Archive for May, 2011

On Sunday, Todd and I started to push forward on redoing the house. But, before we tackled anything inside, we decided to start on the outside since it will be unbearable in the next month or so due to lovely Maryland summers. We had perfect weather on Sunday for some outdoor work. Cloudy, cool, and breezy.

While Todd worked on cleaning out the garage and repairing some things, I went full on war with English Ivy that had taken over a good bit of the house.

You know there’s a lot of ivy when you spend about an hour working on an area and it doesn’t look like you did anything! English Ivy is evil, but I managed to pull as much as I could before I started getting small blisters on my hand, and yes, I was wearing gloves!

Only one of the large piles of debris. I also trimmed the huge bushes we have in the backyard an pulled up some old stumps. Overall, I think I spent about five hours working outside. And I made sure to wear sunscreen! Even if it’s cloudy, the sun can still harm you. Here’s the entire mess from our yard.

Enough to fill a small trailer! A lot of the branches in there were from trees that were broken from the heavy snow we got this past winter.

Between working up a sweat and feeling like bugs were crawling all over me (I lost track of how many giant spiders I came across!) I managed to get some nice pictures when the sun popped out for a few moments.

(little strawberries!)

We still have a lot of work to do outside, but at least we put a good dent in it. There’s still a lot of English Ivy and trees to be taken down. Plus, since we’re adding a porch to the front of the house we have to take up entire bushes and another tree. I think I know what I’ll be doing when I get back from FitBloggin on Sunday!

On Saturday I ran another 5K. It was completely on a whim. I forget how I found out about it, but last Monday I signed up for the Preakness 5K. Mostly because it had a lot of positives about it.

• Was only 15 minutes from my house
• Race started at 10:30am which meant I could sleep in
• Pretty nice race premium
• Cost wasn’t too bad, $35, which is about the maximum I pay for 5Ks, but being last minute was a good deal
• Small race, only about 600 people

We also had unique bibs to represent an imaginary race horse. While looking around at the other runners, some names were funny, some didn’t make sense, and a few seemed a little insulting. I’m sure a bunch were thrown together at the last minute, but if you sign up early enough it would be nice to choose your own name so you don’t end up as “Teeny-Tiny Poverty.” Umm… yeah.

It was a rainy, dreary day, but was overall a nice race. The start was pretty cool. They lined us up like the horses and we ran through the starting gate after they rang the bells.

This was by no means a fast race for me, I was hoping to finish in about 35 minutes which is about my average for a 5K. However, I didn’t realize that about 1.25 miles was run entirely in loose sand! Every other step I was tripping over or twisting my ankles. Not much fun, but I wasn’t alone. Finally, we looped around the streets just outside Pimlico, which gave my legs a nice break. Nice, flat streets to run on, but of course, this was in an “iffy” part of Baltimore so I just kept chugging along.

The race ended back inside Pimlico but thankfully, no more running in the sand! I crossed the line in 38:32. Not bad. I actually consider it another PR because I have never ran a race where 1/3 of the course was sand.

One thing I didn’t care for was that you had to pick up your race premium after you finished. It was supposed to help everyone get their shirt or blanket quicker and although the line moved quickly, I still had to stand in a line of about 60 people and wait. When I went to pick my packet up on Friday, I was the only person at the store!

It was worth it though. I really like how the shirt has no advertisements on it!

Overall, it was a fun, quick race that I would definitely do again. Parking was extremely easy and there was no traffic getting out of Pimlico. I’ll have to recruit some friends to do it with me next year!