AIEEEE Flashback!

Today.

It's January. 

A few days before my first-born's birthday. 

Packed snow and ice on the roads. 

The wind is blowing. 

And it's trash day.

FLASHBACK!

January 21, 1993, one week before my eldest's 8th birthday.
Roads are completely covered with packed snow and ice (much worse than today).
The wind is gusting up to 90 mph (much worse than today).
I am walking to work in the wee hours of the morning when a gust catches me and blows me right over. I am pretty sure some damage has been done. I get up, look down at my arm and see that my hand is drooping at a right (or so very wrong?) angle to the rest of my arm. I am a little over a mile away from home and a little less than a mile from work. There are no lights on yet at any of the nearby homes so I continue to walk, unsteadily, toward the office. Hark! I hear the sound of a vehicle and stand out in the street to flag it down. It's a trash truck, and the fellows take one look at me and get me into their truck as I ask if there's any way they can contact my husband. Thus the now infamous phone call was made. Upon answering the phone, the first thing Kendall hears is "This is Western Disposal. We have your wife."  Broken arm #3 is in the books. 
Note: Broken arm #1 was while playing wall-tag baseball in 4th grade; I was so surprised I'd hit the ball, I tagged the wall a bit over-enthusiastically. Broken arm #2 was while cross-country skiing and I came downhill out of the woods onto a bare patch - inspiring Kendall's older brother's inscription on my cast of "Next time let Kendall go first." And broken arm #4 was just stupidity on my part when I got engrossed in watching a very well played pickup basketball game while I was cycling home from work and rode right off the bike path.  I have yet to break an arm running and would very much like to keep it that way. To say I ran cautiously today, is an understatement!

Back to January, 1993.  I had a tradition of making and decorating my kids' birthday cakes and I was not to be deterred by a measly broken right arm. My eldest had requested the Starship Enterprise and I was determined to create the Starship Enterprise - 'cuz that's what moms do!

2018 is well upon us!

Happy 2018!

 On this snowy day in Boulder, Colorado, let me start this post by introducing you to our new granddog, Barley, a little fella who has brought many smiles to our new year.

Unbelievable, it is three weeks into the new year and this is my first post of 2018. Well, let this end that drought!  2017 was an interesting year running-wise for me. (Actually, it was an interesting year all the way around, but let's talk about running, shall we?) It was one of my lowest mileage years, yet I covered an extraordinary amount of territory with highlights all along the way.

Since 1990, I have only had 5 years of less than 2,000 annual miles - and one of those years was last year, 2017, with just 1,844 miles. But during the year of 2017, I also checked off 19 states in my quest to run a trail in every state of the Union. This quest has proven to be a glorious journey. During 2017 the trail quest took us from the southeastern states to Hawaii to Alaska and hopping around the midwest. We learned that packing 13 states into one trip was a bit much, that running one or two trails every day in one state (Hawaii) is a great way to visit a state; that it's o.k. to skip a few days of running if you're sailing on a small ship through the Inside Passage of Alaska and have the great fortune to run trails every now and then when stopping at tiny towns and national parks.

Traveling as much as we did dropped my running mileage a bit. A quad problem I had been trying to run through for 18 months decided it was tired of being ignored, also making it difficult to run and exacerbating the situation by affecting my hips. My mileage really dropped off at that point and I needed to turn my focus toward rehab, hip strengthening exercises, and mobility work.

And now we have a new year. Quads are happier - not perfect, but happier. And Kendall and I are putting together our travel plans for the year. We're thinking mid-Atlantic states in the spring, some of the southwestern states we've yet to do in May-ish, northeastern states in late August, and, of course, a few trips to Petoskey thrown in here and there. I'm saving Colorado for the grand finale'. In the meantime, I'm slowly (hopefully adequately cautiously) building my mileage back up. As part of this build-up, I also hope to keep a better record of my running progress with much more frequent blog posts than I've been managing over the past year or so.

We had a snow day here in Boulder today.  Taz heading into and tackling today's run pretty much summed up my heading into 2018 and tackling my running goals for the year.

 Taz, the statue. 

I put the booties on him and he did not move an inch 

until I tugged on the leash and coaxed him out the door

And Taz, once out the door and in the wild & wooly winter weather

booties gone (he lost them in less than a block)

and running free