When life gives you lions

After a week vacation in Ohio visiting my friend Garrison (and doing a sweet bike ride that deserves it's own post) I came home to find my yard had turned into a bit of a jungle.  The dandelions had pretty much taken over things, so before I brought the lawn mower to bear I collected a bunch of flowers and leaves and cooked me up some dandelion goodness.  I made greens out of the leaves (they were bitter at first, so I changed the water, boiled them down further, and added plenty of onion chives and curry to give them a good flavor) and fritters and pancakes out of the flowers (these were actually delicious unless I left too much stem on the flower, then they got a bit bitter).  The whole experience made me feel a bit like a hippy, and I'm sure any of my neigbors who saw me out with a bag collecting dandelion flowers probably thought so too.  I'm still catching up from the vacation, but now at least the lawn is looking a bit more respectable (still needs work, the reel mower can't handle tall grass and tall dandelions well, so I'll probably need to make another pass if the rain lets up at all for the remainder of the week.  I have also started playing around with a new data tracking program to use my Garmin data, so look for cool stuff from that once I get it figured out a bit better.  It should make it much easier to share workout data on the blog.  My camera is still missing in the BWCA somewhere, so the only photos I will put up will come from others until I get a new one.

Ouch

I'm quickly becoming singled out for being single amidst my group of non-skiing friends.  Most all of my friends are now either married, engaged, or at least in long term relationships, and I'm still rolling with the single thing.  Gary's wedding was last weekend.  It was a good time, probably the only wedding I'll go to where "Botten Anna" will be played at the reception.  I don't know if Gary picked that song to put on the list or if the DJ just played all the techno songs he had in his repitoire, but it was a good time none the less.  Me and my brother were ushers and we made a pretty sharp pair.

On a running related note, it is May now and that is when I said I would start running.  Almost every day this week has been at or near 60F so it is much easier to get out running, and to come back into my house and not need to move around everywhere in a pile of blankets.  The legs have been holding in there so far, but the digestion is not doing so well.  I might need to take a closer look at what I'm eating to try to fix this problem.  For me digestion has never been a major deal before.  Skiing and biking for sure I can eat pretty much whatever whenever and be fine.  Running I've always had a bit more trouble, but usually only with the meal just prior to the run.  If I do unwise things like eat a quarter cup of peanuts before going for an 18 mile run I can understand why my stomach fights back, but this is less easily explained.  My 14 mile run yesterday started fine for the first 6 miles or so then my stomach just got angry.  It was a real struggle to just keep running, and even after the run it didn't settle down for the rest of the night.

On the plus side though I did pretty much finish the run, albeit at a slow pace and with a couple stops along the way, and added to the lunch run made a total of 19 miles yesterday.  That is 60% of the way towards race distance, so I'm getting a bit less nervous about that.  The climbing involved still scares me though, need to get some good radar hill intervals in come June I think. 

Trail Mix

So my trail mix team, Nordic Ninjas, is going for win #6 this year, a pretty decent streak by any standard.  We have had a couple team members change over the years, but have stuck pretty consistently to U of M skiers.  This year changed that a bit when Dave decided he did not have a good enough feel of his racing/health condition to enter a team event.  So we went through a series of other skiers to find someone to fill his shoes.  Brian Gregg or Evan Pengelley were the top two choices on my list.  Both of them were on the team at one point, but Brian ended up with other commitments, and Evan just closed on a house, so we ended up with Sven, someone from Gear West who works with Matt.
Preparing for this race seemed a lot like getting ready for a ski race.  I waxed the night before (summer wax on Jeff's skis) got up, put on my ski gear (also good for cold weather running), strapped on the skis and warmed up a bit (with 3 inches of new snow in my yard it was too good of an opportunity to pass up).  Then I got in the car and drove to the race.
The cold wet weather must have scared some people off, because the field was probably only 75% of it's normal size.  Things started looking up right from the line.  It is always a good sign when nobody is anxious to start right on the line, nobody out to win the race before it starts.  Matt and I set the pace right from the start, and when I finally looked back after a mile or so there was nobody with us.  I held on to Matt until somewhere between mile 3 and 4 then cut back just a hair to a more comfortable rhythm.  I was still able to see Matt on the long climb at the back loop, and picked up the pace a bit to make sure nobody was closing the gap down behind me.  Matt won, I was second, about 45 seconds behind him, and Travis was about 4 min behind us.  Sven was an additional 8 minutes back however, so things were looking a bit dicey.  Results came out and we had the second fastest time, but it was behind a Co-ed team, so we still won the Men's division.  In fact, we beat the next mens team by 13min.  A pretty sketchy win if you ask me, but I'll take it.
That night was my friend Kim's birthday, so we went to Annie's malt shop and out to a bar for a bit.  I got to ride in Rob's fast new Cadillac then it was home to sleep a bit before racing again the next morning.

Sunday morning was the maple syrup run at the Riverbend Nature Center in Faribault.  I was lured down there by the chance to win maple syrup, and the pancake breakfast after the race.  I took the lead right off the line and put a fast gap on everyone else.  I ran 17:50, not a great time, but I still won by 1:30 over the next finisher, so I'm pretty happy with that.