Happy New Year!!

It’s been almost two weeks since I last wrote a blog post. I’m very good at being on vacation, and have rather enjoyed sleeping in and being lazy for the past two weeks. It’s going to be hard to go back to work in two days.

Here are a few photos from our trip.

Four generations.. my grandmother with my niece Mia in her lap, and then (from L to R) my sister Lia, mom, sister Stephanie (Mia's mom), and me

Later in the evening at my cousin Amanda's house. We're such dorks, but i love this picture.

We stayed in NY for a few extra days (and got in some quality hill training). I miss the hills. Virginia is a boring pancake. Yesterday we got together with my husband’s family and exchanged gifts. Later in the evening we went to a friend’s house and drank far too much. I also ate a burger, and for the record that is three servings of red meat in a week. Way to go, Mollie.

So, I had signed us up for 5k a few days ago because it seemed like a good idea and I felt I was ready to run a good time. Unfortunately the night’s festivities had not worn off yet. Our warm up was rough, about 10 min mile pace. We debated just jogging the race (I felt awful and Pete was worse off than me). After about 5 minutes of warming up we stopped to stretch and use the bathroom, and my dear husband has this look of horror on his face as he is coming out of the restroom. He misplaced the effing car key! We ran all around trying to find it, I cursed at him, he pretended we were going to find it (by the way our race numbers, flats, and everything else were in the trunk). Then I asked him to check his pockets again. The key suddenly appeared in some hidden pocket he didn’t know existed. This morning was getting ridiculous, but we just continued our slow pathetic warm up.

I’ll cut to the good part: we made it to the starting line. Pete and I decided it would be a good idea to start off slow, which we did very well. After about a half mile I realized I was able to push myself and I just focused on passing people for the whole race. It was weird to run a race like that, but my pace was close to the tempo I did last week so I guess it was more of a tempo. I ran 18:44 and finished as the first woman overall. Pete ran 20:14 and was 4th in his age group. We were both kind of disappointed in our times since I think we can both run about a minute faster, but considering our state of mind this morning I think we did okay.

Pictures from the photo booth at the finish line... you can tell we're both happy to have made it to the finish line

And I leave you with the lyrics of one of my favorite songs by Death Cab for Cutie

“The New Year”

So this is the new year.
And I don’t feel any different.
The clanking of crystal
Explosions off in the distance (in the distance).

So this is the new year
And I have no resolutions
For self assigned penance
For problems with easy solutions

So everybody put your best suit or dress on
Let’s make believe that we are wealthy for just this once
Lighting firecrackers off on the front lawn
As thirty dialogs bleed into one

I wish the world was flat like the old days
Then I could travel just by folding a map
No more airplanes, or speed trains, or freeways
There’d be no distance that could hold us back.

There’d be no distance that could hold us back
There’d be no distance that could hold us back
So this is the new year