Home.

Nothing like coming home from a week long trip and picking a quick dinner out of the garden.

Rainbow chard, tomatoes, carrots,
 lemon cucumbers, and Teahive Cheese!

Nothing like a car trip the day before a twelve mile run, except possibly a ten mile run before a car trip.  

Happy Saturday!

Up, up, up.

I usually run on trails, but most of the time the ones I choose are relatively flat, with a few rolling sections, but nothing too technical or challenging.  This I do largely for reasons of timing.  I run in the morning, as soon as it's light, and I try to be back before the baby wakes up, which means at most I have about 70 minutes.  I'm not great at running trails.  I take about a billion steps and I'm extremely inefficient, which makes it harder to squeeze a workout in.

But this morning, I met a friend for an eight miler (for me -- six for her.)  Rocky, steep in sections, and I really should have opted for my Saucony Peregrines over the Pegasus, but I didn't, and this is what my Garmin has to say:

Elevation Gain: 1,440 ft
Elevation Loss: 1,467 ft
Min Elevation:4,649 ft
Max Elevation:5,327 ft

This is what my body has to say:

Owowowowowowow.  Right toe, IT band, and ankle are all tight tonight.

I had to walk in some sections, but the nice thing about trails is that because I'm so remarkably inefficient at them, I don't really care much about my time.  That's a nice thing on a long run, where I sometimes fight the temptation to turn it into what I would call a tempo run if I had any solid idea of my race pace yet.  8.1 miles in 1:36.  

It was a beautiful run.  The Bonneville Shoreline Trail and associated feeders and canyons snake high above the city, and we ran most of it just as the sun cleared the mountain.

Not a mountain, but a nasturtium!

Tomorrow is a rest day.  I wonder -- do rest days preclude yoga?  Because I think I could use a little mat time....

Oh, Snap!

I've loved snapdragons since I was a kid.  Squeeze their cheeks and they open and close their little mouths!  Snap, snap, snap.  So when a friend offered me some of her volunteer (read: self-seeded) snapdragons, I jumped at the chance to use them to fill out my garden.

Snapdragons are supposed to be annuals, but in northern Utah, it's just warm enough that it's possible for the seeds to winter over.  As a result, what were originally ordinary solid-color snapdragons pollinate each other, and turn into gorgeous tie-dyed, ombre manic dragons.

There's probably a halfway decent metaphor in here about hybrid vigor and friendship and beauty and strength, but the last thing the Internet needs is some hobby jogger trying to squeeze a metaphor out of some pictures of some flowers.

Yesterday's run was a comfortable, tentative five miles, in which my main goal was not to fall on my face again.  Achievement: unlocked!  Today I hit the Birdsong trail again, because not only is it so pretty, but it's sufficiently challenging that I have to take it as an easy run.

Eight miles tomorrow, in which I hope to explore a new (to me) trail!

After the fire

My running trail looks like the moon:

No one was hurt, nor was there any property damage, so I am free to appreciate the eerie beauty of the landscape.  The contrast with the surrounding hill is striking:

It smells like over-toasted marshmallows.  

There's a peace to the burned land that is hard to describe.  It will recover in a few years.  I am tempted to seed it with local wildflowers.  Wouldn't that be great?  A spot on the mountain all covered in Western paintbrushes and columbines and globe mallows.  A riot of color.

I like to imagine this little guy fought hard.  He retains some green yet.

Here you can see how close the fire came to disaster.  One spark over the fire road, and the town would have been in trouble:

----

Today was a much needed rest day for me.  Tomorrow intervals; Friday a long run; Saturday, a fun trail race!  More later.

Between the raindrops.

I live near a canyon, so 15mph morning winds are pretty common.  This morning when my alarm went off at 5:30am, however, the winds seemed to be stronger than usual, so much so that I couldn't tell whether it was pouring down rain from the thunderstorms that have been predicted for today, or it was just rustling leaves.

Well, I was too tired/lazy to figure it out.  Sometimes early mornings don't happen for me.  Two hours later I was awakened by the vocal talents of the toddler, who was launching his toys out of his crib.

 Fortunately I was able to sneak out a little bit later for an easy 4.6 mile run at a good clip.  A light drizzle started about halfway through.  I've noticed that runs after breakfast or later in the day tend to feel easier for me than runs first thing in the morning.  I'm attributing that to being awake and having eaten, but it suggests that I might need to make sure I get a good breakfast in on race day.

This week has been hot and sunny, and the garden is really starting to take off.  Most of my ornamental plants are xeric, because my yard is so bright and sunny and hot that even lavender, which grows everywhere, wilts and dies without supplementary water.  With mulch, I need to water only every other today when it's above 95.  I'm hoping once these beauties are established they'll need even less care; spending water on a landscape still strikes me as wasteful.

Munro Globemallow

Veggie garden is coming along, too:

Anaheim pepper.  You can see the drip irrigation system in the back.

Happy Friday!

Peanuts.

Yesterday was a day that wouldn't quit.  I started off with an easy six miles at six am (9:47), then home, shower, wake up the toddler, breakfast, laundry, work, meeting, mow the lawn, make dinner, then get an (overall great) e-mail from the editor requesting more revisions, revise until 11pm, pass out.

It's a good thing today is a rest day!

In May I purchased many starter plants for the vegetable garden from a great local nursery.  They have a great variety of plants, and I like in particular how easy it is to find ornamental plants suited to the local climate.

On that day, however, there was a cheerful hand-lettered poster inviting us to try planting peanuts.  I had the same reaction everyone else did, I imagine: "Huh.  Peanuts.  Never thought to try to grow peanuts.  I will purchase a $0.69 peanut plant right away."  I remember from learning about George Washington Carver in third grade that peanuts are good for the soil (nitrogen fixing?), so if nothing else, a couple of peanut plants would be good for the garden.

I know nothing else.  I don't know how big they'll get. The Internet tells me they grow underground, which I think I knew?  In any case, they're a pretty plant:

Holy crap, there's a snail there.  Ew.

Week two recap

Sundays are better with flowers:

Tiger daffodils from this spring

Weekly total: 20 miles.

I'm feeling pretty good about training so far, as I was able to complete my long run easily.  I'm not in pain, either, which is new, as for the past three months I've been battling a cranky left glute.  Aggressive hamstring stretching and strength training seems to have helped.

I am, however, unusually tired, to the point that I took a pregnancy test (negative!) and I'm wondering if my iron levels are off.  A check-up Thursday should help sort that out.  In the meantime, this week will be lighter on lifting as it's an interval week and Friday is the holiday.

Week in review:

Monday's strength workout.

Tuesday's easy run.

Wednesday's strength + tabatas.

Thursday's easy run and apricot overload.

Friday's easy run thwarted by a stroller.

Saturday's poopy long run.

Oh my apricots.

I promise you this will never be a running and food blog, because a) Hungry Runner Girl wannabes are a dime a dozen (nothing against HRG, but there are soo many candy! running! yay! imitators out there!)  and b) I am not fantastically excited about spinach salads.

Nevertheless, my cups runneth over with apricots.

Lego Duplo included for scale.

Seriously, this is getting a little ridiculous. We have one tiny tree.  Last year a late frost zapped all of the blossoms, and this year they're all over the place.  

So, I'm going to be making jam, but I also made a delicious apricot sorbet based on this version of the Perfect Scoop's sorbet.

• 2lb ripe-to-squishy apricots.  (Mine are small -- I used about thirty.)
• 1 cup water
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 T white wine.  (Totally optional, but it helps keep the sorbet soft and scoopable.)

Remove the pits from the apricots, put them in a saucepan, add a cup of water.  Bring it to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer it for about ten minutes.  Stir it when you feel like it -- this isn't a fussy recipe. 

So unfussy that you can blog while it simmers...

When the apricots are very gooshy, remove them from the heat.  Add the sugar and stir it till it dissolves, then add the vanilla and the white wine.  Let it cool, then puree it.  Chill it thoroughly, and then freeze it in your ice cream maker.  This recipe makes about four cups of sorbet.  

Oh, right, this is my running blog.  

An easy four miles today at the crack of dawn, averaging 9:30 pace.  I prefer to run on trails or service roads, as the camber on the streets tends to aggravate my hip, but today I felt the need to hit the pavement and some of the rolling hills on my route (+/- 200 feet.)  So away I trotted at six AM, and came home, looked in the mirror, and discovered that apparently a flying ant had crashed into my face and drowned in my sweat.

So glamorous.  

On writing and running.

Rachel Toor brings us a lovely essay on the similarities between writing and running.

To her observations I'd add that both writing and running, at least in my particular case, demand continual, patient effort.  I am not a naturally gifted runner, and to get to the point where I can run several miles without injury has taken careful training over seven months.  Likewise, if I wish to write well, I need to write every day.   I can't just sit down and write an essay any more than I could jump off the couch and run a marathon.

In both disciplines there are junk miles.  In running, miles that you run just to practice; in writing, sentences you write just to keep the thoughts from freezing and seizing up.  It takes time to find my stride in both running and writing.

Yet improvements happen in small invisible increments, until one day, the flow is effortless and beautiful, and I run miles without thinking faster than I have, and the words cover the page.

__

Today's plan has me doing a "fun workout", for which the authors of Train Like A Mother suggest something like soccer or cross-country skiing.  It'd be nice to play soccer, but look, I'm running because I don't have time for another sport (and also, no skills.)  So today I have a date with some heavy weights.
__

The apricots have ripened.

Week One Long Run

Cherries!

Nothing like six easy (9:49) miles at sunrise to start the weekend off right.