Annabelle is now a little over 3 months old. She has changed so much since we brought her home in early October! Below on the left is the day we brought her home, at 3 days old and 35 pounds. On the right is nearly 3 months old, and at least 150 pounds!

She has put on a lot more weight and has grown a bit taller. She’s also grown a lot wider, too! Looking pretty healthy, with a furry coat to keep warm.

Right now she is still living in our backyard, but Barry has expanded her area. She’s really enjoyed this as it lets her walk/run around a bit and she gets to eat grass!

She still likes running around with the dogs, and can now outrun Hank. She also recently head butted him! I guess poor old Hank is at the bottom of the totem pole. Annabelle and Scout are still best buddies, and Scout can often be found just sitting or standing by Annabelle’s pen keeping her company.

One major change since I last checked in is that we have weaned Annabelle. We started the process around the second week in December, by taking her down to one feeding of milk a day (down from two). By December 22 we had cut her off milk completely. She was not very happy about that and made her feelings known!

While Annabelle was being weaned, Scout was very upset. Anytime Annabelle was outside bawling, Scout would go and sit by her pen and stare at us like “hello, clearly she needs something!” Now Annabelle eats hay and grain, from her snazzy feeder that Barry got for her. It took a few days, but she has adjusted and is completely weaned now.

She still really likes hanging with the dogs, but I think she’s no longer having an identity crisis. She spends a lot of time talking to the cows in the field behind our house, and I think they’ve set her straight.

The next step is to find some land for our little ‘peanut’ to move to. She’s not staying in the backyard forever and she’s not going to be a little peanut for long!

Do you have any questions about Annabelle? I’ll try and address them in the next update!

Remember that Monday trail run I had planned? Yea, it didn’t happen. I thought it would be fun to hit the trails since I had the day off of work. But after spending nearly five hours cleaning the house, I was feeling pretty worn out and my back was sore. So I decided to take a rest day (originally I had planned for Tuesday to be my rest day) and moved my trail run to yesterday.

Right after work I headed over to run on some trails in Radford (the next town over from us). I discovered that combining stairs with trails makes for a pretty tough climb, especially when the stairs have varying lengths and heights.

I decided to base this run, and most of my weekday runs, on time instead of distance. It’s hard to make a distance goal on trails when my pace varies so much. So for now I think my weekly runs will be based on time and my weekend runs will be based on distance. My time limit yesterday was based on how much time I had until sunset – about 30 minutes.

On my way back, I discovered that stairs can be as difficult to run down as they are to run up. I had to react quickly on my way down, as some of them only took one step while others took two or three.

It was unseasonably warm yesterday (about 50 degrees!) so I got to run in shorts. It felt glorious, but my legs definitely showed how little they’ve been exposed to the sun lately. I’m so pale right now! At least I don’t have a shorts tan, I guess 🙂 There were still plenty of signs of winter on the trail, despite the warmer weather.

Lastly, I got to run through a tunnel at the beginning and end of my run. Running through tunnels is fun, especially when they have lights 🙂

 

Do you ever base your workouts on time instead of distance?

The long weekend is just about over. Boo. But it’s been a pretty good one, so I can’t complain too much. On Friday, I did as I had planned and spent most of the morning arranging my new filing cabinet. It look a long time, but it feels good to have everything organized! In the afternoon I headed over to Draper Mountain for a bit of trail running.

I went up a trail I hadn’t ever gone up before, and had to run and hike on the way up. It was tough, but I enjoyed exploring a new-to-me trail.

I finally made it up to ‘The Landing’ (which is probably about 2/3 of the way up the mountain). From there I headed back down a different trail, back to the parking lot. The very first part of this trail was completely covered in ice (none of that is snow in the below picture). I tried to edge my way down very slowly and immediately slipped. I slid on my backside all the way down to the bottom of the patch of ice. Luckily I didn’t rip my capris or my shirt! When I stopped sliding I thought to myself “well, I guess that was the fastest way down.” I laughed, got back to my feet, and continued on.

It was about a mile back down to my car, and it didn’t take too long to get there. In total, I think I ran about 2.5 miles. My watch acted up a bit at the start, and didn’t get signal for the first 10 minutes or so. I also ran in my new socks, and really liked them.

On Saturday Barry and I spent most of the day at Search & Rescue training with Hank and Scout. One of the trails we did was through the woods, up to the top of a ridge line. I ended up getting some unexpected trail running in! I’m working on a full post about what these trainings are like, and what types of things we do.

On Sunday morning I met up with Kim for 8 miles on the Dora and New River Trails. It has been a little while since we ran together, so it was nice to catch up. It felt pretty cold at the start, with the temperature hovering right around 30 degrees, but once we were moving it felt like great running weather. Thankfully the wind wasn’t blowing!

It was a pretty tough run for me. My legs were toast before we ever hit mile 1. Kim really kept me going. I think I would have cut the run down to 3-4 miles if she hadn’t planned on doing 8. I think she had a bit of a tough time during the second half of the run, so we definitely needed each other. We got it done without any walk breaks (which each of us were very tempted to take at time).

Today I’ve got plans for another trail run, some cleaning around the house, and some time spent relaxing and soaking up the end of my long weekend.

What adventures did you get into this weekend? Who else had a long weekend?

I have the day off of work today! We have a state holiday, called Lee Jackson Day, today. Since Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is on Monday, it means I get a four day weekend. It’s always nice to have this little break shortly after returning to work post-holidays. I have big exciting plans for today, too. I’m going to organize my new filing cabinet and take the outdoor Christmas lights down. Being an adult is fun 🙂 In case you missed the sarcasm, I do have actual fun plans. I’m hoping to get out for some trail time both today and other days during the long weekend!

I was really sore after Saturday’s trail race and Sunday’s Jillian workout, so I took a rest day on Monday. On Tuesday it was dark, cold, and sleeting on and off all day. All I really wanted to do when I got home from work was take a nap. Instead, I did a Jillian Michaels workout DVD that was about an hour long. Scout supervised.

I ended up taking rest days both on Wednesday and Thursday because I was sore (on Wednesday) and tired (on Thursday). But now I’m ready to go on a few adventures this weekend!

This is random, but I wanted to share. In case you missed it, The Ohio State (yes, that’s their official name…) won the first College Football Playoff, and thus the National Championship title, on Monday night.

Why do I care? Look closely at the above picture and bear in mind I’m a die hard Virginia Tech Fan.

Yea, that happened. 🙂

Did you watch the National Championship game earlier this week? Who were you cheering for?
What plans do you have for the weekend?
Who else has a long weekend?

This past Saturday I ran my first race of the year, a trail race called the Frozen Toe 10K.  It was also the first race in the ‘RNUTS’ trail series I signed up for this spring, put on by Mountain Junkies. The race started at 9:00 AM, so I didn’t have to get up super early to make the 1 hour trek up to Roanoke. I had a smooth trip up, and arrived around 8 AM. The race headquarters, a church, was easy to find and there looked to be plenty of parking. I took advantage of race day packet pickup, and grabbed my bib and race swag.

Instead of t-shirts, this race gave participants the option of socks or a buff. I chose to go with the socks. I was happily surprised to see they had skulls on them. Neat! They’re a thin wool-type material, and I think I’ll definitely be able to run in them during the winter.

Luckily we were able to hang out inside the church prior to the race, because it was 13 degrees at the start with a ‘feels like’ temperature of 8 degrees (even with the sun shining down!). We had a prerace meeting at 8:40 where they explained the course. As usual, I came out of the meeting feeling very confused and convinced I was going to get lost. That never happened, though. Shortly thereafter, we headed out to the parking lot for the start of the race.

Everyone was milling around, talking, and all of a sudden the starting gun sounded and we were off! We ran out of the parking lot and did a short stint on the road before hopping onto the Chestnut Ridge Loop Trail, which runs around Roanoke Mountain.

I felt like I dressed well for the race, and never felt overheated. When I would get to a shady section of trail my face and mouth would get really cold, but other than that I was fine. The cold weather also made for great trail conditions. No sloppy, muddy trails.

The trail was a bit rolling at first, but nothing too bad. I knew I was probably going to have to walk/hike a bit during this race since I’m not in the best shape right now. My running has been so irregular since November. However, I didn’t expect to take my first walk break just before the first mile marker. It was a bit disheartening, but I kept trekking along.

Somewhere between miles 1.5 and 2 I found my ‘trail legs’ a started to feel a bit better. I was still taking walk breaks, as we encountered some more challenging climbs through the middle miles, but I felt good.

I really enjoyed the course and I would love to go back and run it again sometime. We ran by a campground at one point, so maybe Barry and I can go for a weekend camping trip and run the trail. (That will have to be sometime in the future. I looked up the campground and its currently closed due to federal budget cuts in the National Park Service)

During the race we ran along a ridge, and then would go down into a hollow and back up the other side with switchbacks several times. There were a bunch of good views along the way. I’m pretty sure I saw the backside of Mill Mountain (the first mountain you run up during Blue Ridge) at one point.

The first half of the race went by a bit slowly, but the second half actually flew by. I think part of it was because I settled in and just enjoyed the race and being out there running in the woods. I took a few stumbles along the way, but luckily I never fell. That’s good because the ground was very frozen and very hard!

As I made my way through mile 5 I knew I was getting close to the end. I kept waiting to pop back out of the woods and onto the road we ran down at the start of the race. Finally I did, and was directed down the road a short way, back onto a trail, and then up a short hill and to the finish at the church. I was hoping to finish under 1:20, but crossed the line in 1:23 and change. Still not bad for my first trail race of the season (and fourth trail race ever). I feel like I’m still pretty inexperienced on trails, and have plenty of room for improvement.

Immediately after finishing, I headed inside for the post-race ‘party.’ As per usual with Mountain Junkies races, there was an awesome spread of post-race food. The line was a bit long when I got there, but it moved quickly. There were bagels, cookies, muffins, crackers, hummus, chocolate, fruit, and veggies.

I hung out for awhile and thawed out while enjoying my post-race food and watching the awards ceremony. They had really neat, handmade awards for the top 3 overall winners and the masters winners.

After that it was time to head back home before my overnight trip up to the northern part of the state. I had a great experience at my third Mountain Junkies race and I’m looking forward to the rest of the races in the coming months.

What type of unique ‘race swag’ have you gotten from races?
What’s the coldest race you’ve ever run? Temperature-wise, this was probably the coldest race. But I was colder both at the Hokie Half and the Asheville Half last year, both because of rain. I was also colder at the Star City Half, because I was underdressed.
If you run trails, how long did it take you to start feeling comfortable on them?