Blogging to De-Stress

I'm feeling stressed. It hit me like a ton of bricks this afternoon. I've been going along just fine in my grad program the last few weeks, but it seems that all the projects and assignments are finally getting started, and I already feel like I'm drowning. I have no idea when anything is due and I feel unorganized, and it's stressing me out. I haven't really exercised very much since the marathon a week-and-a-half ago, and that's bugging me too. I have a paper due tomorrow morning and in the spirit of trying to set the stress aside, I'm blogging before I get to it. :) This afternoon when I got home from class, instead of tackling any assignments, I laid out the blanket that we used at the 4th of July fireworks this summer and spent 45 minutes picking out all the prickly weeds and pieces of grass that got stuck to it. It's been sitting next to the front door for two weeks and I finally decided I couldn't stand it being there anymore. It made me feel good. :)

In other news, Bill and I went to our bishop's house last night and went horseback riding with them and they made us an awesome dinner afterward. The Browns are so awesome! I haven't been on a horse in years, and it was tons of fun! Hopefully I'll get some pictures of it from them soon.

This weekend is the BYU vs. Florida State game. We have All-Sport passes, so we'll be there and at every other home game this year. It's going to be awesome!

I'm learning lots of new chords and other things in my guitar class. I can play "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain" like a pro. :)

Minus being excessively stressed out this evening, things are good. I really love my program, which helps out when things get crazy.

I think I've hit my quota for blogging tonight. Bye now!

Devil's Castle

Bill and I had awesome plans to go backpacking over the weekend with our friend David, up Twin Peaks in Big Cottonwood Canyon. But then Bill and I couldn't get up there until 7:45 PM. And then when we were following David up to the parking lot, which I was sure I knew exactly where it was, we missed it and spent the next hour trying to find each other since there's no cell reception in the majority of that canyon. Then, while getting my backpack together, I dropped my chapstick and shut my car door in order to retrieve it. I stood up and tried to open the door and realized it was locked with my keys inside, nicely stowed away in my pack. So there we were, locked out of my car with my pack inside. If I had it, we would have just gone and figured it how to open the car when we got back, but no luck.

So instead we went camping in David's front room on a pile of blankets. :) That was actually really nice. And we got up fairly early yesterday morning with hangers, intent on going to unlock my car and get on the trail early. Yeah, hangers don't work on Hyundai Elantras, in case your wondering. So we went to try and flag down a cop, which we did. Turns out slim jims don't work on Hyundai Elantras either. But never fear, we have USAA insurance and we finally remembered we had roadside assistance through them! So we called and they said they'd be there in 45 minutes. Awesome! 2 1/2 hours later, they did arrive and open my car and we were ready to go!

Our awesome backpacking trip started about 15 hours late, at noon yesterday. Sorry Twin Peaks, you'll have to wait for another day. You're too long for a 5-hour hike. Enter Devil's Castle! It's in Little Cottonwood Canyon, is quite a bit shorter hike, but very technical. There's lots of scrambling and clinging to rock ledges with large drop offs on the side. In Bill and my terms, that equals awesome. Some that read this may not agree with that, but we sure like it. :)

Here's a couple of pictures of Devil's Castle, looking up at it and then back down on it after we'd crossed the whole thing.

It was an AWESOME hike! Really steep on the way up, then scrambling along the knife-point ridge line you can see in the second picture above. It was incredible! This is Bill and David on our way up. Here's a picture of Bill and I at the top of one of the many high points on it.
Here's a couple shots of the view from the top. And yes, the second picture has a huge drop off about five feet away from me. David, Bill, and I are all much more comfortable with large drop offs like this when we're a few feet away. It was seriously beautiful though. If you live in Utah and have never been up to any of the canyons, you're really missing out.
For the most part the hike wasn't too exposed. We were definitely on a knife edge, but there was usually a decent path or it was wide enough that we could walk without fear of tumbling off any big cliffs. There were just a couple places that made my heart beat pretty fast though. Here was one such place.

All in all, it was an awesome day and an incredible hike. Thanks to David for sticking around to work out the locked out issue. It took FOREVER, but he was so nice to help out. The hike was just great. Now that our marathon is over, it's so nice to not have long runs every weekend taking up all our time. I'm so excited to start doing all the other activities that got shorted because of running 30+ miles a week for the last 5 months. This is going to be a fantastic Fall!

Learning Guitar

I decided to take a beginning guitar class this semester. It's awesome. I'm not very good at it. I love it. I'm going to be better in 4 months.

Pocatello Marathon: We did awesome!

4AM: Wake up in our little 2-man tent at the KOA campground in Pocatello, rollover and decide to sleep for 15 more minutes.

4:15AM: Wake up for real, get up, break camp, get everything prepped to run.

5:30AM: Get on the bus to shuttle us to the start line

6:15AM: After freezing for a few minutes before the race, the starting gun fires and we're off! Bill tells me he'll see me if he sees me, and heads off ahead.

Mile 5: my hamstrings, which have been bugging me all training time, start aching, but it's okay, it's not that bad.

Mile 6: My iPod battery dies. I wonder if the race is going to be intermitably long without any tunes to run to.

Mile 7: Bill and I see each other in passing at a spot in the race where the course backtracks on itself. He's in the top 30 or so runners and he tells me I'm 68. We're both running strong and feeling great.

Mile 12: First significant hill. Get up it no problem and continue my quest to catch the runners just ahead of me. I've spent the time since my iPod crashed enjoying the fabulous scenery in the canyon we're running in and running just fast enough to move up through the runners a bit at a time. I'm pep talking my hamstrings, telling them they really don't hurt all that much, or if they do, it's okay because it's not going to slow me down.

Mile 15-18: Ran up a ton of "rises" that sure looked, and sometimes felt, like hills. I didn't remember them from the elevation map on the website, but oh well. Just running along and still feeling pretty good.

Mile 20-21: Catch an amazing tailwind that gets me halfway up the real hill at mile 21. I'm pretty beat at this point so I start taking breaks every mile or so to walk for about 30 seconds. It's a trick my friend told me about awhile back and I've never tried it. It turns out it works fantastically well to get a bit more energy out of my poor thrashed legs. My hamstrings are more than a little sore by now and I am in the mentally tough mode that marathon training is supposed to prepare you for. That mode where my body is screaming it's done, I'm ignoring it and still putting one foot in front of the other even though I'm not sure where the energy is coming from.

Mile 22: Pass Bill. He looks pretty terrible. He hit the not-so proverbial wall at Mile 18 and hasn't found a way over it. I'm not feeling so great myself (that's a huge understatement), but I could at least keep running fairly normal, albeit at a slower pace. He's barely keeping his feet moving, poor guy, but he's still going, and I think that's awesome! Come to find out at the end of the race that he never stopped running no matter how bad it felt. What a guy!

Mile 25: Pass a guy that cheers me on saying, "Congratulations, Marathoner! You're done!" Oh how I wished I was! That last mile was ever so long! People may laugh when marathons specify that a marathon is 26.2 miles, but there is a reason. That last mile and .2 from 25 to 26 seems like the longest you've ever run. The .2 miles makes a HUGE difference! I couldn't wait to see the finish line and it sure was a long way in coming. I had completely forgotten to bring my watch, so I didn't really know my time, except that my first half of the race was fast and the second half quite a bit slower. I was able to make a push at the end to pass one more guy and came in at 3 hours 43 minutes and a few seconds. What a race! I couldn't have been more glad to finish! I loved the course, the staff was amazing, but man was it a hard run!

After my race waiting for Bill: I got a bit of food, stretched some, and waited for Bill, hoping he would make it in. I was rather worried and I didn't know how long it would take him those last few miles. I was SO excited to see him come in at 3 hours 57 minutes! What a race! And he didn't stop the entire time! Way to go Bill!

Awards Ceremony an hour or two later: We got some food into ourselves, stretched as much as we could, and waited to hear the results. There were 281 marathoners, plus enough half-marathoners, 10kers and 5kers to fill out the numbers to about 1000 runners overall. I went back and looked at the results and saw they were very promising for us. Turns out I was right! I finished first in my age division and Bill finished 4th in his! Woot! What a great way to end the morning!

After the ceremony: We had to book it out of there, drive back down to Salt Lake, stop off at my parent's apartment to take the fastest showers in recorded history and drop off our car, then they took us to the airport so we could fly down to Las Vegas to be at Vince and Megan's wedding reception. It was awesome!

What a day! Oh, and one more thing. We watched the BYU vs. OU game during the reception, and it was incredible! I have to admit I didn't think we had a chance, but I cheered them on like crazy and was so excited when they won. Go BYU!

Back Online

I've had so many things to blog about in the last few weeks, but life has been crazy and I just haven't gotten to it. Here's a few highlights:

Bill and I finally got to go on our late honeymoon a few weeks ago. Most of you that read my blog know about the fiasco we had with trying to go to Cancun in April. Delta was not our friend at that point and we missed out on our trip to Cancun. We did however, get a beautiful digital piano with the money from the flights, and because of the extra vouchers Delta gave us, this weekend we will be able to fly down to Las Vegas for Bill's brother and wife, Vince and Megan's wedding reception. They got married in Ohio and we just couldn't get out there for it, so this is it for us being at wedding festivities. We are running our marathon in Pocatello on Saturday morning, then driving back to Salt Lake in time to catch a flight down to Las Vegas, so those vouchers are just what we needed to make it work.

The trip to San Diego was awesome. I went boogie boarding for the first time while we were there. I wish we'd taken pictures, but we didn't really want to leave our nice new camera sitting unattended on the beach while we were in the water. I'll just say it was awesome! Bill blogged about the trip on his blog. I'm not going to post any since his post pretty much sums it up. We got to see several of my aunts and uncles and my grandma while we were there. They treated us like royalty, and it was awesome. We had a couple nights free at a hotel down on hotel circle, and that was fun. It was just an awesome trip. We'll definitely be back in the future.

In other news, today was the second day of school in my grad program! I'm doing my Master of Public Administration at BYU and I absolutely love it! I'm not exactly sure what direction I'm going to take in the program emphasis-wise, but I'm leaning more towards local or state government. I had thought originally I wanted to do international non-profit, but come to find out most of those organizations are in Washington DC, and with Bill going into the Navy Civil Engineering Corps (unless something crazy happens to change that path), I don't think that's the best option for my career pursuits. It might be a little hard to find a job if we're in Germany or New Zealand or something like that. :) I do think it might be fun and fulfilling to work in a city government and maybe even get to work with the Parks and Rec part of it, running that. I might actually get a decent salary out of it, instead of what I would have got if I tried to do that with just my Rec Management undergrad. Who knows. The first two semesters of the program will give me a good idea of some of the different career options, so I'll refine what I want to study as time goes by.

It is SO good to be back in school! I've always loved BYU and it's great to be back. I spend all my time in the Tanner Building, which is a somewhat elitist place. It's quite amusing, but it's a seriously nice building. They just built a new addition and I spend all my time there. Bill came and hung out with me in the MPA lounge yesterday and he agreed it's pretty nice. :)

Speaking of Bill, we have it set up so that we can meet for lunch or other random times on campus and I love it! It's so fun to see each other in the middle of the day! It hasn't happened really since we got married, except in passing as he was coming home to eat and I was leaving for work. It's so fun to be a married student! Complicated, yes, and we're excessively poor, but who cares? :)

Life is good, and it gets better every day. I love it!