Top of Utah Half Marathon

Another half marathon has bit the dust without me biting the dust!  A success!  This race was special though because Olivia and I got to do it with our sisters!  They are both busy wives and moms so training for them was quite the sacrifice!  I was especially proud of Amy.  This was her first race longer than a 5k...from a 5k to a half marathon...what a woman!  Here we are before the race looking especially tired!

So here is the awesome planning on our part.  We bought tickets for Wicked forever ago for Friday, Aug. 24.  Then we signed up for this race completely forgetting about our Wicked plans for the night before.  Long story short, Olivia and I went to Wicked Friday night which was over around 11pm.  We drove up to Logan for the race and arrived at the hotel at 1am.  Our alarms went off at 4:30am to get our race packets and catch the bus to the race start.  Run 13.1 miles on 3.5 hours of sleep...brilliant idea!  And poor Liz had no choice in the matter and had to suffer from our poor planning.  Luckily Amy and her fam were able to go up a little earlier, but the kids were up several times during the night.  So we were all sort of a tired mess!  But here we are pre-race all ready and rarin' to go!

I took my camera with me on the race this time.  Here we are around mile 3 feeling pretty great about life.  We talked and laughed and told stories for the first 8-9miles.  Take note of my sweatiness here to compare to a future picture.

The first half of the race was down a canyon (down being the key word there...yippee!!).  It was so beautiful!  It was really a perfect race day!

Here is a pic of O and I that I stole from the professional race photographer website so ignore the watermark...ha!

And here is the sweatiness comparison picture. This is probably around mile 9.  It started to be not so fun and enjoyable at about this time.  No more DOWN the canyon with a tailwind and a whole lot of flat running through cities.  At least there were no big hills to climb!

The last 2 miles were brutal!  I wanted to cry and stop and walk the entire time!  Its funny because its all mental.  I felt just fine physically, but mentally, I was done!  Check out the sweatiness now...

After I tracked down some water and something to eat, I headed over to the finish line to find Dan and the kids and to cheer Amy on to the finish!  Here she comes!!  I was holding Jack and she fived it up with him as she ran by.

My goal was to finish under 2:10, and I made it under 2 hours again...coming in at 1:58!  I'm not sure how that happened, but I am quite pleased!  That is WAY faster than I was ever running during all of my training.  I'll give the downhill and the tailwind for the first half of the race all the credit.  Amy's goal was to finish in less than 2:30, and she came in at 2:23!  Go us!

After the race, a shower, and a bit of recovery time, we headed to the Bluebird Diner for lunch.  The kids picked up some candy treats on the way out.

We also drove by the house we used to live in when we were little.  The neighborhood is looking ghetto fabulous these days!  It is funny the memories we will have the neighborhood and house though.  We moved from there when I was 7 or 8.

It always feels so good when I finish a big race like this.  It is hours and hours and miles and miles of training and hard work, but the sense of accomplishment is so worth it!  So proud of all my girls!  And especially thanks to Olivia for being the best running buddy a girl could ever ask for!

Chunkin' Dunkin' - Attempt #1

Skinny dipping (for real) has been on our roommate bucket list for months and months now.  And when I say skinny dipping (for real), I mean getting naked on shore and running into a body of water.  I've done the skinny dipping where you get in the water fully clothed, remove your clothes, swim for a minute, and then put your clothes back on in the water several times.  That is not skinny dipping for real in my book.  So we have been trying to figure out where to complete this task for a long time.  I finally found a short hike to a secluded lake in my Salt Lake County hiking book, and we decided that this was it.  FHE activity it is!  We packed our towels and headed up Big Cottonwood Canyon.

See the sweat about to drop off my ear?  Sweatiest person on earth=me.

Here are my peeps!  Don't worry, Jake was going to stay a good distance from the lake and guard the path to make sure no one came up and saw us.

When we came up to the lake, our anticipation and excitement was diminished.  It was disgusting!  Like mossy, film on top of the water, mosquitoes and gnats everywhere type of nasty.  But we thought we would walk around the lake and see if there was a cleaner looking spot.  We would have definitely caught a disease or came out of the experience with a tape worm if we jumped in naked there.  The three of us continued along the path to other side of the lake.

No such luck!  It was disgusting everywhere.  Tricia walked up to the shore and ended up ankle deep in mud, and there were moose tracks everywhere.  Moose country at dusk...great!  The lake looked so shallow, and we weren't even sure if we could get completely in the water.  I picked up a rocked and went to throw it underhand out into the middle of the lake to get a better idea of how deep it was.  Well, I had a bit of late release and ended up throwing the rock almost directly straight up into the air and onto one of our heads.  It was hilarious!

At this point, we still hadn't completely given up on the idea when a young family walked up to the other side of the lake probably for their own FHE activity.  All skinny dipping dreams were destroyed.  We were pretty sad!  This picture if one of my favorites of all time.

We headed back around the lake to where Jake was waiting for us.  We came up to the top of a little hill, and I looked up and saw a huge brown blob.  I said, "There's a moose..." as the moose lifted up his head and stared right at us..."a bull one" was my response.  This guy had a huge rack of horns on him.  He was about 50 yds away, so we calmly backed away and decided we would hike around the lake the other way.  That plan ended up being easier said than done.  The path did not lead around the lake but back up into the mountains and definite moose country, so we had to blaze our own trail through the marsh lands.  We tried to walk on logs as much as possible to stay out of the mud, and Olivia bit the dust.

We had to ford several streams and the grass was so high we never really knew what we were stepping into.  It was almost totally dark by the time we started our hike back to the car.  It was quite the FHE adventure and a skinny dipping failure! We haven't laughed so much in a really long time.

This brings me to the title of the post.  Tricia was listening to something on the radio and they were talking about the term "skinny dipping".  Who decided that "skinny dipping" was an appropriate term for jumping into a body of water naked?  The radio people said that "chunkin' dunkin" is a much more appropriate term.  It really cracks us up!  I bet you can't wait for our chunkin' dunkin' attempt #2....stay tuned!!

Sunset Peak

I finally went hiking! It only took until August 17, but I finally made it up into the mountains!  After work last Friday, T and I headed up Little Cottonwood Canyon to hike to Sunset Peak.  It was only about 3 miles round trip, so it was perfect for a little after work adventure!

You could see Lake Mary, Lake Martha, and Lake Catherine from the top.  So beautiful!

So happy and so sweaty!

About half way along the hike, you come up to this meadow.  It sure was pretty with the sun setting in the background on the way back down.

There was even a moose enjoying the meadow too, as well as some annoying little children who were screaming at the moose.

We also saw a little buck.  Seeing wildlife during hikes is quite exciting as long as its from a distance!

What a great way to kick off the weekend!

Wedding, Work Trip, Running

The first Sunday in August, Preston's brother got married up at Atla ski resort.  Tricia did the flowers for the wedding, so I got to be her assistant/date.  It was so beautiful! 

The wedding, dinner, dancing, venue, everything was all so lovely!  We ate dinner at the same table is a famous local artist named Al Rounds and his wife.  I tried to become fast friends with him so that he could come to my wedding some day and give me a painting for a gift.  I don't think it worked, but it was fun to meet him!  Preston did an awesome job on his Best Man toast!

P & T

P & K

P & O - just never feels right when Olivia isn't with us!

I had to add this picture because it makes me laugh so much.  The wedding photographer was trying a new technique to put on his website so he had Tricia and Preston stand like this for like 10min while he took pictures and adjusted lighting/flashes.  Very funny!

Mmmmm hmmm!

Last week, Holly and I went down to St. George and Cedar City for a few days to finish up some work project.  We were able to squeeze in a session at the St. George temple while we were down there.  Such a beautiful temple!

Part of our work took us up into the mountain outside Cedar City, so we got to see this great view of the city below.

We also got to drive through Cedar Breaks again.

This is probably the last work trip that Holly and I will take together.  My company has been doing a lot of layoffs lately, and unfortunately, Holly will only be working with me through the end of October.  I can't even talk about it.  I've bawled and bawled about the layoffs.  We all know I don't do well with change!  I couldn't have asked for a better coworker if I had hand-picked one myself.  I feel so blessed to have coworkers who are all dear friends.  I won't think about Holly leaving until I have to...until October!

Olivia and I have been logging lots and lots of miles training for another half marathon.  Last Saturday, we ran 10 miles.  This is how I looked when we were done.  Even leaving before 6am, it is way too hot and I sweat way too much!  This was taken after Olivia removed all the dead gnats off my face and neck.  Looking pretty dang sexy, no?

We might be crazy, but we actually look forward to our long Saturday morning runs.  And I'm getting more and more excited about the race!  I'm to conquer that bad boy in a couple of weeks!