's done.  I head home to our little house, still covered in unpacked boxes and unhung pictures, and spend time with my family. I cook things, we eat things, we do laundry and build bookshelves and go to bed early.  My life is boring right now.  And I coul

So, waaaaaaaaay back in December while I was home and at sea level and had enough red blood cells, I think I had a bit of a breakthrough.  Only a tiny one, but then I got sick and my life was crazy bananas for a while and I haven’t really even had time to sit down and try to process it.  And no one has breakthroughs in December, those should be scheduled for March when you actually might be able to make it useful.   I stopped talking about specifics of training here on the blog such a long time ago, because for the most part, the numbers don’t matter.  And it (sometimes) irritates me when other people spend so much time focusing on the numbers, so I didn’t walk to talk about this because I felt like I was being a hypocrite but something happened in the water and oh for pete's sake just type already. It was a boring Thursday afternoon (it was a dark and stormy night...).  I had a swim workout I’ve seen a few times before, broken 250s.  (Sorry, Sonja, if I am giving away state s

I realized recently that I have done a monthly recap post for every month that I’ve had this blog.   Which is quite a long time, if anyone is keeping track. In each of them, I walk through the goals I set - some serious, some silly - at the end of the previous month.  Then I discuss the current status of my swim, my bike, and my run - always in order.  What follows next is usually a mishmash of discussion about my personal life and what the next month will look like.  Then I round up a few goals for the next month and hit publish.  Done.  Yesterday I started writing my December recap post and thinking about January, and thinking about how I wanted to set it apart from all the 2012 recaps/2013 resolution blog posts, and it just made me feel exhausted.  Mentally, exhausted.  And I realized, I think, that it’s time to change direction.  For good. I’ve been struggling lately with my life, with the life that we are building here in Colorado.  And I’m struggling because it’s good, an