So Much Fun!

Just wanted to share a couple of great photos of the girls at the race this weekend! It was freezing cold (35 degrees) and raining during the morning, but all of the girls were confident in themselves, and excited for the race! They've worked for 10 weeks to accomplish this goal, and they've all come a long way!!

I'm so proud of my girls! The best part of the week with them was definitely the last practice. They shared how they felt about the program, and their experiences, and I was elated to hear how many girls felt like they could "do anything" and were "proud" and "confident". It was an emotional practice, but it was a good one!

Mackenzie just before the race started - ready to run!

Marissa with her mom - she has worked so hard this year! Almost at the finish!

Sophia charging ahead (a huge improvement for a girl who had never run), and Kayla behind her surviving the cold!

Lilac being the best running buddy you could ever ask for - encouraging Alondra on the way!

Amya- a champion!

Thanksgiving!

Picture of Plimoth Plantation, the living museum in my hometown of the original pilgrim village. I also had my first job here - ironing out the wool costumes.

So I had my first "real" Thanksgiving at my house, and by real, I mean that my mother and her husband came, which meant that the meal had to meet a standard, rather than being a mess that my Dad and brother would love me for anyway.

I got up at 2:45am, and had the turkey in at 3:03am at 275 degrees (we did prep it the night before). After 4:40, we basted it in butter, garlic, and black pepper + turkey drippings every 20 minutes. My mother told me it would take about 10 hours to roast a 24 lb turkey. My bro spent the night, so that he could assist with basting while I went to the turkey trot with my neighbor, her friend, their kids, and of course Lilac. The "race" wound up being more of a walk, since I was the only one ready to race, but it was fun all the same. After the race, we let the kids play at the park and feed the ducks.

I got home at about 10:30...and the little thermometer was already popped up. WHAT?? the turkey can't be ready already - it's 10:30 in the morning!! But it was. I used a second thermometer, we took it out, and it was perfect! Even though we didn't eat for another couple of hours it wound up working out just fine.

Everything came out well, the turkey, two types of potatoes, portugese meat stuffing, regular stuffing, peas, sunshine carrots, sweet potato pie, homemade cranberry sauce, and of course pumpkin bread, pumpkin pecan pie, derby pie, death by chocolate cookies, and red velvet cake.

It was surprisingly relaxing, everything went smoothly, and I think everyone had a great time. The neighbor even came over to borrow our stove (hers wasn't big enough to feed 18 people), and was commenting on how nice it must be to be able to hang out together and relax.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Running in the Redwoods

Ok you can tell by my lack of posts that I've been in a mulling phase. I'm trying to work with this new shot and the process of going way up, and falling way down, and then climbing back up. Basically, I'm trying to get the timing down so I feel fairly well all the time, and tweek my workout schedule to ensure that happens. It's been an interesting challenge so far. As of right now, I'm going to try to get more shots, in the hopes that I can avoid that lovely feeling I like to call "being hit by a bus".

I've changed my training plan substantially, as I've opted out of PF Chang's 1/2 this year. I just don't feel like my body is quite ready for the riggers of another long race. However, I have found the most exciting race that I plan to do the first week of May - the Avenue of the Giants 1/2 marathon!

Tell me this race doesn't sound perfect for a Phoenician? It's in May, in the the woods, in 60 degree temperatures, no time cut offs, and best of all it's $45 entry fee. Did I mention that it's in the woods? And not just any old woods, we're talking Redwood National Forest. They say that the 1/2 marathon course is the most scenic of all the options, and looking at the pictures I have to agree. It's perfect since Lilac and I were planning on doing our annual girls only trip around the giants anyway, might as well get a race out of it! She's not 100% sold on the 1/2 idea, but I basically told her that with no cut off, we can run/walk/stop and take pictures as much as we want. Just consider it a day hike, and it's a piece of cake!

(I have no idea who this is in the picture, but you need to see the scope of how massive these beasts really are).

The plan winds up working out perfectly, and I'll start running my "long" runs with an easy 3.5 this weekend, and slowly build up by 0.5 miles each week (cutting every 4th week in half, and then repeating the previous week 3 the following week) culminating in that big 10 miler the middle of April, with a perfect 2 week taper leading into the race.

This rotating 4 week plan has worked best for me in the past, so I'm going to keep up with it - and hope that I can get the shot in line as well.

I'm SO excited to go see the Redwoods (a bucket list item) and to be able to enjoy a day running with them is going to be awesome.

I'll be keeping you updated on my training successes here!

Can you guess...

Which one is my brother?

Light the Night!

My cousin Kristen was diagnosed with Lymphoma about a month ago. (technically, she's the daughter of my Dad's best friend, who he's known since childhood, and who is my god-father, but I don't know what you call the kids of your god-father, and frankly, I see him more than any of my real relatives on my dad's side, and celebrate holidays with them, so for the benefit of this blog, I'll be calling her my cousin). She was diagnosed at stage 2, and based on it's location, treatment is 90%+ successful.

When I heard the diagnosis, I felt pretty useless. I like to be able to fix things, and this was just something that I could not fix. I had thought about it for a few days, and I decided that it was likely that everyone was feeling about as useless as me, and that there was a way to give people the chance to feel like they were contributing somehow. So I offered to captain a team for the Light the Night walk - where we could raise funds, and more importantly, meet as a big family and show Kristen in a palpable way that we are thinking of her and supporting her.


Our initial goals were pretty lofty (at least I thought so). I had initially hoped that the Penney family and my family would walk with a couple of friends. My uncle thought that we could raise $2K, which I thought was possible, but I didn't consider it entirely probable. However, the community really stepped up, and after the paper checks are counted, we'll have raised OVER $10,000!!! We had a total of 62 people make donations, and 52 people actually signed up to walk with us. It was pretty amazing to get that kind of response. In fact, we were recognized by the National Team Coordinator for our efforts! THANK YOU to everyone donated, or participated!!

The organization has been pretty difficult, especially considering the way people receive incentives by both donations and fundraising efforts. However, I've already sent out half the thank you cards (the hardest part) and I will be sending out the remainder THIS WEEK! Of course I have no pictures of the team as they gathered before the event, or of the team picture we took (I was too busy running around giving out t-shirts, checking off balloons, handing out water, etc) but I have some before shots that we took in the lull before people arrived. The one above is of my brother and I (I swear he is not a militant terrorist, he's just lazy, does not like to shave, and for some reason his beard is just patchy) underneath our pop up tent (we were graced with lovely three digit weather as we prepped for this walk).

This are my stevedore-sherpas, my dad and my bro at Tempe Town lake, both sweating their butts off after carrying tables, tents, cases of water, boxes of t-shirts, ice, and backpacks from the parking lot at Tempe Center for the Arts to our spot in the park. No, somehow I didn't wind up doing any of the heavy lifting. I had the clipboard and was checking activities off!

This is Dad posing with about half of our balloons. You can see that they each had sticks attached to them. There were lights inside of the balloons, with the wire from the light acting as your string, and you would hold on to the stick, which had a switch for the light itself. One of my father's many non-commercial talents is his ability to create and untangle knots. We had 46 balloons (6 popped on the way from the park to our tent) somehow with their wires in a hopeless tangle at about 5:30. By 6pm, he had untangled them all, confirmed that the lights worked, and prepped them for our walkers. Go Dad!

Once we had actually begun the walk along Tempe Town Lake, I realized that I had forgotten to take any pictures with MY camera before the walk. So I tried to take this one of all the balloons stretched out ahead of us on the walk. All of the red squiggles are balloons. However, I never remember that you have to be really still to take night shots, so this is how it came out. I still like it :)

It was incredibly successful, and I'm pretty sure that we'll be doing it again next year!