vacation mode

Hello!!  I hope you all had a wonderful holiday weekend.  I can’t wait to get all caught up on all your blogs and festivities.  I just wanted to post a little recap of our trip . . . and maybe another pistachio recipe soon.  Are you getting tired of all these pistachios yet?  Well, I still have about 3 bags in the freezer and 2 in the fridge :)

Because we didn’t leave for our Thanksgiving celebration until Friday morning, Chris and I decided to participate in our first 5k Turkey Trot to help balance all the good eating soon to come.  If you haven’t been following too closely, I decided to start this thing called running about a couple weeks ago.  Even though I didn’t finish the Couch to 5k training program before then, I still figured I would take it easy and just have some fun.

At the start of the race, I felt really fast and fresh, but as it went on I slowed down and settled into a comfortable, yet challenging pace for me and my lungs.  Chris, who used to run cross country in HS, comfortably left me in the dust, even though he hasn’t done any running since then either!  I didn’t mind.  I wanted to challenge myself, but not kill myself.  The views were pretty spectacular too!

The only thing was after the race, my chest got really tight and I started sneezing like crazy!  We were running on packed dirt and it was kind of dusty, but I’ve never had problems with allergies before.  I do have a hard time with the cold air too, but it was really weird.  So for the next couple days I was all sneezy and watery eyed :(  Anyone heard of this happening?

I ended up finishing better than I had hoped for!  I had an average 9:12 min/mile and finished in 28:34, 6th out of the 15 in my age class.  Not too shabby?  I look forward to increasing my mileage in the future and making this Turkey Trot a yearly tradition :)

My favorite part of any race . . .

I munched on about 3 watermelon wedges, 1 orange quarter and a fig newton, along with a water bottle.  There were a ton of other things there, but I didn’t burn all that much to go all out :)

We left early Friday morning for Colorado and had a great Thanksgiving celebration with Chris’ family.  His dad and step mom recently retired and built a beautiful cabin.  I would love to have a cabin!!  Although shoveling snow and freezing winds aren’t my idea of retirement, they sure seemed happy and it was really beautiful up there.

This was the view from the back! 

 

There was of course lots of munchin’ goin’ on . . .

Here was my Thanksgiving plate.  Since we arrived late, we had leftovers, but it was still delicious.  I also had a glass of Ritual Pinot Noir that we brought in our suitcase.  I managed to only have one serving!   

But really I was saving for dessert of course, my favorite part :)  I usually like to get a little taste of each, which included pumpkin, apple and pecan.

 

Some cute salt and pepper shakers and of course we had to have a fire.  Boy it was warm!  Can you see the hidden picture in the fire?

mmm . . . these homemade cinnamon rolls were awesome!  I haven’t had those in a long time.

 

Getting back home from a Saturday outing we had a bit of a problem, oops!  But don’t worry we made it out!!  Oh the joys snow

The views were just spectacular everywhere!  We even saw a guy ice fishing. 

I can’t wait to come back in the summer time, which is a short 3 months probably, but I bet it is even more gorgeous.

Man, I just can’t wait to retire to be honest!

After tromping around in the wilderness on Saturday, we decided to ride into Fort Collins to walk around town and have dinner, but I’ll save those pictures for the next post!

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday!  I’m sure trying to keep myself from slipping into vacation mode this time of year.  It seems once Thanksgiving hits and I get a little taste of relaxation it’s so hard to get back into gear for the last home stretch.  I had my first presentation for sports nutrition yesterday and have one more to go this week before finals next week, and then I’ll be done!  (for this semester at least)  Oh and I can hardly wait for my week long winter break when I get to visit my mom.  I’m really looking forward to it and it’s keeping me going during crunch time.

What keeps you looking up in stressful times? 

----> Real Time Update ----> Speaking of stressful, my computer has been acting up lately again for the third time, so I’ve been using Chris’ older laptop.  A few days ago I noticed a slight clicking noise, and come to find out Chris says this is my hard drive about to take a dump, so we’ve been frantically saving files tonight!  Thank goodness all that I needed was recovered and I’m working from a different hard drive now until I can get the box to send my computer in.  So sorry for the lack of posting!  I’ve had the darndest time reinstalling everything and trying to remember passwords.  Darn computers!  Hate them, but can’t live without them. . .