The beginning of the end

I've been up to all kinds of crazy adventures since I last posted. I'll give a quick rundown of them here. I had this post ready to go last week, but put up the Mozzarella post instead.

After Grandma's this summer I was dreaming of continuing to build on the great spring of running to try for a fast half marathon in the fall. I decided on the Columbus 1/2 because it has a fast course with good competition, my friend Sharon grew up near Columbus and offered a place to stay before the race, and gave me a great excuse to visit my friends Garrison and Kristen out in Ohio who just had a lovely baby girl this spring.

Long story short, my awesome summer of running never quite came together right. I was trying to juggle too many things training and racing wise, plus had my whole schedule periodically jostled around by the study I was participating in, so I never really got in a good training groove. I held on to my spring fitness pretty well though, so I was hopeful that I could still throw down a PR.

I started the long trek out to Ohio with my running gear, bike, and a bunch of stuff for baby Maggie. Before we get to that part of the adventure though, something else really exciting happened. Nate & Nichole gave birth to their first child, a super tiny little girl named Greta. Since this was a pretty big occasion I deemed it cow suit worthy, and suited up to go to the hospital and pay the new parents a visit.

Saying Hello to baby Greta!

Then I headed home to do some last minute baking so I would have a snack supply for the long drive ahead. I made it out to Garrison & Kristen's in time to take a quick nap and visit with them before Sharon and Erin picked me up to head to Columbus. We got to Sharon's parents and pretty much went straight to bed. The next morning we drove into the city to pick up packets and get a bit of a look at the race course. Sharon and I got our shake out run in, Sharon's folks made a good pasta diner, we did some race/cheering strategizing, and that was the day.

I couldn't have asked for much better conditions than greeted us on race morning. It was just a couple degrees above freezing with little wind and clear skies. Sharon's folks drove us down to Columbus and Sharon and I took off to find some porta potties and get a warmup in while the cheering crew headed out to find a place on the course. I packed a lot of warm clothing anticipating a cold race and cold biking while I was visiting Garrison, but besides gloves and arm warmers I didn't need much. Erin ended up wearing most of my warm weather gear for standing out cheering.

The race started well, I dropped right into 5:35 mile pace. Around mile 5 though the pace started to seem like a bit of a struggle. I held under 5:40 pace until about mile 9, then started to fade. The lead women caught me at this point, and I picked up the pace for a couple miles to give them a good pull, but around mile 11 I just couldn't hold pace anymore. The legs didn't hurt all that bad, they just felt blocky and sluggish. I kept all of my miles under 6:00, but ended up running a 1:14:40, less than 10 seconds from a PR. It sucked not hitting my goal, but coming so close at least reaffirmed that I'm holding on to my fitness well, a good sign for ski season.

The rest of the week went by very quickly. Garrison and I got out road biking one day and only got a little bit lost. We mountain biked one day on some fun trails, but the wet leaves made for treacherous going. I rollerskied one day while Garrison biked with the baby trailer and Kristen and her sister Haley both biked along too. That was a merry adventure, there aren't many rollerskiers around Dayton I'm sure, so I got many strange looks. We played a few fun board games as well. Betrayal at house on the hill, Elder sign, and Level 7, which we spent as much time looking at the rule book for as actually playing I think, but which has a lot of strategy to it in addition to a whole lot of rules.

Garrison homebrews, and while I was out there we started his first ever recipe that he created. It will be a Milk Chocolate Russian Imperial Stout, and we decided to call it the milk chocolate caucus, because it is heavy, very black, and uh, the caucus mountains are in Russia. Yeah, lets go with that.
It was fun learning a bit about homebrewing, and this recipe used a lot of materials. We used 20lb of various grains, cocoa nibs, and lactose for the milk flavor. I'm excited to try the finished product out when he is home for Christmas.

This post is getting longish, so I think I'm going to break it off here for now. Tune in next week (or at least not today) for the exciting conclusion of my Ohio road trip and the weeks that followed. One last note though, it is starting to snow here and I'm super stoked for that! Not much in Northfield yet, but the cities are getting dumped on.