It's hiking season! I'm super excited about tackling another section of the Appalachian Trail this weekend with another friend and I'm still head over heels with the last trip with Emily. To celebrate I caught up with Emily and got her thoughts on her first backpacking trip and what she learned as a newbie.
It's always exciting to get a new medal, but where do you put it? For my first couple race medals I just draped them on the frame of a mirror, but a few more medals later and my poor mirror was sagging under the weight, so I just stuffed the medals into a bin. But a bin is a sad place for medals to gather dust and feel neglected, so I started looking for a medal rack. I wasn't thrilled with any of the commercial medal racks available. They were cute, but they just didn't fit me, so after a while I just decided to build my own race medal rack.
One of the reasons we picked our particular house when we were house hunting last summer was the yard. I was adamant that I wanted a house with a big yard for Ryder and for gardening. The yard already had a good amount of landscaping, so it's been a lot of fun to discover what flowers pop up this spring - and here are the latest blossoms!
REI just announced a focus on women in the outdoors in 2017 called "Force of Nature." It's an attempt to counter the long-standing complaint about the outdoors industry: for too long the outdoors has been dominated by men. Men are on the covers of outdoorsy magazines, men are depicted in active ad campaigns, men get the best gear, men get featured on social media, men men men men.
Well, it had to happen eventually. After a four race PR streak I finally broke my streak. It was bound to happen though. It's unreasonable to assume that I can run every race in my life faster than the last, and it might as well happen on my fifth half marathon.
A Saturday post?! What is this?! Exciting, right? Well, it's the first of the month so of course I had to put up a monthly goals post!
It's here! It's here! Taper crazies, taper tantrums, (half) maranoia - all the insanity that comes with rest and nerves leading up to race weekend. The Rock 'n' Roll Raleigh half marathon is this weekend and I'm giving mile 7.5 to 8.7 a big ol' stink-eye for that ugly hill I'll have to run up. (And that's already the toughest section of a half marathon in my opinion, so I don't need any hill to make it worse!) Fine, fine, after a weekend on the Appalachian Trail I shouldn't complain about a measly ol' 163 feet elevation change. I shouldn't complain...but I still will. Bah! But since it's Friday I've got a few things on my radar to celebrate the weekend!
Last summer my friend (another Emily than the one I went backpacking with) and I were packing up her family’s beach house so it could be empty for a couple months, and I made sure the discarded food containers were recycled. I didn’t think anything about this until months later when Emily told me that this experience had reminded her how much we waste when we don’t recycle and that she’d started recycling more items on a regular basis. Once I realized I was a little fanatical in my recycling habits, friends pointed out other habits of mine that I didn’t realize were that unusual. After a while these eccentricities piled up and I realized I could write a whole blog series on green options, so today I'm introducing the "Good & Green" series!
