Office Makeover

I spend 40+ hours a week in my home office.  The room is in a good location and has a good view.  BUT the decor left something to be desired, it was kinda dark and dreary.   I have wanted to do something with it ever since we moved in, but, I hate painting.  Since it was a long weekend I motivated myself to get it done.  I still have additional work to do, but the paint makes a huge difference. There is so much more light in my office now! 

Before

After

My view

Fancy Toy

Last week I mentioned my fancy new watch and after getting it out on a few runs I am happy to report - I love it.  It provides me with more data that I know what to do with.  From the readout it appears that I have a hummingbird heart.  My resting heart rate is normal (50ish), but activity causes me to spike in a hurry.  I need to do a max heart rate test so the results are a little more accurate.  Due to the heart rate issue and an incorrect activity setting, my watch has informed me each run was killing me.  I may not have felt awesome these past few weeks, but it surely isn't as doom and gloom as the watch is predicting.

Now onto the fun stuff, below is a peak at what the watch does (from yesterday's run).  If you want to see everything click here:  http://www.movescount.com/moves/move5583011

Run Summary

Route - I must admit, I am digging the GPS!

Speed and Altitude. 

Outdoors

The chickens are getting bigger

And the garden is planted

Now to finish the coop so we can move the stinky birds out of our garage...

Gear Geek

This week found me joining the ranks of gear geeks.  I don't know if I am excited or somewhat embarassed to share this picture.  Oh, who am I kidding, I'm excited!  I have work to thank for the phone, my blackberry died and when I contacted IT they asked what I wanted, hence the iPhone.  The watch, well, I've been drooling over it (Suunto Ambit) for awhile and I manged to talk REI into giving me 20% off under their sale, so, I pulled the trigger. 

Suunto Ambit and iPhone

I got the watch after my Saturday run, so I do not have an output to share with you.  I had intended to go for a run today to play with it, but the rain came back and we got busy with house project.  Maybe later, assuming I feel like hitting the trails with my headlamp. Speaking of rain, it is back... We had 2 glorious weeks of warm, sunny weather.  That is gone and there is rain in the forecast for the foreseeable future.  Not to be deterred, Matt donned his rain gear and power washed our deck, you can see our new raised beds in the background.

We capped off our Sunday with fresh oysters on the grill.  Not a bad way to end a great weekend. 

Holy Crap!

Preamble - over the past 5 months my longest run was ~11 miles, and that happened a few times, at best.  More often that not I ran a few miles at a time.  Sad, pathetic, motivation lost...  But, as I mentioned before I found it, my motivation reappeared. 

Fast forward to this week.  I ran three, count it, THREE times.  That is big for me.  First up, Tuesday Rock Candy.  If you remember from last year this is that hill workout that knocked me on my ass.  Not this year, I am woefully out of shape compared to where I was this time last year; however the workout felt much easier.  Next up was Priest Point on Thursday, an easy 45 min run followed by beer.  Okay, maybe this one doesn't count.  That brings us to Saturday.  Dave wanted to link together three peaks for a 20 mile jaunt in the woods.  I was sold.  Sure, my longest distance in months was way less than that, but hey, you gotta start somewhere! 

We started off at the crack of 9 am figuring we would be out for around 4 hrs.  We ran into a hitch right off the bat, there was an ATV event going on and they were using a number of the trails we planned to run.  A bit of map work and we altered our route a tad to deal with this (bypassing Capitol Peak making it a two peak run).  Problem solved.  We cruised up peak one (Larch Mountain), said farewell to Herb and headed on down the trail towards Rock Candy.  Some more re-routing (ran into the ATVers again) and we found ourselves at the top of Rock Candy where we stopped for a minute to take in the view and discuss the fact that our 20 mile run may be a bit longer than expected.

Top of Rock Candy

After our little break we headed off to run trails we had never been on and ran into this...

The trail washed out, in its place was a rather steep ravine that lead to this...

Upon crossing and reconnecting with the trail we were met with so many blowdowns that running ceased and we scrambled for about a mile.  After which we were met with yet another washed out trail and ravine we had to cross.  Once that was all said and done we came across this...a bit late in the game.

At this point we had deviated even farther from our original course.  In our ravine hopping, route finding fun we ended up further away from our car than anticipated.  Did I mention we were all out of water at this point?  Back to the map to figure out how to best get home.  We made our plan and headed out, slowly.... 

In the end we covered 26-27 miles, a heck of a lot more than I've previously run this year.  I  must admit I am awful proud of myself.  The best part, I feel fine.  I figured I would pay in soreness today, it never came.  Below is a graph of what we did, the mileage is short because the GPS died before we were done.

Stolen from Brian