Sixteen

Ever since the move to Eureka, I have always thought that the area looked a lot like Anchorage. If it were only 20 degrees colder here, it would be. And I'm not talking about the dirty, disgusting brown of Anchorage, but the natural beauty of a city nestled between the mountains and the sea. Yesterday morning, it was just that. As Matt and I drove to the trail for our long run, on Hwy 101, I couldn't stop snapping pictures of the snowy mountains. At sea level, little evidence of snow existed. But up in the hills, they were snow capped and gorgeous. Of course, I had brought the running camera, lightweight but takes only blurry photos from the car, so I have nothing good to show you. But I nearly cried at how beautiful and different it all looked.

As we loaded up the pack at the trail head, I debated what to wear. Running in Arcata (about 10 miles from our house) always has different weather than when we leave home. A dark cloud drifted overhead. Looked intense, probably hail. I dressed for a run at 30F, even though it was nearly 40. I'd need it in the rain. This particular course is nice in the fact that we run a 2 mile out-and-back and return to the car, before going another 7 out in a different direction. Always a second chance to change my mind about my outfit. As we ran into the wind, rain started to fall. Then it turned fluffy. For a moment I thought I was dreaming. Snow? At sea level? This happens once a year and I got to witness it. :) The snow continued as we ran into the dark cloud. "Please don't hail, please don't hail", I begged Mother Nature. I can handle rain and snow, but hail hurts a LOT. It was really windy. Matt assured me that it was localized wind generated by the storm. I tried to believe him.

Trying to outrun the cloud.

About mile five, we actually ran through the other side of the small storm. Sunshine greeted us, like an apology for the wind and snow on our run.

Running buddy!

At mile 8 we reached the lookout point, my favorite part of the trail, overlooking the ocean, the sand dunes and the Trinidad Head, jutting defiantly out of the sea.

Look at those waves! That is one angry Pacific Ocean today!

We hit the turn around at nine miles and after that many miles of fumbling with taking gloves on and off, I finally abandoned them and one of my shirts. I couldn't continue on being this overheated and bathing in my own sauna suit of layers. I tugged off the shirt and immediately felt better. A cool breeze blew through my soaked shirt. The wind suddenly turned on the air conditioning. The entire return trip I felt refreshed, almost wishing for sunglasses.

Another storm lurking just offshore.

Per a very wise reader suggestion, I decided to run the last mile as a tempo. I also tried to run even splits, which sound easy in theory but really really hard in execution. I go out too fast. This is why I am so terrible at doing "tempo specific" runs. I picked up the pace gradually: mile 14 at 8:40, mile 15 at 8:15, my last mile in 8:03. Mentally reining myself in at the beginning was harder than I thought it would be. By the turnaround point at mile 9, I remember mentioning to Matt that I had finally found my goal pace, a sustainable. For now I feel like I have to keep it a secret so I don't jinx myself. I'm weird like that. I did run a negative split though, which I'm happy about. 1:17 on the first 8, 1:12 on the last. Maybe I should've taken my sweaty layers off sooner, hey?

PS- My knee did great! There's still a slight twinge of something not being quite right, but it doesn't resemble pain in the least bit. Yay knee!!! :)


And we got hail that night. Wonderful pea-size hail. Yes, I noted the size. (I even have two hail measurement rulers which I keep at home and in my car.) I am married to a weatherman after all. :) Similar hail fell at our home that night and remained until this morning. I thought it was snow as I raised the shades out to my deck. But it was hail, still there from the freeze last night.

He looks really happy to see our car covered in hail, doesn't he?
I love my weather nerd.

Finally, another point for California

Ever since the move, I've posted several times that I miss Alaska and want to return immediately. "Nothing compares to the awesomeness of Alaska, etc." Well, I've found a way that California is better : the food. The selection is amazing. Eureka has six grocery stores, two of which are organic or natural food stores. The aren't tiny natural food stores like I'm used to, with very limited stock. They have fabulous sales and I can find all that I'm looking for and more, often at prices cheaper than the other groceries. The only thing I dislike about the natural food stores is their promotion of herbs to treat illnesses. They don't suggest going to a doctor before trying herbs. They say, "It's all natural, it must be safe". That's not always the case. Herbs are just as dangerous to self prescribe as any pill.

All things considered, I enjoy the natural grocery. It has about ten different types of flour. Matt and I have always wanted to make our own bread, but because we lived in a series of very small apartments with even smaller kitchens, we didn't have the room to store three different types of flour. Now we do. And for about two months, we've been baking our own bread. Garlic herbal bread, whole wheat oat bread, and French baguettes. And we're getting pretty good at it. I also make some really delicious w.w. cinnamon rolls. With a little practice, it is almost as easy to make as going to the store and pulling a loaf of the shelf. And I love that my house smells like fresh bread for a day or two. Not to mention the obvious, it tastes 100 times better than the stale-by-comparison store bread. Someday I want to venture into Sourdough, but that takes a few days' advance notice since the starter has to sit for that long.

Every Sunday, we've taken to baking our own bread :

Growing the yeast

Growing the dough requires enough heat. Guess I'm going to have to bake cookies to warm the place up.

We're also very grateful to have sunny days, in which the entire family takes advantage:

My first shot at mowing the lawn. I did a terrible job.

Zoey explores her new turf.

The peas decide to make an appearance in the sunshine.

I'm very excited about having a garden. We had a patio garden while we rented apartments, but were never able to grow very much with our limited space. I have peas, radishes, and lettuce in the garden now. Our blueberries are blossoming. And I've got some starter broccoli plants inside by our south-facing window. Can't wait until I can eat them!! :) We're still toying with the idea of raising meat chickens, but we're not sure what the neighbors think. The county allows us to have them, but we don't want to make enemies with the neighbors yet....although just a couple more nights of their dog barking from 7pm to midnight and it might help us make up our minds. ;)

California has a long way to even up with Alaska, but so far, any progress is good.

My Valentine

Matt completed his last mid shift for the week and awoke, after just four hours of sleep, to me, frantically packing our things for a camping trip. The sun was out and wanted to be THERE, not inside packing. Clearly, I am out of practice in packing for a camping trip, I thought. We will have to go more often so this doesn't happen.

As I packed our sleeping bags and hiking clothes, I couldn't help feel nostalgic. These are my adventure friends. How could I have neglected them for four months? Down Cave (my 15 degree Marmot down sleeping bag) wept tears of joy as I stuffed her into her compression sack. She thought I'd abandoned her to the closet forever.

Our last year in Alaska, we were able to throw all of our stuff together at a moment's notice and everything would be alright. We don't know enough about the local area here to do that, so I loaded the car with a general destination in mind and a hiking guidebook from the library. Matt read the book as we drove along. Humboldt Redwoods State Park is less than an hour from our home.

After we nearly fainted paying $35 for a campsite, we were ready for our first hike. We overheard the cashier at the visitor's center telling others that the Founders Grove Hike was not to be missed. It was just like all the other hikes along the Avenue, about 0.5 miles long through the groves. We were disappointed. There were lots of people and they all looked like they were out for a Saturday walk in the woods. We craved something beyond that. Our library guidebook told us that the Addie Johnson Memorial Trail had great views and was 2.2 miles. Well, at least it would take us a little longer than the silly 0.5 mile hikes. We vowed to make a plan for Sunday after dinner.


AJM Trail is a long ascent to a hilltop. Garmy had problems with distance again, so we finally gave up on her and stowed her into the pack. We brought all our usual survival gear for hiking : bear spray, water, food, emergency blanket. We always hike as if we're going to get stranded. We don't rely on being in cell phone range since our hikes in AK never were. So, naturally, we had over-packed for the hike. Nobody else was on the trail. Darkness was about an hour away. We'd have to climb our 1,000ft on the trail and head back before then. The trail wound through Redwood groves, growing shorter and shorter as we climbed. We hit a meadow and a memorial gravesite at the top just as the sun was dipping below the hilltop.




The late afternoon sun cast a golden glow onto all the nearby hills. At that moment, I couldn't have imagined a better Valentine's Day weekend trip with my honey.


That night as we prepared dinner, I realized that we had forgotten the frying pan. It's really hard to make hamburgers without it, so we piled bits of browned hamburger onto our buns. A little bit more difficult, but doable. Matt and I joked that we had packed for the Armageddon with our bear spray and water filter, but I'd forgotten the frying pan. (We usually have a frying pan in our camping food kit, so I didn't even think that we needed one.) That night we had s'mores over the campfire. It was heaven.


The next morning, we decided that we needed a trail run up Grasshopper Peak. The book described it as the "toughest hike in the park!", "start early because it will take all day", and "to be in good physical shape before attempting". Sounds like the perfect trail run to us!


The hike followed a gravel fire service road seven miles and 3,000 ft up to the top. It wasn't technical, but it was literally seven miles straight up. No breaks at all. We had to walk most of the way up. It took us 2h20 to get up to the top. At the top, we could see the ocean, King's Range of Mountains and the NWS radar upon a hill near Ferndale, some 40 miles away. A perfectly sunny day and we could see for miles and miles in every direction.



We even found the grassy meadow from our hike the previous day, seemingly miles below us. The hills were covered by giant Redwoods, but one wouldn't notice from way up here. They looked like hilltops covered in shrubbery. We hadn't planned for a long trail run, our lunch consisted of marshmallows and graham crackers, the only food we had brought along that didn't require cooking. Buzzing off of a sugar high, we started our descent as a run. Some parts were too steep to run. Matt and I were both took tentative steps to avoid tweaking already troublesome knees. The descent took us under an hour. Fourteen miles, 7,000 + ft. of elevation change, and three hours. Great run. Sore legs the next day, but great for now.

In my Valentine's Day card yesterday, Matt wrote, "It was awesome that you picked the toughest hike in the park! I love a challenge, even though I'm a bit sore today." A Challenge. That is a good word to describe our time together. We get along amazingly, but through our seven year history we've spent a lot of it apart, I've battled deadly illness, and we've moved three times. All of those things pose lots of challenges. Standing at the altar, 22 yrs old, on our wedding day, we had gone through a lot more than most others our age. But we like the challenges in life. We don't like to do make our choices based on what's easier. And I love that about us.


I couldn't have planned a more perfect weekend with my Honey, could you?

Learning Experiences

Well my 10 miler went just as I had figured it would : badly. The only way I'm going to learn where my limit is to push until I find it. Today, I found it. So I'm grateful for that...but I still sort of feel like a failure at the same time. What I've realized:

1. With my training plan, there's no room for tempo specific runs. At least not at my current fitness level.

2. I'm just gonna pull the 1/2 mar. from my butt and that's all there is to it. I think I want to run a 1:50, so it's only two minutes faster than my PR, which I have hit in training recently, just not today when I shot for the moon and ended up slowing down a LOT.

3. All this over-training nonsense started with my friend, Nichole. We both really love the Green Bay marathon, but have never done it the same year as the other. This year we are. Also, this year, she's going for Boston. We were going to run the race together and BQ (3:40) together....but... She's more experienced than me, by about five years and three or four good marathons. I was going to give a BQ a shot these first couple months and see if I could hack it. Well, I can't. Too big of a goal for me right now.

4. What I want to do is PR (under 4:03) and average under an 9:00/mi. This goal is reachable if I don't over-train and kill myself beforehand. Every run, except the one 20mi in Michigan, has been sub-9:00. I can do it. FO SHO. So, new goal : 3:55. Guess I'll be running without Nichole. She can save me some chocolate milk at the finish line.

5. I will not let myself feel like a failure if I don't reach the 3:55 and still PR. A PR is a PR, no matter if it's a few seconds or a few minutes. Also, it's still a darn marathon, 26.2 miles. Not everybody can do that. Quit whining, Karen.

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I guess there's a silver lining in there somewhere.

I miss Alaska

I've briefly touched on how much I miss living in Alaska in the last month or so, but realized that I haven't really given much reason as to why. Last night, as I was sifting through photos of the last year, I changed my Facebook status :

Karen misses Alaska. A lot.

To this I get a few replies, some from my Alaskan friends saying they miss me too. And one from my mother-in-law, whom is so terrified that I'm going to drag her son back to Alaska and never return. ((His parents and mine have the idea that we're someday soon going to move back to the Midwest--which is becoming less and less our ultimate goal.)) So I decided to finally think and write up the reasons why I miss Alaska.

1. The obvious : the familiarity of it all, knowing the back way to the store, and once I get there, I know exactly where to find the green curry paste and make a quick in-and-out for just one thing. My friends. All my running routes. My job. and the Fairbanks Community Band.

2. I miss having seasons. And anticipating that something new happening. February in Fairbanks was really exciting because the sun was up a full three more hours each day since the winter solstice. Here, the high temperatures vary from 50F in the winter to 60F in the summer. Great for running, but no real change at all. I need to settle somewhere permanently that has the full four seasons.

3. I miss drinking coffee to stay awake through the dark winter. I know I could drink it here regardless, but I miss the NEED to do it to function. I'd usually calm down my running schedule for the winter too, and I didn't this year, because I didn't HAVE TO. I think I really benefited from the lighter load to recharge my batteries. I miss the hibernation period where I sit inside and read books and crochet.

4. I miss the aurora. One night as Matt and I sat in our hot tub, looking up at the stars, a faint glow of light pollution from town snuck up from the horizon. I have to keep myself from doing a double-take, thinking it's the aurora. It never is.

5. The nearby hiking here sucks. Nearly all trails here are less than three miles. It's fine if I want an easy, day hike, but if I want to trail run, it's pretty much impossible unless I want the killer Headwaters Trail. Fairbanks had lots and lots of trail options that I became spoiled by the choices I had. Also, there were bike paths to run on, here it's only the slanted shoulder of the road. There are trails a full two hours away, but I'm talking more about the daily afternoon runs, where Matt doesn't have time to get off of work, drive, run, and drive some more before it gets dark.

6. If you can actually believe it, it's more expensive living here than it is in Fairbanks. And Matt gets no COLA (extra pay for high living costs) here. Our gas costs more and food does too. And people say that SFO is expensive, we make sure to fill up on our way out because Eureka is always about $.35/gal. more. WTF. And we thought Alaska gas was high.

7. I miss the open, miles and miles of driving through nothingness. Just me and the mountains. Nobody else there. Camping where I felt like it.

8. California has a lot of rules. Alaska pretty much operates following Darwin's ways, Natural Selection, mere guidelines of common sense to dictate what I can and can't do. Just weeds out the dummies. Here, I'm always afraid that exploring somewhere new and unmarked will get me arrested. It sucks.

9. I miss running in the winter, the crunch of frozen snow under foot. The running club has really great weekly races all winter (free ones!), to keep the runners motivated. We didn't ever run for time, but more to have someone else completely nuts to run with us. I miss having wild and crazy winter runners in my life. We ran in so many layers that I could recognize people by their outfit and voice. Come summer, I'd finally get to see their face.

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So the plan is to take a few years, get good and sick of running at full-throttle with four marathons a year, and then go settle somewhere new forever. Buy a treadmill, run outside when I feel like it, run inside when I don't.

I'm not saying that Alaska is definitely where I want to settle down, but I know that it's not crossed off the list. When we moved from Oklahoma, I was certain that it would be. When I moved from Michigan, I was about 90% certain it would be. But Alaska? a totally different story.

Superstition

Sometimes I feel like I'll jinx myself if I mention my goals for something too soon. Just an "I want to do this goal by XX date" is fine, but if I give specific goals for a specific day, I feel like I'm going to ruin something. Just like how I eat Lucky Charms the day of a race. I don't train with them, hoping that they will give me extra power because I'm not used to their magic.

Tomorrow, I'm going for a trial 10 mile run to see if my half marathon goal pace is attainable. And I'm kinda nervous. Also, I'm using the half as a test to see if I can run GB in the time I want to get. Everything kind of builds off from there. I haven't had the best luck with my legs lately. But I have been going a little easier on them with some cross training and not pushing the pace, so I don't know what will come of it. Let's hope my legs are happy tomorrow.


...and every day after that....

Super Bowl

My team won the Super Bowl!! :) YEAH! Yearly events such as holidays and the Super Bowl let me reflect on previous years. Last year, we had a party at our home in Alaska. The previous year, we were flying back from Matt's work trip in Oklahoma. The previous one we were just moving to Alaska and watched it from the big screen at the Seattle airport before boarding the plane. Before that, it was one in Oklahoma. Then one before that, I was getting chemotherapy in the hospital. What a ride the last six years have been.

When I thought about all those changes, I realized, I've never shared my cancer blog with all of you. So here it is : Inside My Head....

....are those MY legs?

Good News!

Let me first start by clarifying, I have had ITBS in the past. It was at a time I was classified as a "recreational" runner, so I didn't mind taking time off while recovering and cutting back from 25 mi/week to 10-15. This time around, I've set some big goals for myself and don't want to see them disappear because of injury.

Taking emphasis off of my running plan for the week has been much easier than I thought it'd be.

Tuesday, I ran the five miles on trails and then did the 30 Day Shred to take the antsy edge off.

Yesterday, Matt and I found a minimally sloped road and ran 10 miles. 10 MILES! At about mile 9, I started to feel some pain in my knee. But before then, I was okay. Not perfect, but not altering my stride in pain either.

Today, I ran to a friend's house and back (3 miles) and did one of my favorite exercise videos, Sweatin' to the Oldies. This is the very same VHS tape that my mom used to get rid of the baby weight when my (now) 22 year old brother was born. It doesn't really give me much of a tough workout like the Shred does, but my friend said that the Shred was too hard for her right now, so we did this instead. I was in a hurry and even forgot to wear the Ariels and I wore my other (not as motion control) shoes instead.

I'm still going to try for a long run this weekend, but I will take each mile as it comes and stop if I have to, just like the 10. We started out with a general goal of "5-8, maybe more if my knee feels good" and went 10. I will continue to use the Ariel's on my runs until the pain is completely gone.

But this is great news!! On Sunday, I was really bummed and cranky, thinking I'd have to scrap my goals for awhile to rest up...but maybe not. I celebrated my painless 10 miler by registering for my March tune-up race, the Bidwell Half Marathon in Chico. :)