Running – Page 3 – Jocelyn Rau

August 23, 2011August 23, 2011

Weekend reprieve

This past weekend was awesome. It was just 2 of those days where the whole time you think man, this is a really fun day. And with how busy we’ve been lately it seems like we hadn’t had our fair share of those for awhile. Well-deserved, I’d say.

My sister M and her fiance C came into town from Colorado on Thursday night for some business meetings on Friday, so they stayed at the Iron Horse Hotel that night. Oo la la. On work’s dime that’s a great choice. They stopped by my office after their Friday morning meetings to check out the place, then picked D up at daycare on their way to our house. So she got to leave school early and play with them that afternoon. We then all headed up to St. Ann’s for dinner Friday night, and it did not disappoint, as usual. It’s really called Schwarz’s Supper Club and is in teeny tiny St. Anna, WI, a little over an hour from here. Huge, delicious steaks and perfectly-made old fashioneds, all for a fraction of the cost you’ll find anywhere else. We dropped D at one of R’s brother’s house for the evening, then met friends for dinner and a couple drinks in Elkhart Lake afterwards. It was a beautiful night and a good time was had by all.

M and C spent Friday and Saturday nights at our house, and Saturday we were free all day. Wahoo! M and I went for a run mid-day (ran 3.23 miles in 30:26 for a 9:25 pace. slower than usual, but we had a huge hill in the middle and sprinted the last block), then we all headed downtown to take the Great Lakes Distillery tour that afternoon. That place is really cool. Their spirits are excellent, they have a full bar on-site, and it’s always great to see local businesses thriving with their products. I’m not a straight liquor fan by any means, but even I find theirs palatable. I also tried absynthe, and was surprised to find it not too bad. That evening there was a neighborhood party/summer concert just a few blocks from our house, so we loaded up a cooler with some beers, put it in the bottom basket of D’s stroller, and walked up there to hear some tunes. It turned out to be fantastic. There were approximately 1 million kids running and biking around, and the entire area had congregated on one of the main streets outside our little local grocery store. There was a big tent in the middle of the street where grills were set up and refreshments were being served. So we stood around for maybe 30-45 minutes, had our brews, then wheeled it back home to fire up our own grill. R cooked up the last of the Rausages as well as some brats from a fabulous meat market in Sheboygan, and we feasted. D went to bed around 8, then the 4 of us sat outside by a fire, enjoying the pleasant evening weather and some adult beverages.

Sunday M and C left shortly before 9 to catch their flight home, and then we had absolutely nothing on the agenda for the entire day. No places to go, no chores to do – something I like to call heaven. And the weather was spectacular again, which made it even better. D is officially in 1-nap-a-day territory, as it was the first weekend I couldn’t get her to take 2 naps at home. So when she went down after her lunch a little before noon, I put on my bikini and headed out to the backyard to snooze in the hammock and soak up some rays. Pure bliss, I tell you. The rest of the afternoon was spent just enjoying being home. R sat outside and caught up on some magazines, I played with D for awhile, and we got her water table back out to splash around in, too. She especially enjoyed carrying her little water toys all around the yard and driveway while we were out there. By late afternoon it was time to get her bathed and all the dirt and sunscreen washed off, then dinner for her and a little more playing before reporting for sack duty.

Summer weekends always fill up before the season even begins, so when we get ones like this to just relax and enjoy each other, they feel so wonderful. And guess what? We have another free one coming up again this weekend. Gasp! My heart might just explode with happiness.

August 17, 2011August 17, 2011

Our life in pics

I have been remiss in my photo posting duties lately, so I thought I’d devote an entire post to these past couple weeks pictorially. They’ve been really busy for us, so there have been a ton of pictures to go through. Enjoy!

My beautiful girl, just after her 1st birthday

She loved playing with the water table at the party

d12 — Birthday girl. Her dress had an adorable tulle overlay on the skirt part

d21 — R had to get one of the "Cheapest Beers" at the Fair

D suitcase — D helping me pack for Colorado

D&R Pack — Daddy & D ready for the Packers' preseason

D&R — One of R's bday gifts - I thought this pic was so cute of him & D napping in Canada

p.s. i finally ran again last night, the first time since last tuesday. i really need to work on getting more than 1 run in per week. but anyway, i ran 3.57 miles in 32:01, for an 8:57 pace. again, pretty much my standard. it felt awful, so i’m surprised i was able to hold my usual pace. i want to get at least 1 more 5k in before the end of summer.

August 9, 2011August 9, 2011

August is a popular month

Happy birthday, R!! This has been an amazing past year. We became parents for the first time 8 days before your last birthday, and things have only gotten better since. Watching you with D fills my heart so much it practically explodes. You are, without a doubt, the most wonderful father she could ever have gotten.

And you’ve been my best friend for a decade now. A decade? Seriously?? Wow. I am so lucky. Truly. And I can’t wait for decade upon decade upon decades more with you.

To the man who refused to listen to Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long” (one of my faves!) until he heard the line “We were smoking funny things,” I love you.

p.s. sorry to make you share your post, r, but i want to jot down my run stats from last night so i don’t forget them. i ran 3.66 miles in 32:49, for a 8:57 pace. it was the first run during which i had to stop, due to a stitch in my side that turned into a scalpel when i could neither breathe nor stretch nor massage it out. so as much as i hated to i took about a minute to try to get rid of the pain, failed to do so, then just started up again. it finally subsided after about the first mile. then at one point i thought i was going to poop my pants, but fortunately that didn’t occur. it did feel good to get the legs pumping again.

August 3, 2011August 3, 2011

Not-so-happy birthday

Poor little D. Her birthday celebration on Monday wasn’t exactly the fun-filled evening I was expecting. Sure it could’ve been a lot worse, but it certainly could’ve been better, too.

I left work a little early to pick her up from daycare, since one of R’s brothers and his family were coming into town for the Brewers game that night and staying at our house, so I wanted to be there when they arrived. Plus, duh, who doesn’t like to leave work early? Turns out D had taken zero naps all day, which never bodes well for the evening hours. I don’t think she’s ever decided to not nap at all at daycare, so right then I prepared for the worst. Of course she ended up falling asleep on the couch after about 2 sips of her bottle just minutes after we got home around 4, then slept for 2 solid hours until about 6. That actually wasn’t too bad because R and I were able to get a lot done around the house – he started preparing food and sauces for our upcoming party this weekend and I hung some curtains in the dining room. I’m getting pretty good at this curtain hanging thing, if I do say so myself. Just don’t make me use anything but a power drill and screwdriver now, and I’m golden.

After her nap I gave D a birthday dinner of pears, cheese, bananas, and Cheerios while we finished up what we were doing, eagerly awaiting the token first birthday cake-smashing-in-the-face. She was still pretty zombie-fied from the day, so she wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about much food, hence the lighter fare. Usually she happily gobbles up a hot dog and a couple other things, but a hot dog a day doesn’t really work like an apple to keep the doctor away. And she’s been eating tons of hot dogs lately. Anyway.

Before we got to the cupcake, however, we measured her on the growth chart board that R made for her. This thing is awesome. He took a router to the edges of a 2×4 to give it a finished look, found some really cute letters to spell out her name and glued them to the top, then stained and sealed the whole thing. So each year we’ll measure how tall she is on it, starting with her length at birth of 19″, and he’ll wood burn it in as a keepsake. We’ll mount it on the wall outside her bedroom door. She’s up to 29.5″, 10.5″ of growth in her first year. Yeah, go D! Then we showed her the box her water table came in with a big bow on top of it out in the garage, since it was a little late in the day to get started setting it up and playing. She seemed to approve.

All right – cupcake time! Let the smashing begin. We were definitely more excited about this part of the day than she was. So we got her back in the highchair, bib on, cupcake paper off, #1 candle on top, lit and sitting on her tray, ready to be blown out with some help from Mommy. Oh wait, Mom, what is this shiny thing? Fire? Let me stick my finger in it to see what it does. Oops!! She stuck her finger right in the middle of that flame to the wick before I could grab her hand away. Total Mommy fail. Of course R’s like why in the hell did you do that? I could see it from happening over here! (over here being where he was positioning the video camera to record this precious first birthday moment) Yeah, cuz I did that on purpose. I enjoy watching our child scream in agony. Oh man, that was bad. Her poor little head turned as red as a tomato with her screams, as I’m trying to suck on her finger to cool it off. Does that even work? Or does it just make it worse? I don’t know, but that was my first instinct so in my mouth her tiny index finger went. R got an ice cube to put on it right away, but she still got a little blister on it. Damn. Fortunately it didn’t seem to bother her much at all after the first couple minutes, once the pain subsided. Geez, Mommy, way to go again.

Ok, take 2. Once we got her calmed down I was tempting her with some frosting off the cupcake on my finger, since she was a little leery of going in the highchair again. That seemed to work, so she allowed me to put her back in to try the cupcake thing once more, sans candle this time. Except she really wanted nothing at all to do with that nice funfetti cupcake that I had so lovingly made and frosted in pink for her. She stuck her finger in the frosting a little tiny bit and squished it in her hand, but that was about it. Not one bite. No throwing it anywhere. No smashing in the face. I thought all babies smashed cake in their face on their birthday, didn’t you? Ah well, guess I can’t blame her. I don’t think I’d be too thrilled about something that had just burned me either, even with the burny thing removed. Maybe we’ll try again this weekend at our party so others can join in the fun, too. She did get a huge kick out of us singing “Happy Birthday” to her, though, so we ended up singing it 3 times. That means my horrifying singing voice is now captured on home video thrice. Ick. But anything to make her smile on her birthday. Plus by this point she was sufficiently exhausted again, so it was time for a bath and then bed for that little birthday girl. She had some wicked diaper rash happening that night too, which didn’t help her mood, and then I saw the culprit – another tooth. Ah ha! See, I knew these things were festering in there these past couple weeks. It’s not a molar though, like I was expecting, it’s the bottom right one that’s right next to the ones already there. What’s that called, a cuspid? I have no idea. But I saw it in there just under the surface as she was screaming with her finger on fire, then I saw the very tippy tip the following morning.

As I was rocking her to sleep with her bottle that night I obviously found myself staring down at her little head and reminiscing on that same night 1 year earlier, her first night out in this big wide world. Man, what a difference a year makes. That very first night was filled with the remaining shock and elation from the day – we had a daughter. Wait, we had a daughter!! I remember the nurses taking her to the nursery that first night and R going home to sleep, leaving just me in the hospital room, exhausted yet almost too excited to sleep, trying to fathom what life with a little girl was going to be like and wondering how long it would be until they brought her back for her first feeding. I missed her already. Then there was that night 2 nights ago, filled with calm and peace, looking down at our 1 year old daughter knowing that we made it through a whole year with a little girl and things just seemed to fall into place as we went. Thinking how lucky we are to have her in our lives, how beautiful and incredible she is, how endless the possibilities are for her in her own life, wondering what these coming years have in store. But most of all just thanking everything in the universe for her, our daughter D, on her first birthday.

bday3 — A water table, just what I've always wanted!

bday6 — This was the extent of the smashing

bday7 — Family photo with our 1 year old!

p.s. i went for a run on sunday morning, my first one in a week. it felt horrible. my legs hurt the whole time, and i felt like i was moving at a snail’s pace. so i was very surprised when i entered my stats – i ran 2.86 miles in 25:32 minutes, for a 8:56 pace. not nearly as bad as i was expecting. i just need to get more than 1 run in a week. unfortunately, this week is going to be busy, so i might only be able to squeeze in one more, tops.

July 25, 2011July 25, 2011

Takin’ it on two wheels

This weekend was R’s annual family picnic up in the Sheboygan area, and man was it hot. It was this exact same weekend last year, and I remember that because it was the same day my mucous plug came out (oh yeah, that again) and 8 days before D was born. It was equally as hot last year, but this year’s weather was more bearable for the simple fact that I wasn’t carrying around an extra 30+ pounds and going to the bathroom every 15 minutes. This is always a fun event, because R’s family is big and they’re a blast. His mom is 1 of 9 kids (this is their side of the fam that gets together), so all of his aunts and uncles and cousins are constantly coming up with crazy stories. Plus this was D’s inaugural appearance as an outside baby, so of course she was the hit of the afternoon.

P1080312-1 — The Murray fam (some of 'em, anyway)

Yesterday was one of our few weekend days where we had absolutely nothing planned, so we took advantage of it not being quite so hot and horrible outside and loaded D up into the bike trailer for her first ride. There is an awesome path that runs from just a few blocks from our house all the way into and through downtown, so we hopped on that and cruised along. R had her hooked to his bike and I followed, and he said she looked a little apprehensive at first. But as soon as we were halfway down our block, all I heard for the next half mile was her nonstop giggles. We rode all the way down to the lakefront and to the little man-made peninsula just out from the Summerfest grounds. It was so nice down there, too. The sun had gone behind some cloud cover and there was a cooler pleasant breeze off the lake, so we stopped for a bit at the point in the park to get D out and let her look around. By the time we got home we’d been gone for 2 hours, so that was a great ride. It was still pretty nice since the searing heat hadn’t come back yet with the sun, so R and I both got runs in after the biking, too. Talk about studs! I just did my real quick route, since the last time I had to do a bike to run transition was in the last triathlon I did, 2 summers ago. I ran 1.44 miles in 11:15, for a 7:50 pace. R did a longer run, and I called him crazy.

This is the bike trailer we got, and it worked perfectly. It holds 2 kids, so when only 1 is riding in it, the straps just turn around and make a harness in the middle of the seat. D loved it, so hopefully we’ll have many more weekend rides in our future.

Then after our runs, showers, and a Goldfish snack for D, we walked up the street a few blocks to watch the last leg of the International Cycling Classic, which happened to be running right through our neighborhood. Talk about amazing! I don’t know how those guys don’t wipe out each turn, they’re going so fast. We were there for the start, which was an awesome site as the field of riders charged down the street after the race car, then separated into a group of 9 leaders followed by the rest of the field, a gap that grew from around 20 seconds to almost being lapped by the lead pack by the time we walked home. We stayed for about 30 laps, which was just over half the race. What a cool event, and how fun to be able to get to watch it just a short walk from our house. They have it every year, but this was the first time we actually went up to see what it was all about.

And I’m sure you all heard about Amy Winehouse’s passing on Saturday. I can’t say it’s totally surprising, but a tragic loss of life nonetheless. And I did love “Rehab”. She joins the infamous 27 Club – Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain… R always said he was convinced he was going to die at 27, too. Sorry babe, I love you, but you’re not exactly the second coming of Mr. Mojo Risin. Sure glad you made it to this side of that fateful age, though.

p.s. One week from today I’ll have a 1 year old daughter. Wow!

July 17, 2011July 18, 2011

Where’s his whistle?

I currently have a spider monkey climbing around my legs. Oh no wait, it’s my daughter. My mistake. And this is almost an hour after I literally crawled out of her room on my hands and knees after putting her to bed so as not to wake her back up. ‘Twas no army crawl, mind you, but it was a crawl nonetheless. Apparently I could have back flipped my way out, for that “bedtime” lasted approximately 5 minutes. Superb, here we go again, after a grand total of 3, maybe 4 hours of sleep with her last night.

But to the real point of this post, today was the Milwaukee Challenge, that urban adventure race I mentioned, and it was awesome! It ended up being me and 4 other girls, and we were team “Jolly Green Giants”. None of us had ever participated in one of these races before, so we had no idea what to expect. The description said the top teams usually finish by about the 1.5 hour mark, so personally, I was considering a sub-2 hour finish a success. Plus, they posted hints on their Facebook page at midnight last night, and all they did was confuse the hell out of us. Here’s what we had to go on going into this thing:

360 degrees of blades
“DD”
Elroy
As You Like It 2/7
Where’s his whistle?

You’re kidding right? So let me get this straight. Each of those hints is supposed to correspond to something in Milwaukee that we had to find? Um, yeah right. I think you can see why we all had a mixture of anticipation and trepidation brewing by the time we got underway. Here we were, about to start a race that was billed as “part 5k, part ‘Amazing Race'”, and our preliminary hints were utterly vague and confusing. Sweetness.

Fortunately, once we got our sheet of actual clues at the start of the race, those ridiculous hints became much more clear and appropriate. Here’s how it worked: each team captain stood in a big circle outside Rock Bottom in downtown Milwaukee, the race staff handed each captain a sealed envelope, and when the clock struck 2:00pm everyone was able to rip open their envelope, make their way back to their respective team, and it was off to the races. Literally. There were 12 clues in all, 11 of which had to be completed for a successful finish. I must admit, as soon as we started reading through everything I was kind of lost in a cloud of wtf? Each clue was its own little paragraph, and 5 people all trying to read the same list of 12 paragraphs was slightly awkward. We finally decided that we had a good enough idea of what a couple of the clues meant, headed off in that direction, and just tried to decipher the rest as we went. It was a pretty good strategy, for we were able to complete our first handful of clues in no time. A couple were definite stumpers, and a couple of us tried using our phone-a-friends (totally allowed, per the race rules), but they turned out to be pretty much worthless. Ha, sorry phone-a-friends! But we did end up figuring all the clues out on our own.

And get this… We took 5th place!! Read that again. We, the 100% inexperienced, 110% confused team, came in in 5th place!! Out of roughly 160 teams that finished (about 170 entered). BOOM! Take that, Milwaukee. The Jolly Green Giants turned out to be a force to be reckoned with, and we Jolly Green Giant-ed all over your ass! Our official time was 69:28, and we ended up doing at least a 5k’s worth of running through downtown to get to our clues. And I think that was definitely the difference for us – those extra jogs through the streets instead of the leisurely saunters some teams were doing. It was so much fun. I was so unbelievably proud of us and just simply amazed that we did so well. None of us expected anything like that, but when we ran up to the finish line and saw they were just then beginning to bring the water bottles out for the racers and the finish line sign wasn’t even hung, I think we all got a little twinge of butterflies, like, we actually might stand a chance here! And we so did. We got 5th!! Sorry, I’m still riding that high.

And what did we get for placing 5th, you may ask? A $50 bar tab to be spent at Rock Bottom. Why yes we would like to spend that right now, thank you very much. How nice of you to offer. 1st place got $200 cash, 2nd place got $100 cash, 3rd place got $50 cash, and then both 4th and 5th places got the $50 Rock Bottom tabs. We were so stoked, I can’t even tell you. All I can say is watch out Challenge Nation – next year we’re out for blood. It’s 1st place or bust, and yes, we will knock you down and run you over to get there.

Here are pictures from our day, and I’ve tried to give you some idea of which clue we were completing in each caption. Even with a heat advisory we rocked this.

P1080240 — Find someone from a state that starts with L, M, N, O, or P

P1080242 — Form a pyramid in front of "The Calling" statue

P1080243 — Find a donor brick with the same name as any team member's first, middle, last name, or last name of a U.S. President

P1080245 — Find a building built before 1900 or completed and occupied in 2011

P1080246 — Find someone in non-WI sports apparel

P1080248 — Find an outdoor stage and work w/another team to act out a scene from an Oscar-winning movie

P1080249 — Find the plaque dedicated to "Crazy Legs"

P1080250 — Find the 9' abstract referee statue

P1080251 — Unscramble an anagram to get "Public Market", then go find the clock in the middle

P1080254 — Then take another picture there 5 minutes later

P1080256 — Find the firefighter statue and pretend to put out a fire

P1080261 — See, the final list even says so

P1080258 — Putting our prize to good use

July 15, 2011August 30, 2011

I Stormed

Last night I ran a 5k that kicked off this weekend’s downtown festivities, Bastille Days. It was called Storm the Bastille, and dudes, I stormed the shit out of that Bastille. I haven’t done this run in a couple years, but it’s a pretty easy route that winds through the city streets of downtown. I always had a fond remembrance of this race, but had forgotten that it’s actually pretty annoying. Here’s the sitch.

It’s a fun run, so it’s not chip-timed, and if you want to know your time you have to just keep it yourself. They do have a clock, but it’s so ridiculously crowded that the time you see when you cross the finish line is nowhere near accurate unless you were the very first person to start the race. (side note – of course my watch was dead when i pulled it out to wear last night, as was my old sport watch, as well as ryan’s sport watch. awesome. so i ended up wearing his clunky gps watch. very stylish) Everyone is crammed into a 1 block space at the beginning, so by the time I finally made it up to the starting line the clock already read 3:18. Then for I’d say the first solid half mile you’re barely able to keep a jog going, since most of your time is dodging people and jockeying for any clear pavement. The runners and walkers are all mixed in together, so each time you think you’re going to be able to get moving, you practically slam right into the back of a walker you didn’t see as someone else narrowly missed knocking them over too. Yeah, fun run.

They also had a ton of beach balls flying around and over everyone’s heads the whole time, which I could have done without, too. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for them at, say, a Jimmy Buffett concert, but not while I’m trying to run. I know, I know, stop taking it so seriously, it’s a fun run. But I wanted to try to make it a real run.

I was hoping to get a good run in and try to beat the time of my last 5k, so this logjam beginning kind of got on my nerves. Fortunately I was able to weave a pretty good path through the sea of bodies, didn’t run into anyone, did spend more time going sideways and around for a while instead of forward, but was finally able to pick up the pace by the middle of the route. And pick it up I did. I realized that the majority of the mid-section of the race was downhill, so I took full advantage of gravity and tried to just go as fast as I could. I never do this in races – go balls out that early – and now I remember why. By the last couple blocks it took all my steam to keep going just to make it to the finish line. And you couldn’t even cross that line, it was so crowded again. So I stopped my watch within just a couple feet; I figured that was close enough.

So my time was 27:20. Not the sub-27:00 I was hoping for, but it did take me 17-18 seconds to get to the actual starting line/clock after I started my watch, so that puts me close to 27:00 right there. Then with all the sidestepping and non-race-pace running I did for a while there in the beginning, I think I could easily have broken 27:00 again had I had a clear course the whole time. So I wasn’t too disappointed. Plus it felt like I’d gotten a good run by the end, and I was able to get right out of the parking lot in which I’d parked with no delay on the way home. In my run mapping program, it was a total of 3.22 miles in 27:02 (i just went ahead and took the liberty of knocking off that 18 second lag at the start), for a 8:23 pace. Decent.

I was also pleased with this time because I haven’t been getting much running in lately in preparation for it. I ran once in Canada a week ago, but no runs the week before that, so that’s pretty slacking. I did get out Tuesday this week, though – I ran 3.45 miles in 30:57, for a 8:59 pace. Getting better. I still feel like I just need to knock the cobwebs out and really get into good shape.

I’m doing another race on Sunday – an urban adventure type race with my trainer and another girl. The description of it says part 5k, part “Amazing Race”, so it should be fun. You go all around the city trying to solve clues, and you can only travel on foot or by public transportation. Great, the bus, my favorite. It sounds like it takes about 2 hours to complete, and it begins and ends at Rock Bottom. At least we know the beer will be good.