Packing list passes test

I tried out my packing list last weekend and successfully exhausted myself with a night of camping and two days of exercise. The only thing I forgot was shampoo, but the lake wasn't full of stringy green stuff so rinsing off felt clean enough.

I have absolutely no idea how I fit enough stuff into the backpack to travel around Europe for 4 weeks even if I did wear the same clothes about every other day.

Extreeeem packing

The triathloning is going well, barring my slight inclination to skip long bike rides by sleeping in.

This weekend is a training weekend, including camping, and next weekend is my crazy back-to-back race days, also including camping. I'm sort of happy to be camping this weekend because it will help me gauge the impact of sleeping on rocks in extreme humidity on my performance.

It's sort of terrifying however to look at the stuff I have to pack.

Race/workout clothes:
swimsuit
tri-shorts
2x exercise shirts (Sat/Sun)
2x socks (Sat/Sun)
bike shoes
running shoes

Race/workout accessories:
swim cap
goggles
sun glasses
2x water bottles
helmet
garmin+HRM
cell phone
sunscreen

Postrace/workout clothes:
2x shirt
2x shorts
2x underwear
sandals

Camping:
tent
sleeping bag
pillow (unless the backpack gets too full)
bike light/flashlight

Other:
towel
shampoo
deodorant
toothbrush/toothpaste
sunscreen (on list twice for a reason)


Can you see anything obvious I'm forgetting? There's almost no way I won't end these two weekends a little burnt and very dirty (mmm sweating for hours after swimming in a lake!), but hopefully it will be fun as well.

Weekend Plans

I realized this morning that I've made some pretty ambitious commitments for this weekend, and am feeling a little pre-exhausted in anticipation.

Friday: I was browsing a discount ticket site for DC and saw a re-make of some ancient Greek plays opening this weekend, so I've gotten a cheap preview ticket.  I'll totally pay $15 to see something I may not even like. But, I have to pick up the tickets at the discount ticket place before 6pm Friday, so that means going over to DC straight from work. Then I'll head over to Dupont for dinner before the play. The play is at 8, so I'll probably get home around 11, with metro and walking time.

Saturday: I'm going to do an open water swim and run with Team Z and have a zipcar reserved starting at 6am. Gah. I'll probably get up a little before 6 to have time to get ready and eat some breakfast, then pickup my carpoolers and head down to Gunston Manor.  Group bbq after the swimming and running, then drive back up to Alexandria to get some much needed groceries.

Saturday Part 2: Then Saturday evening I'm going to take some jumbo sized rice crispy treats to a "Big" bbq, where there will be big beers, big chips and big hamburgers.

Sunday: At 8am, I'm meeting up with some people from work who are doing a training run for the Army 10 miler. I'm planning to ride around on my bike carrying their water bottles.  Supposedly, I'm biking 40 mile that day too for the triathlon training, but I think that depending on my energy levels, I might round that down to 10. :-)
Then, home to do laundry and collapse in an exhausted lump

Monday: After work, I'm meeting some people for takeout food and an outdoor movie (X-Men!!!). Somehow I have to actually manage to stay awake until the movie starts, which will be at like 8:30, since it has to get dark first.


Besides that stuff, I went to a track workout last night, and my group was doing "speed" work. My GPS watch told me that I actually moved quickly for my 2 20 second sprints, and then also managed to go at some peoples normal jogging speed for the two 1/2 mile sets. The difference in tiredness from going my usual pokey speed and the trying-harder-approach-an-actual-jogging-p

ace was incredible. I don't think I will ever love track workouts that include these interval thingys, but it will be a nice way to measure improvement.

 

 

I got fruit this week in the CSA box. I ate two peaches right away, dripping juice down my arm and onto the cell phone. Lucky person who got to listen to me slurping up extra-ripe peach :)

I cooked up the beets with last weeks beets and will probably eat them and most of a zucchini tonight. Then I have two cucumbers to enjoy also.

Looking at my CSA photos from previous years, I remembered the awesome peach crumble that I made over and over again my first year. Next week, if I get some tomatoes, I'm totally going to re-make this meal

Disgusting glop

I made the beet green risotto, and it executed like it should've, but I sort of forgot that beet greens taste a little like dirt to me, so I'm having a hard time making myself eat it.

However! This is by far not the most disgusting thing I've cooked for myself. I used to have a list, but I can't remember them all anymore:
1. Attempted Spinach Saag with farm spinach 2 years ago. So foul.
2. "Spanish" rice while hostelling in Europe -- somehow the liquid refused to cook off. Gloopy and flavorless, while still tasting bad.
3. Chard when I tried to cook it with onions, apples and apple vinegar. ewww
4. Scrambled eggs one summer in college that wouldn't set. They may have been old as well.

I think that this beet green glop doesn't make that list, but until I remember something else that turned out icky, it's #5

It is, however, beautiful. If it tasted better to me, I'd save the recipe for a valentines meal. As it has sat in the fridge, the greens have been turning the rice pinker and pinker.

CSA week 4

Yay farm. We got some vigorous beets in the box this week, and they included this recipe in the weekly email:

Risotto with Beet Greens and Spring Onions
5 cups chicken stock

1 Tbsp olive oil

1 cup thinly sliced spring onions

1 1/2 cups uncooked Arborio or other short-grain rice

1/4 cup dry white wine

3 cups coarsely chopped beet greens

1/4 cup (1 ounce) grated fresh Parmeasan cheese

1/8 teaspoon black pepper

6 lemon wedges  

 

Bring broth to a simmer in a medium saucepan.  While broth is simmering, Saute onion in olive oil until tender.  Add ride and cook 1 minute stirring constantly. Add wine and stir 1 minute. Reduce heat to low and stir in greens.  Add 1/2 cup of broth at a time and stir until each portion is absorbed before adding the next.   Stir in cheese and pepper.  Serve with lemon wedges.

I've never done anything risotto like before... This may be a ridiculous question, but can I do this with sushi rice (which I have in my cabinet) or should I go get some more risotto-ish rice?

I'm excited about eating the beet greens. Previously I'd just cooked them in olive oil with green onions, and if I run out of cooking enthusiasm, I'll probably end up doing that again. It's fun because even the beet greens leak beet juice.

Besides the beets, we got broccolli for a third week, some very happy green onions, snow peas, and some herb thing. I think it's thyme.

Recovery Week!

So it's only been two weeks with the triathlon club, but I think with all the meeting new people, new longest bike rides, and meetings to learn stuff, I've earned this recovery week. The two weeks on/ one week recovery seems like it will be nice because the next recovery isn't *that* far away.

After a nap yesterday, I was able to perk up enough to make the collards and onions dish I made last year to use up my greens from last weeks farm box. Then I ate a third of it for dinner, along with a giant strawberry milkshake. I'm soooo lucky to have a stomach that doesn't hate me.  The strawberries were from the farm too, so maybe it was like a family reunion in my stomach.

The hardest part of the bike ride this weekend was in my head (if this link works, this was the course we rode on). I just got the clipless pedals (and the cute sandals that I linked to in my previous post), and that meant that when I was riding, there was a constant low-level fear of falling over whenever I slowed down. After about 12 miles, we took a break and I was very happy to get all the way off the bike and re-set my brain a little, but towards the end of the ride, I was barely holding it together. I felt like crying at how nice the ride leader was being for hanging back with me, I felt like crying at how scared I felt when there wasn't anything scary going on ... There was probably some low blood sugar going on in addition to the brain meltdown, but I sure look forward to not being mentally done before the ride is over.

I had to walk the bike up a hill when my breathing and mental freak-out got the better of me, but the people who were keeping me company were able to ride as slow as I was walking.  That was pretty awesome to watch, and gives me something to work on.  It would be great to be so sure of the bikes handling that you could keep churning up the hills like that at such a slow speed.

Tomorrow, I'm riding to work which is an easy ride, and I'll use the pedals and shoes, and I'll be happier about it, or else. Then after work tomorrow, I'll take my new veggies home and then ride my bike to the pool to go swimming, and it will be a delicious summery day, except instead of leaving my bike on my friends front lawn, I'll be locking it with a U and cable lock and then paying to swim. Whatever.

exercise blah blah blah

I've been all kinds of sporty since last updating.  I thought I'd been running around and biking a fair bit before joining the triathlon team, but I sure didn't reach this level of tired.  I woke up on Tuesday thinking it was Friday and happy that the week was almost over -- unfortunately, that obviously wasn't true.

Our training group had it's kickoff meeting on June 13 and after looking at the different "tracks" of training and seeing how much faster Track 2 ramps up the running than Track 1, I decided I was pretty much a Track 1 kind of exerciser.

There are 4 tracks for each of 3 training programs.  You can train for "Under 70.3" (Sprint and Olympic distance races), 70.3 (half-ironman distance) and 140.6 (ironman distance), and then Track 1 is for beginners/much-improvement possible people, Track 2 would be people who have done a race like that before, or can go some significant fraction of the required distance, and then Track 3 and 4 are for people who are too strong, aerobic and speedy for Tracks 1 and 2.  At least that's how I understand it.

The Track 1 workouts aren't necessarily individually challenging so far -- they aren't really supposed to be -- but all the exercising and going to the newbie clinics where they are telling us lots of useful information is tiring.

Last Saturday, there was an open water swim about 30 minutes south and a group run afterwards.  It was super-extra humid, but when it finally started raining, it felt so good to be standing around getting rinsed off by the warm rain. The Sunday there was a group ride.  I went out with the 30 mile group and felt awesome after 10 miles, pretty good after 20, and tired and ready to go home after 25. Unfortunately, there were still 8 miles to go since the 30 mile route was actually 33.  It was a new longest ride ever for me, and my average speed was 13mph.  That isn't a fast speed compared to more in-practice people, but it was a great speed for me.

The coach set up his grill after both of the weekend group run/ride events, which was awesome.  Both days last weekend I ended up stomach-growling hungry during parts of the exercise, so I need to carry some snacks on the bike and/or eat more breakfast.

I'm probably going to buy some of those "clipless" pedals for my bike this week.  "Clipless" in quotes because these are the pedals that you like click your bike shoes to and then you are attached to the bike, and it seems that that would be a clipping system if anything was, but the old kind of shoe attachment mechanism was "toe clips" where you stick the front of your shoe into a cage of sorts on the pedal, and since the new pedals don't have toe clips, they are called clipless.  I'd been hesitating on switching to these pedals on the bike because then I would have to wear bike shoes to ride it and would end up clomping around the grocery store and stuff, but I've been doing some research, and it looks like there exist bike shoes that aren't velcro (making it look like you can't tie shoelaces) and have the attachment bit recessed (so you don't clomp as much).  The sandals above are about as un-dopey as bike shoes get.

Besides exercising, I've been enjoying my farm vegetables, but have already had to throw some out as they withered from neglect in my fridge.  I couldn't get excited about most of the spinach, and had some lettuce give up on me also.  This week, I got some sturdy collard greens, so I'm going to make the cheesy collard and onion dish that I did last year.

I made a batch of strawberry jam too -- third year in a row of jam-making :)  I hadn't tried any in all this time, I'd just been giving it away, but the other night I was hungry for dessert and didn't want to eat marshmallows (the only sweet thing besides semi-sweet chocolate chips I could find in my kitchen) so I had bread and jam and, wow! it was good! I'm looking forward to finishing the jar and then trying some of my blackberry jam from last summer.

Finally, the cat with his stupid-expensive teeth seems to be doing well. He was doing a weird thing with his food the other day -- taking a bite and then walking away from the bowl to eat it, then walking back to the bowl to get another mouthful of food, etc -- but he is eating and active and his shaved forearm looks mostly normal now.

Open Water Swimming tips

This made me laugh outloud.

Things to remember when open-water swimming

• Do not put your pet rock collection in your pocket for luck.
• If the water is cold, do not wear you winter coat, gloves, and boots.
• If passing the one mile mark causes you to remember you forgot something, do not go back for it.
• Do not answer your cell phone.
• Breathe when you head is above the water.
• Shaving your head may reduce drag, but it may not be worth it.
• Avoid swimming upstream if possible.
• Do not pick up hitchhikers.
• If you hit your head on a cement wall say, "dam."

I'm very excited about the triathlon team kickoff meeting this Saturday

Kale and stupid expensive cat teeth

Last week was the first delivery from my farm for this year. The picture on the left shows the bounty. I had a kale and strawberry salad which was pretty tasty, but the sweet and sour kale I made tonight (picture on the right) was much, much better.  My favorite non-cheese kale dish by far.

Sweet and Sour Kale

 Ingredients:

1 bunch Kale (around a pound or so), washed and ripped into eatable pieces

Dried cranberries

1 bundle spring  onions

Apple Cider Vinegar

Garlic Powder or freshly chopped garlic

Salt

Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Sugar in the Raw

Water

Seeds

1. Chop and Saute onion in olive oil for a few minutes- ½-full onion or so.

2. Add:

¼ - ½ cup cranberries

3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1 tablespoon sugar in the raw

1 teaspoon garlic powder or chopped fresh garlic depending on what you have

A sprinkle of salt

3. Mix this all up and cook for a minute or so until the cranberries can soften a bit

4. Put your Kale in and pour a little (3 Tablespoons or so water over Kale) and put the lid on. You can open to stir, but mostly the kale will be steaming. Cook it on medium for a few minutes or until Kale is wilted but not mushy.

5. Throw on some seeds (pumpkin, sunflower..) or whatever you have to add.

Now for the cat news. Stupid Zozo has bad teeth. The vet said it was "stomatitis" and described it as essentially, his gums are allergic to normal cat-mouth bacteria. Lovely.  Do Not google for images of feline stomatits, ick ick ick. 

The good news is that they only had to take out one of his molars, and there is some hope that the rate of decay can be dramatically halted with some additives to the cats drinking water.  The bad news was that the two options I thought I was getting from the initial vet visit turned out to not really be options, but rather the *two* *expensive* things they were going to have to do to him, instead of one expensive thing.  At least he takes liquid medicine easily.  In the picture of Zozo, you can see where they shaved his arm for the IV.

Jaxby was completely not pleased with being left alone all day long while Zozo was at the vet and spent the next two days hissing whenever they ended up face to face. I'm hypothesizing that Zozo's mouth smelled like stitches or something or Jaxby has never smelled Zozo without extra stinky cat breath.  Because I am a bad cat owner, I spent part of Saturday making them chase the same bell trying to take pictures of angry Jaxby.  This was as close as I got, the hiss had finished, but the ears are still shouting angry cat language.

Thunderstorm with a chance of biking

I went out for a bike ride after work today. Unfortunately, me wishing really hard was not enough to keep the giant thunderstorm away.  It rolled in while I was starting my laps of Hains Point and, instead of going to hide in the bathroom, I decided to keep riding. I know this was stupid, but wow it was exciting.  Thank goodness for my sunglassess -- the rain was coming so hard it would've probably hurt to have it hitting my eyes directly. In my second lap (I know, I know, to do one lap in a thunderstorm is foolish, to do two? Is there even a word for how un-fore-thoughtful it was?) I ended up going through a flood of the road where my shoes were completely submerged during the bottom part of the pedaling.

Needless to say, I got a little wet.

However, I didn't start getting dirty until the rain let up while I was riding home, and then I got really dirty. Stripe up my back, mud on my shins, dirt on my helmet??

Now, I'm sitting warm and dry in my house with that wonderful exercisey radiant body heat feeling listening to the storm rage outside and totally happy that I went out, even though it was dumb.

In the time of kale

I got my first CSA box for the year yesterday, featuring kale and more kale.  The neat thing about the seasonal nature of the CSA is that this early mix of veggies has anchored my memories for the last two years. I might not be able to remember what happened in meetings I was in last Friday, but I can think of what sort of things I was doing last year and the year before with my spring kale.

I've been feeling so good recently, enjoying running and biking around, celebrating the weather, that I was a little surprised to remember how I'd felt before in the kale-times.

Two years ago, I sniffled my way through trying to make kale pesto so that my massive quantities of kale wouldn't go bad while I was out of town for my grandmothers funeral. I filled multiple tupperwares with the green goo and stuck it in my freezer. It's still in there, I have no idea how it tastes, because I can't quite bring myself to defrost it and either eat it or throw it out.

Last year was a little better. I made up a Kale and Strawberry salad to eat while on the train up to Connecticuit for a conference. It felt exciting  to have my healthy, farm-fresh lunch to eat while staring out the window at the cities and countryside that I'd never seen. But at that point in the year, I was still (pathetically) sniffling over someone who "isn't falling in love" with me, and I spent part of the train ride wishing I were alone so I could melt down in private.

This year, I'm thinking hopefully that there will be no crying into my Kale.

More biking with new bike

I went for a great bike ride last night. Instead of going my "usual" route (can it be a "usual" if I've only done it twice a week for like three weeks?) I sucked it up and went over a bridge to ride 2 loops around Hains Point, aka East Potomac Park.  This is a great loop to practice pedaling consistently instead of frequent braking and coasting to share my usual trail with runners and other bikers.

(And, new this year with the road bike, occasionally accelerating to pass other bikers!)

There's a three mile loop or it's possible to do a five mile loop, but two of the three-milers trying to pedal pedal (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ... counting to myself at some reasonable rate, trying not to say it out loud while riding) was enough for me last night.  I look forward to feeling like the ride over is a nice warmup instead of feeling like it could be an actual part of a workout.

No, I'm not going to share the elevation profile of this route. It's so flat that it's almost downhill both ways. Seriously.

The absolute best part last night was letting two bikers who were around my skill level pass me and then pushing it for a while to catch up with them, and reaching 19mph in the process, which is quite fast for me if there is no coasting down-hill involved.  Actually, that's a little fast for me going downhill too, since I'm sort of a chicken.  One of them was a super athletic looking girl on a hybrid-ish upright bike. I wish I could've gone as fast as she was going when I was on my other bike last year.

I practiced getting my water bottle out without swerving violently as well. It's getting better, but certainly doesn't feel comfortable. Yay summer and exercise!

The vocab word from today at work is Mahalanobis. I should get back to Mahalanobising (not actually a valid way to use this word in a sentence)

Lake swim, et al

I had a great weekend. I wish all weekends for all people could be as good or better than my weekend.

Saturday was the loser day of the great weekend. I learned that Zozo, my black cat, has sadly decayed teeth and will cost me a lot of money. He's not even 3 yet! I'm giving him antibiotics for now to try to cut back the bacterial proliferation in his mouth, but will be scheduling an expensive vet appt with "x hrs of teeth extractions @ $tooMuch/hr" and "y units of pain management @ $whatDoesThisEvenMean/unit" and stuff and then spending the month afterwards thanking my lucky stars that I don't have a car payment that I have to fit into my monthly budget on top of things like this.

Sunday was way better. I woke up unnaturally early -- seriously, what are all those manic birds doing chirping like that at 5am -- and went out to do an open water swimming competition - 1 mile of paddling around in a lake. I could make excuses about my time, but eh, whatever. I made it, I felt good doing it, I swam in straight lines, and didn't freak out about the icky things that live in lakes. And then it was 9am and I'd already swam a mile. I watched the 2mile race start and the very fast 2milers finish, and then went to spend the day with friends.  We went on a field trip to this huge Asian market and I saw loads of things that reminded me of my mochi and nori obsessed-time in Berkeley. yum! I got some mochi and other ingredients were purchased to make some awesome noodle dish that I don't remember the name of, but the noodles were some sort of thin, Korean, potato noodle, I think, that cooked up to be transparent. Yum yum.

Monday was an awesome bonus day where I finished laundry, vacuumed, cleaned, and went for a slow 1hr bike ride. I ended up behind a family on the trail and didn't get up the nerve to pass them because the trail was all swervy and I didn't want to run into an oncoming runner or biker. It was slightly humid, but not in a bad way, and felt like a great intro to summer day.

The giant rain storm even waited until late Monday night to come through so the whole weekend was dry and sunny! Yay.

I don't have any more upcoming races that I've already paid the fees for, so June will mostly be a month of geting in some miles of practice with the HRM and spending time on the bike.

My farm deliveries start next Tuesday and I chose to have them delivered to a group site near work (to save some money) so I need to sort out the logistics of getting my veggies from work to home every Tuesday night and remember to implement the plan next week.

Summer wishing

I feel like it should be summer now. Looking out my window at work, it's been so beautifully sunny that I don't want to believe the weather website that's telling me it's in the low 60's.

I also don't want to believe that it will get into the low 50's by 10pm tonight.  The weather is messing with my plans to have a long bike ride and then go see an outdoor movie -- if I dress in clothes that will feel good for the bike ride, I'll be cold for the movie, but if I carry layers to be happy about sitting for the movie, I'll miss the zippy fun of zooming around on the bike. 

Oh well, there will be plenty of summer nights, so I should enjoy the spring-ness of today.

1 more hour of working and then I'll get to go see how my heart spazzes while biking.

Exercise with heart

I got a new toy last week, a Heart Rate Monitor. The positive spin on exercising with the HRM is that it shows me that I am, in fact, working hard, even if I'm not moving very fast (at all). The terrifying thing that it has shown me is how very little it takes to make my heart speed up. I wore it last Sunday at the Poplar Springs 5K and felt entirely justified walking up hills -- the HRM says I'm trying hard, really it does.

The theory espoused by many exercisey-types of people these days is that running around at a more moderate level of working hard helps build endurance, and eventually, you should be able to do more without your heart spazzing up to super speed. We'll see.

I decided to tabulate my lack of improvement from last year as I'm continue to recover from my winter-of-sloth:

Year	GW Parkway	Poplar Springs
2008	36:41	40:53
2009	38:44 *	41:08

* It was very hot, whine whine whine

I think I could've beaten last year's Poplar Springs time, but my heart told me it was trying pretty hard just to get that 41:08. And I'm certain I couldn't've beaten last years GW Parkway time, partially because this year it was unseasonably hot, and also because I just hadn't spent as much time running around this year.

Lake swim next weekend. Hopefully it will at least be warm on the day of the race. That won't help the water temperature, but it will make it feel nicer to dry off afterwards.

Follow-through, check!

It's been a good week filled with follow-through.

I got my new bike, as mentioned before, and have been balancing the thrill of riding it (4 min 45 second miles on a trail without even trying very hard!) with the pain of getting used to the much less cushy seat.  The seat may need to be swapped, but for now, I'm taking days off between rides and, with the weekend off, was able to love zooming around for 9 miles Monday night, even though it was drizzling and a little chilly.

I've decided to sign up with the triathlon training group. They start groups three times a year, so I'll be starting in mid-June, and the focus race will be at the beginning of October, with lots of other opportunities to go race, support, and cheer teammates at other events.  There are many group workouts scheduled during the week, so I can be as social as my schedule and the constraints of the DC-area transit system will allow, and the running workouts are more about heart-rate than speed, which is good, because I can get my heart rate to go up a lot easier than I can get my speed to go up (sort of joking, it's not actually good that I can make my heart race as easily as it does.  If it didn't calm down so quickly, I'd actually worry about this).  This means that there's yet another opportunity for me to buy myself a new toy; I've been looking at heart-rate-monitor/watch combo things, but will probably delay getting one for a few weeks.  There's been a lot of spending recently.

Some of the spending has been going to committing myself to go be active while someone times it.  For the third year in a row, I'm going to go do the Poplar Springs 5K. The course is full of hills which cause me much wheezing, but some friends are doing it, and then there is vegan yogurt afterwards (ick).  I also signed up for a 1 mile lake swim, which may be a stupid idea, not that I can't swim that far, and not that it's in a lake, but because I decided to not try to rent/wear a wetsuit and may end up blue at the end.  There are other non-wetsuit swimmers signed up though, so it won't be that bad, right?

Two Sundays ago, I went and did a 5K while some friends did the associated 10 miler. Sadly, I was slower than last year, but it was a great deal hotter, so I'll take that as my excuse.  Also, sadly, I was beaten by a 5 year old. There's really no excuse for that. I did beat him last year when he was 4.  If I train hard this year, maybe I'll beat him when he's 6, but shortly after that, there may be no hope of me catching up with him again.

I finished a crafty project last Sunday by going up to Silver Spring to rent a sewing machine for a few hours. It's fun to start projects, but it's also really satisfying to finish them off. 

I'm really looking forward to sitting down to start watching the next House DVD from Netflix tonight after jogging.  DVD watching time is my prime time for working on a never-ending hand quilting project that I've been making for myself. (Now that I said here that I'm going jogging tonight, I'm committed and will have to go, even if it's gray out. Yay sneaky self-motivation)

I see a triathlon team in my future

I'm much more obsessed with the whole triathlon thing this year than I was at this point a year ago. Work has blocked the stupid villages game so I've been forced to read blogs and NYTimes for distraction during simulation runs. All the blog reading, plus some talking with my favorite exercise instructor lead me to RSVP for an information session about a real training group, so I'm going to go learn more about them tomorrow afternoon.  I'm particularly curious about the fees, because it seems like this group is providing a lot more support than other local clubs, which is cool and all, but probably means they would want more than $35 a year. 

Last night was a jog with some coworkers who are doing the 10 miler later this year. It was exciting to happily keep up with the slow group. We did 4:1 jog/walk with a long walk break between the 1st and second mile and I loved how good it felt. Not like I could actually breathe steadily enough to say long sentences, but I did wheeze multiple words in a row sometimes. After all these years of trying jogging and giving up and trying, it actually is getting better! Crazy!

I've ordered my road bike and am excited to pick it up tomorrow. I have to make sure that I don't get 20-miles-worth of excited the first time I head out because I'm doing the GW Parkway 5K on Sunday, and that will be less fun to try hard at if my legs are jello.

I'm also looking forward to trying to eat all the kale that will be starting in about a month. I've signed up for my farm again.  It turns out they do a group delivery to the building next door to where I work for a $100 discount off of the normal door-to-door delivery price, so I'll have to lug my veggies home and up my own stairs once a week,  but I think the +$100 is worth it.

Basically there is lots of excited feelings out here right now. I'm sure that it is intricately related to the fact that Spring Is Here!! It's been beautiful outside, it's finally not dark so early at night, and it's not humid yet! YAY Spring!

(Is it worth suffering the coldest winter of my life to feel this excited? Actually, maybe it was)

No bike yet

I still haven't got the bike. The bike stores I like aren't big enough that I can wander around and be anonymous, which is my favorite way to shop, so working up the courage to go in and actually talk to someone is taking a while.
I did however buy myself some other presents, including a set of paperback Harry Potter books 1-6 which was deliciously discounted and a heart rate monitor/watch thing, but it was sort of gigantor on my wrist, so I'm waiting to hear back from the people about whether I can return it for a slightly smaller watch part

I'm on track to justify the HRM/watch as I gear up to this summers activities. Overcoming the winter-of-sloth feels wonderful. People from work are doing a sort of group training thing to get ready for the Army 10-miler in October (which I did not sign up for), but I'm hoping to keep up with their training and do the Navy 5-miler at the end of September. Yesterday I had a nice (as far as jogging slowly can ever feel nice) 3+ mile outing and am excited for the 5K coming up two Sundays from now.

Besides running around (literally) I've signed up for a glassworking thing. I think that I will not actually be doing much of the hot glass stuff, but it will be neat to go and see the workspace. It's not particularly metro close, so (circling around to my first point) I need to get a bike!

Last point, I'm excited that I might've found some co-workers who will come swim laps with me occasionally. And one of them might sign up with me for a lake swim at the end of May. It will probably be cold. I'm still trying to talk myself into paying someone so I can go do a mile of splashing in cold water.

Summary

I spent last weekend out in CA for a beautiful wedding reception and a great time visiting friends and realized, in talking with them, that while I am apparently capable of updating facebook with meaningless nothings, the non-archiving nature of facebook means that when I try to remember what I spent the last 6 months doing, I have nothing to fall back on. So I'm going to try to put up a little more here, even if it's as brief as a facebook update.

• I was totally looking for a way to rent sewing machine time a few weeks ago, and now there is one! Awesome! And it's super metro close
• I'm madly in love with turkey, brie, honey mustard and baby spinach sandwiches (on thick multigrain bread of course!)
• I bought a macbook in January and am loving it. I try to do the two finger scroll thing on all laptops now and basically look like someone who has no idea how to use a trackpad.
• I hope to buy a new bike this weekend to replace and surpass the one that got stolen last summer. I can't do another triathlon unless I have a bike.