Mid-month musings

As the very brief (two weeks!) summer class I'm teaching winds down on Friday, it seems that summer is slipping away all too quickly.  Perhaps it was the trip on the front end of the summer or the fact that I've been so focused on two major events/happenings coming up in August, but I've felt that the days, weeks, and months have quickened their pace this year.  Or maybe it's just that I'm getting older?   Keeping that in mind, and with Friday being my last day of summer school AND the day that we depart for Colorado, it seems timely to jot down a few things.

First of all, on Sunday, it took us 3 bottles of wine, two different steaks and some over-priced potatoes to celebrate our anniversary.  I'll offer up an explanation for what seems terribly wasteful and/or extravagant.  Or gluttonous.  For the wine - the first bottle we opened was bad, which totally sucked because we'd had it hanging around for a while and it should have been a good bottle - so much for aging fine wine!  The second bottle needed a day-and-a-half to "open up" and be drinkable (we drank it last night, not Sunday).  But the third time was charm with a good Cabernet.  Not our usual choice, but it paired nicely with the steak.  As we went through one bottle after another, I did think to myself "I hope that this doesn't serve as a sad metaphor for our marriage!"

As for the steak, we almost never cook steak - and rarely eat it these days.  But, we decided that we'd buy a nice piece of meat and eat at home rather than going out to dinner.  So, we went to the butcher and bought one ribeye, and the butcher halved it horizontally, slicing it so that there were two THIN pieces of steak rather than two thick pieces.  That was nice of him - he wanted us to have equal shares of it, but I really wanted a thick steak, even if the piece was small.  Rather than give back the first steak, we took it, and then decided that we'd get one more steak that the butcher did not cut in half.  I know, I know...  I suppose we could have given the first steak back, but it seemed to be our fault since we did not communicate effectively with the butcher.  The steak that the butcher halved is now in our freezer, and we'll eat it at a later date.  And the steak that we had on Sunday night was pretty damn good.  Finally, the potatoes - we bought them at the farmers' market on Sunday morning, and the price more or less outraged Michael who almost refused to pay for them.  However, the potatoes might have been the best part of the meal - they were amazing!  Overall, it was a great way to celebrate our anniversary, despite some of the mishaps along the way.

Finally, a few other details that have been on my mind.  My students' woeful AP scores?  According to someone who has way more pull/influence/institutional weight than I, they are just fine, so I'm going to stop worrying about them.  Shew!

On to the training for Boulder topic (ad nauseam) - after a few pretty intense weeks for me, I've started the tapering process. Woo-hoo!  Not that I'm tapering 100%, since I still have a few tough days and some long workouts that I'd like to fit in, but after a 46-mile ride followed by a 3-mile run on Saturday, I feel that any major 'pushing' that I do at this point will be too much.  One more thought about that ride - even after 7 years of living in the LA area, the weather continues to confound me.  We had suffered through several days of warmer temperatures around the Pasadena area, so we looked forward to something of a break in Malibu.  But really?  When we went on our ride in Malibu Saturday morning, it was a chilly, damp, foggy morning, and it had barely warmed up by the time we finished up our ride at 10:00 am!  Of course, once we made it back to the east side, the temperatures were right around 90.  On that note, I've made an effort to run in the heat, and it has been slow going!  I'd had an itch to run a bit faster, so last night I pounded out a fast (for me) 10K run.  I had forgotten what sub-9:00 minute miles looked like, let alone sub-8:00 miles!  Nice to reacquaint myself with those speeds!

Not that I'll see anything like that on August 5...

I am reining in the desire to make some sweeping comment about my training or arrive at a premature conclusion.  The more relaxed pace of summer has helped me considerably not freak out too much about training, but I also feel a bit impatient for August 5.  I'd like to focus on a different goal, even if it is smaller and more modest, and I think that I would welcome the change.  I lumped my training for Wildflower and Boulder into one long training season, beginning in mid-January, so I've spent many, many, many months thinking about Boulder, even if I haven't always been training for the event and even if I've had other races on my mind (and legs).

I suppose, what I'm saying, is that I'm almost ready for a loooooooooong break from training and will welcome the change with open arms!

I will, however, miss all of the ice cream that I've been eating these days...

Celebrating a milestone

So, Michael and I have crossed the five-year threshold of marriage! Exciting, I know! We've definitely had some excellent times in those five years and plenty of perfect days, and we've weathered a few trials with grace, on the whole. Michael now fully understands that he needs to feed me and walk me if I'm in a terribly grumpy mood. See, I'm just like our dogs!

We ditched notion of the romantic presents a few years back, settling a more pragmatic approach - joint presents. The bike rack for our 2nd wedding anniversary marked the beginning of that trend, and in the following years we've bought a tent and also taken a major trip (that was last year!). This year, our major purchase was FAR more exciting:

In case you were wondering what it is, we bought covers for our bikes. We will be taking them out to Colorado, and we thought that it might be nice to cover them for the drive. This way, they won't be completely covered in bugs! I know, isn't very romantic, but we're pretty excited about the 'bike defender', as it's marketed. I also cheated and did buy Mike an actual present - new cycling shorts! He's been wearing these really gross ones and hadn't experienced the wonder of a good biking short. He is now hooked!

In terms of celebration, we returned to our new favorite burger place in Hollywood on Thursday night. For a moment, I worried that it wouldn't have that "OH WOW" factor like we experienced the first time that we ate there. That, however, was not the case - we enjoyed every single morsel of the burgers and fries that we split (2 burgers, 1 order of fries). After dinner, we returned home and then these guys showed up:

If you've seen the musical Avenue Q, then you are familiar with "The Bad Idea Bears". They are little beings that come and fill your brain with bad ideas by making them sound like excellent life choices. They usually attack younger people, adolescents, for example, who decide to throw a huge-ass party while their parents are out of town and they are convinced that their parents will never, ever find out. So, in our own case, we didn't throw a massive party, but we returned home, opened up a bottle of cabernet and proceded to drink almost all of it. That kind of killed all of my motivation when I woke up on Friday, not with a rager of a hangover, but just low-energy enough that I didn't want to do anything all day except nap.

Fortunately, we did recover and bounced up early on Saturday morning - our actual anniversary day! We had a jam-packed schedule - morning hike with work friends and then head south to Corona del Mar to visit family for the evening. At a certain point in the day, I feared that we were trying to be too ambitious, but we managed to hike the 10 miles to the "Bridge to Nowehere", despite numerous river crossings thanks to the (it has been a VERY wet year). The hike took us here, the renowned "Bridge to Nowhere". More on that hike to come...

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After the hike, we sped home, showered, changed and headed south. We spent a lovely evening catching up with family whom we hadn't seen in over two years, and then Michael and I slept like the proverbial logs at their place in Corona del Mar. We woke up at a decent hour and headed out for a 25+ mile ride, from Corona del Mar down to Dana Point. Parts of the ride looked like this:

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The ride was great with the exception of riding through Laguna Beach - total nightmare on weekends, apparently! We experienced tons of traffic, jerks driving cars that acted as though cyclists shouldn't be in a lane, plus lots of pedestrians and tons of traffic lights. At one point, I actually thought that I was going to not clip out and, therefore, fall to one side because there was a red light and we had to stop on an uphill incline. It sucked! With the exception of Laguna, we enjoyed the ride - lots of nice hills but stretches where you could go pretty fast and a good road to be on. Parts of the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) even had bike lanes which was a total treat!

Although we didn't have a romantic weekend to commemorate five years of wedded bliss, spending time with friends and family and being so active that our bodies are in full protest mode (my arms hurt from hiking?!) seemed like the perfect way to celebrate this anniversary. The only thing that really could have improved the weekend is if the US Women's team had actually won the f-ing World Cup!

Well, cheers to us, and better luck next time to Team USA!