That Was Close...

Those of you who had the bad luck honor of seeing this blog at or shortly after her "birth" on New Year's Day know that she definitely qualified as a "new born" and a not very attractive one at that.  Well, after a bit of nurturing, she seems to have grown and developed a lot in the past week and might even be considered attractive :).  Now the challenge will be to figure out the right "parenting" methods to make her interesting and develop her character, maximizing strengths and minimizing weaknesses, building her self-confidence up so that she can feel comfortable being daring and taking chances but still be sensitive and responsible.  Wish me luck :). 

I must confess that I have already acted like an overly-enthusiastic parent by prematurely planning for and listing an event as one of my blog's stated 2011 Adventures before I was even sure that I qualified to enter, which set me up for potential loss of credibility as a blog "parent" if I were forced to retract that goal...  (yikes, what was I thinking?).... 

Fortunately for me, I found out Friday that I still qualify to enter the Pike's Peak Ascent this year (yay!) and, indeed, will be given the chance to slog my way up to 14,115 ft closer to HEAVEN!!  I had decided last Fall that I wanted to put this event on my 2011 Adventure List and qualified at the time by 2010 race standards. However, to my dismay, the organizers decided that they were going to change the qualification standards for 2011 (but not announce the changes until January--ugh!)  due to the increasing numbers of "wanna-do-it's" that made the event fill VERY quickly.  Seems like there is a "gotta run a well-known challenging event" epidemic going on right now (the Boston Marathon is considering changing its qualifications for the same reasons).  In any case, they only changed the number of accepted years prior to the race year for qualifying times from 5 to 3, so my 2009 Big Sur Marathon time of 5:18:31 works, as they fortunately kept the cut-off at a "turtle-compatible" 5:30 for the marathon--whew--that was close!  (I knew there must be a reason why I put myself through a second running of the "ultimate sprinter-suffer-fest" that was originally supposed to be my ONE AND ONLY bucket list marathon!!). 

So, I successfully avoided the wrath of other blog "parents"........this time, anyway.

And now all I have to do is plant myself in front of the computer on March 16 and be ready to have my fingers race when the gun goes off for registration at 8 am Mountain Time......
.....well.....let's not forget all of the training and suffering that will need to be done, too!

Oh, the sacrifices a parent must go through........... 

I will be adding training goals and details, as well as more adventures to this blog, but I will leave you now with 2 more sunrises from my home this week.  I know...where are the pictures of me running in that beauty?  Try running when it is 17 degrees F outside! (some of you might be thinking that the F [word] should be elsewhere in that word sequence).  Anyway, it was easier to just take pictures instead :). 

  

Have a nice week everyone and, most of all, have fun!  Ann




Sunrise, January 3, 2011

 


Sunrise, January 9, 2011