I feel like I had a light week this past week, due to taking two rest days. But looking at it as a whole, I feel like it was actually a pretty solid week for me.

Monday- 30 Day Shred, Level 1 workout. You want to know how to make crunches more difficult? Laugh while you do them. I was laughing because Hank decided he needed to stand over top of me and stare down at me during every ab sequence.

If you want to increase the difficulty of your core workouts, just let me know and I’ll send Hank your way.

Tuesday- 3 mile run on the roads around our house. I know I’ve been complaining about the never-ending winter, but it was seriously hot outside during this run. We went from below freezing, windy, and rain/snow over the weekend to 80 degrees. Seriously.

I said hello to some heifers along the way. They agreed that it was ridiculously hot.

Wednesday- Rest day.

Thursday- 6 mile run at the New River Trail. It was still pretty hot outside (around 75), but they had been calling for storms all day and those held off until around 10PM. It was crazy windy at times during my run, though.

One downside of the run was that I found they had raised the parking rates at the NRT parking lot. Boo. Usually I start my runs at the Dora Trail (which is 2.5 miles and connects to the NRT), which has free parking. The New River Trail charges because it is a state park.

Friday- Rest day (shins were bothering me).

Saturday- 5 mile run with Sven. I had planned on doing a trail run, but ended up on the treadmill since my shins were still a bit bothersome. They didn’t hurt at all while I was running, but I thought the extra cushion would be good. Plus I got to watch Sweet Home Alabama. Gotta love the bloodhound in that movie. 🙂

Saturday evening is when the shenanigans began. I met a group of friends in Blacksburg (aka my old Virginia Tech stomping grounds) to celebrate my best friend, Laura’s, birthday. I stayed out way too late, but had a lot of fun.

Sunday- Met up early with Kim for an 8 mile run on the New River Trail. After Saturday night I was not feeling my best, but I was more tired than anything else. Kim has a 4 month old baby, so she is not the one to complain to about being tired (especially from my own doing). But it was a really nice day outside- cold at the start, but warming up to the low 40’s which is my favorite running temperature.

Everything is starting to be green again! Plus we ran into an old friend on the trail (who turned out to be a she, and not a he like I previously thought). She is very playful and friendly, and ran alongside us, behind us, and dodged us for about two tenths of a mile.

I’m thinking she’s probably a Beagle/Basset Hound mix. Any thoughts? If we see her again, I’m going to have to name her! I’m leaning towards Delilah, but I’ll have to get Kim’s input…

Total Miles: 22 miles
March Total: 100.71 miles (I met my goal by a mere 0.71 miles)

Welcome to the new Turkey Runner! Hopefully I have done everything right and you have successfully found your way to turkeyrunner.com. My usual weekly roundup will be up tomorrow morning.

I had been thinking about making the switch from Blogger to WordPress for awhile. I finally decided if I was going to make the switch, I may as well go all in and go the domain name/self-hosted route. Talk about one of the most confusing, and at times frustrating, things I’ve ever done!

But I got through it and hopefully you should find everything here that you found at turkeyrunner.blogspot.com. All of my pages are the same, although I changed the formatting of my ‘Race History’ page. I also decided to add a Chick Days page, where you can find a compilation of all of my chicken-related posts.

Please let me know if you find anything that is not working, and I will do my best to figure out a fix. I am aware that the Instagram display on the far right sidebar is not currently working, and I’m trying to resolve it. it’s a neat feature, so I’m hoping to get it working, but I may end up just removing it.

Also, if you use a reader like Feedly or Bloglovin’, make sure you add www.turkeyrunner.com to your feed! And if you subscribe by email (Dad 🙂 ) you’ll need to re-subscribe. It’s on the sidebar.

In other news, I also recently joined Twitter. I felt very welcomed with all of the tweets I received… and the first thing I did was figure out how to turn off email notifications 😉

I’m still figuring all things Twitter out, but so far it has been another wonderful distraction on my smart phone. Speaking of social media, I added a widget at the top of the far right sidebar where you can directly link to my social media pages. It looked like that’s what all the cool kids do. I also created a Facebook page for my blog, because that also seemed like a cool kid thing.

What do you think of the new website?
Any tips for switching to self-hosting?

This will (hopefully) be my final post at turkeyrunner.blogspot.com. This Sunday, April 6, Turkey Runner will be moving to www.turkeyrunner.com!

My new site is already live, but I will be putting the final pieces in place this Sunday. After that point, you should be redirected there, if I have all of my ducks in a row. It has been a lot of work getting things switched over, but I think it’s finally ready!

Any tips you have on making the move from Blogger to WordPress would be much appreciated! Also, let me know if there are any must-have plug in’s you think I should have.

Today is the chickens’ birthday! Last April, I headed down to our local Tractor Supply and picked up six 4-day-old baby chicks. They started out in our garage in a brooder box, that initially had to be kept around 100 degrees Fahrenheit. I lovingly named them: Agnes, Reba, Cecilia, Lady, Beatrice, and Ophelia. I can tell Agnes, Reba, and Cecilia apart, but the other 3 look exactly the same.

As they grew and reached milestones, I documented everything in my Chick Days series that ended up going for 18 weeks. It started with their living in a brooder box in the garage and ended with them laying their first eggs. From the picture on the left to the one on the right in a mere 4 and a half months.

The chicks spent their first 4 weeks in a brooder box under a heating lamp. Initially, they were in a small cardboard box, but they quickly outgrew it. We then moved them into a large Rubbermaid tub, but we had to move them into a larger cardboard box when they out grew the tub. We moved the heating lamp up a few inches each week, lowering the temperature by 5 or so degrees each time. We also had to keep a wire cover on top of the box to keep them from jumping out.

 

When the chickens were 5 weeks old, they were finally ready to move out of the brooder box and into the coop. They were mostly feathered, but still had some of their baby fuzz, and were in an awkward “teenage” stage.

What is this big, new place?

As they continued to grow, we started giving the chickens scraps of fruits and vegetables from the kitchen. They especially loved strawberry tops, pineapple, and cantaloupe “guts.”

We discovered little things about the chickens, like how they would sunbathe when it was warm and sunny outside.

By 15 weeks old the chickens were big enough/confident enough to get up onto the roosting poles in the coop to sleep. It is their natural instinct to find somewhere high to sleep, but up until that point they hadn’t been getting up there. When they were little we put them up there to give them the right idea, but it was awhile before they could get up there unassisted.

Finally, at 17 weeks old the chickens laid their first eggs! We had to train them to lay in the nesting boxes by putting egg-shaped rocks in the boxes. This makes the chickens think there are already eggs in the box, so they should lay their egg in the box, too. It took some training, and at first they would lay on the floor in the coop and even outside, wherever their instincts told them was safest. But eventually they learned.

Initially we got a lot of double-yolk eggs, but we don’t get many of those anymore. As luck would have it, the very first egg we ever cracked was a double yolker. That’s good luck for life, right?

Since the chickens started laying, we typically get one egg per chicken per day, for a total of six eggs each day.

Sometimes we have more eggs than we know what to do with. During the fall, we would trade eggs for vegetables from our neighbor’s garden. We also gave some away as host/hostess gifts during the holidays. Other than that, we simply eat lots of eggs!

Over the winter, we discovered that the chickens will come outside no matter how cold or windy it is, but that they won’t step foot in the snow.

Shut the door, please!

During the extremely cold temperatures we had earlier this year, we set up the heat lamp in the coop to help the chickens stay warm. Between that and huddling together, they made it through the polar vortex just fine.

The extremely cold temperatures also presented another problem for us: keeping their water from freezing. We had a plastic waterer that had heat tape on it to keep it warm. But one day the heat tape got turned up too hot, and it melted a hole in the plastic. We ended up replacing it with a metal waterer that can be placed on a heated base. The base is temperature sensitive and automatically comes on whenever the ambient temperature drops below 35 degrees F. We haven’t had any more issues since we got this waterer and base.

Chickens are very susceptible to predators, but luckily we haven’t had any issues with that. We did a good job predator-proofing the coop and chicken run, mainly to protect the chickens from our darling dogs. Recently, Hank did finally manage to get into the chicken run area with the chickens, but by some miracle we did not have the Chicken Massacre of 2014.

Barring any other disasters or illness, chickens will typically live 8 to 10 years. I look forward to enjoying them and their eggs for years to come!

This week I focused on running and upped my miles. I realized I could hit 100 miles for the month if I put in roughly 30 miles between March 24 and 31. I am happy to say at the end of this past week, I have hit that goal! Any miles I do today will be bonus.

Monday- 4.25 miles easy with Sven, the treadmill. My hamstrings were super sore from Sunday’s strength workout (darn backwards lunges!). We’re talking the kind of sore where you go to sit down and the last foot between your butt and the chair turns into a free fall. The kind of sore where you walk like a zombie when you first get out of the car after driving two hours (which I did on Monday, twice). That kind of sore. So I took it nice and easy, got my muscles good and warm, and stretched a lot afterwards.

Plus I really wanted to watch the second episode of Crisis that was on our DVR. I’m hooked on that show! Anyone else watching it?

Tuesday- Another 4.25 easy miles with Sven, this time while watching Believe (the show that comes on before Crisis!). My legs were still super sore, so I wanted to stick to an easy treadmill run. Plus it snowed outside and I just didn’t feel like going out in the cold.

My poor daffodils got snowed on. Oh and I refuse to take down my winter garden flag, which happens to double as my Christmas garden flag, until spring officially arrives. Lady bugs would just look weird with all this snow.

Wednesday- 6.2 mile run at Bisset Park. I decided to brave the freezing cold and wind to get a run in outside on some pavement. I ended up deciding to push it during this run, and it ended up turning into a progression run. My overall average pace was 9:20/mile and my splits were: 9:50, 9:29, 9:21, 9:19, 9:14, 8:58, and 1:40 for the last 0.2. Interestingly enough, I was only roughly 30 seconds off of my 10K PR.

This was a tough run for me and I’m glad I pushed through. I kept telling myself “I can do hard things” and “I won’t back down.” It’s a little discouraging that a 9:20/mile average pace felt so difficult to maintain. But this was also my fifth day in a row working out, for a total of about 21 miles of running.

Thursday- Easy 4.25 miles on the treadmill. My legs were a bit tired from Wednesday’s run, but I decided to pick it up during the final mile for a fast finish. My “in-flight entertainment” for today was Smokey and the Bandit. If you’ve never seen that movie, your need to ASAP!

Friday- Rest day.

Saturday- I had planned on doing my long run on some trails, but it absolutely poured all day long. Instead, I stayed inside and did the Jillian Michaels Banish Fat, Boost Metabolism DVD workout.

Sunday- The weekend started off with big plans for a long trail run on Saturday. Then it rained all day Saturday. Initially, I decided to move my trail run to Sunday, but then I realized the trails would be a sloppy mess after it poured all day the day before. So instead, I decided to do my long run on the Dora and New River Trails instead. But then we had 30-40 mph winds and light snow. So my weekend, which started with plans of a trail run, turned into a long run on the treadmill. I got in 10 miles while watching some DVR’ed TV shows.

Total Miles: 28.95 miles