2013 - My Favorite Year?

Yippee! It's 2013. 13 is my favorite number so I'm counting on 2013 being my favorite year ever!

I've made some resolutions and I'm sharing them with you, the worldwide web, in hopes that you, the worldwide web, will hold me accountable.  Feel free to blast me when I start to fail!

1. Be more positive. Sometimes I feel that the only conversation I have with people is sharing gripes and annoyances. Most of those gripes and annoyances are pretty minor so I'm planning to just let them go and share positive and funny conversation instead.
2. Walk the dogs!  Since I sprained my ankle at the beginning of November, the poor pups have been missing out on lots of walks. We've got a lot of catching up to do!
3. Blog more.
   
4. Rim-to-rim-to-rim in 2 days. This is hiking the Grand Canyon from the South Rim to the North rim in one day, spend the night at the hotel on the North Rim and then return to the South Rim the next day. It's 24 miles each way.
5. And the one that will probably not happen...become a "real" athlete. I want to lower my 5K PR. I want to run a 10K if for no other reason than to have a PR. I want to do a triathlon. I want to preform well at the obstacle races. The reason this probably won't happen is because, despite what I resolve and despite the results I want, I still HATE running.

So, how am I doing so far, two days into my favorite year?
Well...

1. Not so good on this one. Work today was frustrating and I found myself griping about the lack of assistance I was receiving on a project that requires assistance. Then later I joined in on a griping session about the layout of our new offices because they reduced our departments storage space by half. While both of these events were frustrating, I need to stop the complaining! This resolution will need more determination on my part!
2. 100%!  I walked the dogs before our annual New Years Day Game Day yesterday and I walked them this evening after work. 100%! Woo hoo!
3. Well, this right here is a blog post so I'm on my way. I only posted 24 posts in all of 2012, so "more" shouldn't be hard to reach, right?
4.  We are planning on going at the end of September. I am currently unable to train though because my ankle sprain refuses to heal. Not going hiking has been driving me crazy!! Yesterday I ran for the first time in over two months. My "run" was from the door of Irene's house to my car parked at the curb and back. A whopping 15 steps and then I had to ice my ankle. Tonight's walk was only 1.5 miles and I was limping by the time I finished. I don't know when I'll be able to start hiking again. 
5. Yeah, this ankle thing is hindering the progress on this one too. On a positive note (see #1) I did do pull-ups at the park yesterday while out walking the dogs! I could only do 3 sets of 2, but truthfully that is better than I thought I could do after two full months of doing nothing! Yay, me! Another positive - I have already signed up for the triathlon. It's September 22. My rim-to-rim-to-rim training should help me with my stamina. I'm counting on my friend Emily to teach me how to swim. As for the bike, well, I'll probably have to cry my way through it.

Have a wonderful 2013! May it be your favorite year, too!

Barney

 

Meet Barney, my latest foster. Barney is a recovering from a broken leg via a splint and cage rest. He is a two year old Lhasa Apso. Or maybe a Shih Tzu. Who knows? The shelter says lhasa, I say shih tzu. I did a google search on the difference between a lhasa apso and a shih tzu and the best I can tell is that shih tzus wear there top hair in a pony tail and lhasas don't. Since this little dude came in as a stray, there was no one to be styling his hair so that differentiation is lost on him. No matter what his breed, he is a cute little sweetie.

His cast is so big. His leg sticks out in front of him when he sits.

His leg sticks out to the side when he sleeps. That can't be comfortable, can it?

Barney has a few favorites things, such as my dogs, getting the zoomies and chewing bully sticks. I hope a big alarm sounded when you read "zoomies". He's supposed to be on cage rest, remember? Zoomies are strictly NOT allowed. Well, this morning I was in a huge hurry and it takes me forever to find the collar ring under all that hair so I didn't put a leash on him to go potty outside. I figured he would pee real quick and then I'd pick him and take him inside, just like every other morning for the past 3 weeks. I underestimated Barney's intelligence! He knew he wasn't on a leash and he knew that means I had no control of him. I put him down on the ground and SHAZAM! He was off. He was zipping around like a dog on fire, huge grin on his face. He wouldn't come near me at all. It was a huge game of keep away...the funnest game a dog has ever invented, according to the dog. Not so fun for the human! Especially when that human is in charge of CAGE REST! I take some solace in the fact that he did his zoomies all on 3 legs and didn't put any weight on the broken leg. Finally I gave up and went inside and he followed me so he wouldn't be left outside alone.

Barney does not like to be alone. He wants to be with you and be a part of the family. When he's in his x-pen in the dining room, he will go crazy with the barking if I leave the room, even to just grab something from my bedroom. At night, I put him in a crate in the dogs' room. He's not alone, right? He's got Frankie, Georgie and Mo with him. Yeah, try telling him that. He'll go to sleep for a little bit, but he will wake up in the middle of the night barking. And barking. And barking. I try to let him bark himself out, like a normal dog would do, but no. He doesn't give up. After an hour and 40 minutes (not exaggerating), I would give in. I couldn't take it longer than that. Finally, I gave in altogether and now he just sleeps in my room from the get-go....and not a peep all night. As long as he is with the people, he is a happy and QUIET little dog.

His ideal life would to be with us and with the dogs, too. He LOVES the dogs. He wants so badly to play with them. He tries to wrestle with Georgie and he play bows Frankie into a game of chase that he can't follow through on because I've got him on a leash. Poor little guy. I am looking forward to him being cleared for activity, because Frankie will be so happy to have someone to play with.  Georgie has turned into a lazy-butt recently and doesn't play with him as often and he is sad. Barney will be good for him, hopefully soon!  Though when he's cleared for activity, he will go back to the shelter shortly after that to go find himself a forever home. Hopefully that home has dogs!

Gilmore Adventure Race 2012

Fall racing season started off with the Gilmore Adventure Race in September. This is my favorite race of the year because we always win our division. This year it sucked because we didn't win our division.  Ok, it's actually my favorite because it is the most challenging, both mentally and physically, of all the races we do and it has super-fun mystery events. This year was no exception. Maybe it was too challenging, though, since we didn't win our division.  :(

The race started with some trekking checkpoints first. To get to the wilderness, we had to run through this neighborhood. We were behind all those people.

But we caught up...and here we are - IN THE LEAD!

The hiking checkpoints went well. Irene navigated fabulously. I provided fabulous moral support to her navigating. It was good. Having fun trekking:

After we zipped through our first set of checkpoints, we headed back to the transition area for some mystery events. Yay, mystery events! Why doesn't someone create an event with no running, no navigating, no clue-solving, just all mystery events? That would be a blast!

The first event was to throw balls into a bucket. Easy enough, except one of us had to wear the bucket tied to our back while facing away from our teammate. Like this:

Obviously that is not us, but there were no pictures of us so you get to see the team that was first at this point. Irene and I did not do very well at this. We switched off wearing the bucket a few times and eventually got all the balls in. It was fun even though we sucked at it.

The second event was to go out around a cone and back without your feet touching the ground. We were given pieces of wood to maneuver under our feet. If you fell off you had to start over. We fell off once at the beginning but then figured out a method that would work.

 

Next up was the bike leg of the race. Have I told you how bad I am at biking? I've been doing a lot of road biking recently so I was hoping that would translate to better mountain biking. Irene plotted the checkpoints, transposed the checkpoints onto a better quality map and we were off. About halfway to our way in to the wilderness, Irene changed her mind and decided we'd do better coming in the back way. We zoomed back past the TA and headed down past where we had been hiking. After we got to the back end of the wilderness, we couldn't find where we should go in to start looking for the checkpoints - it was all still neighborhoods. Uh oh. No, really, UH OH!

After looking at both maps for a bit, we realized that the transposing of checkpoints was wrong. We had marked our better map a few miles east of where we really were supposed to be. UH OH.  We were too far from the correct entry into the forest, so we re-routed and came in the back way. The back way included a mile or so of STRAIGHT UPHILL biking, seriously STEEP uphill biking. It was torture. However, it seemed that my road biking had helped after all, since we were still road biking and I was able to make it up the mountain.  When we finally reached the park, we had probably lost close to 45 minutes. Ergh.  But nothing to do but keep on keeping on.

Now that we knew where we were, we knocked out a few checkpoints. Biking:

Then, UH OH, I have a flat tire. In our 5 years of racing, we have never gotten a flat tire. Neither of us have ever changed a tire. Usually before a race we make Brian show us how to change a tire. We didn't do that this year, of course. Nothing to do but give it a go. Irene was a rockstar, she just started taking shit apart and playing with tools that I wouldn't have had any idea what to do with.

And I pitched in by standing there and pretended that holding my bike counted as doing something, though I'm pretty sure I was doing nothing:

Irene used a CO2 cartridge to fill the tire. It wasn't quite enough air so she got out the second cartridge  and UH OH, it was defective. Crap. It probably would have been a good thing to have an air pump, huh? I used to have one but it busted off my bike when I crashed at last year's Dreamy Draw race. Two women (not racers) had passed us while we were using the first cartridge and asked if we needed help. At that point we didn't think we did. Right after the second cartridge was failing us, another women biked by. She had an air pump on her bike. We asked her if we could use it. She said no. Seriously. She said no.

Spurred on by anger at this woman's rudeness, Irene pulled out her hidden MacGuyver resources and willed the second cartridge to work. It was pretty ingenious work. Woo hoo! I'm fixed! Pretty excited! And then we realized that we were now about an hour and a half behind. Pretty deflating. 

We got the checkpoint we were going to and had to head back the way we came to go to the next checkpoint. It was quite a distance...perhaps there was a shortcut? We could see the trail we needed to get to:

And we thought maybe we could just go straight down the ravine and up the other side. Ha! Why do we even try these stupid things? We got about 40 yards and realized we'd never ever get through the pokey, thorny bushes and cactus so we headed back out. Another 20 minutes wasted. This really wasn't our race. :(

Feeling pretty low, we passed the mean lady. Now we are mad again. Then I almost crash my bike and fall off a cliff. It was terrifying. Irene didn't see it happen so she had no idea and kept going. I was so scared I was crying. (There's no crying in racing). Then we passed the mean lady AGAIN going on another trail. Seriously? Gr.  I was so down and scared and angry and unhappy. Finally we got to a checkpoint that had a mystery event! That perked us up. And the team in yellow (from the ball/bucket checkpoint) was there. How could that be? They were about 2 hours ahead of us. Turns out, Sudoku is not their thing. But it is Irene's thing!

She rocked it and finished in one of the fastest times of all teams. We had gained some time back! Whee!

And we were done and headed back to the TA and the big wall. We love the big wall!

 

 

   

 

 Yippee!

We were now official finishers of the race. Surprisingly, we had a bit of time for free-style navigation points. We grabbed the map and were off. Some of the points were in the city areas so instead of orienteering flags, we were to find Go! Adventure stickers on an object in the area. Man, I SUCK at needle-in-a-haystack challenges. We looked forever for the sticker at our first location, finally finding it on a sign that I had looked at 3 times. Gr.

Our next checkpoint was in a wilderness area so we were looking for a flag. Whew. And then we saw this:

Like a crow to a shiny thing, we were sucked right in. We had already lost, right? And how often do you get a chance to climb a rock mountain? So, we climbed instead. It was awesome!  Rocks:

Top of the rocks:

It was awesome! Best part of the day!

Then we climbed back down, realized we had overshot our search by A LOT and moved on to the next few nav points. We found a couple and ran back to the TA just in time.  And guess what?! Though we didn't win, we got SECOND!

 Ok, there were only two teams in the female, two person division. :(

Despite the "McKayla is not impressed" look on my face, I actually wasn't upset about losing. We really like Jill and her partner and we've beaten them a few times before, so no big deal that they beat us this time. We ended up having quite a fun day. And, you can't win them all!

August Is My Month!

August has been pretty good to me as far as contests go. In addition to the BIG win of the PetSmart Charities video contest, I had a slightly smaller win in a Great Urban Race contest. Every month they ask people to submit pictures from their races. GUR followers on Facebook then vote for their favorite. The photo with the most likes gets to be the GUR Facebook cover photo for the month. As I've said before, my friends rock and for this one, Nicole's friends rock too! The owner of the Obstacle Races and Mud Runs Facebook page posted the picture asking for votes and that led us to our big win.

Nicole and I are fabulous cover models! We should do this for a living. Check us out here:  https://www.facebook.com/GreatUrbanRace  or just check out this screenshot:

Best cover photo ever!!

Friends, Family and Random Strangers

Remember this contest that I was begging you to vote for?

My video of Frankie was chosen as one of 10 finalists in a PetSmart Charities video contest (you can see the video at the bottom of this post). The winner was then decided by the most public votes received in a two week period. It was a long two weeks of promotion! Every day I emailed all my friends, family and co-workers with the link, reminding them to vote. Every day I texted all my friends with the link and asked them to vote on their phones. About every other day I posted the link on Facebook asking for votes. Here are two of my posts:

 

I posted pleas for votes on the Maricopa Animal Care and Control Facebook page. I found a few other people on Facebook who were in other contests and started voting for them in their contests in exchange for them voting for me.  I posted in the Classified Ads email at my firm asking all the lawyers and staff to vote for me.

In my emails and Facebook posts, I asked people to vote from their desktop computer, their laptop, their phone, their co-workers' computers and their neighbor's computers. I asked people to forward the link to all their friends. And wow, did people do just that! My sister texted me one day saying that she just got home from voting at her next door neighbor's. My dad emailed all his friends and my mom's friends. They went crazy with it, emailing their kids and their friends. My boss, the COO of  our firm, emailed all of our admin team and requested they vote every day. Some lawyers at my firm and a lot of the staff voted daily and passed it on to their networks. Many of my friends posted the link on their facebook pages. People I don't even know had it posted on their Facebook pages to vote for Jill Diamond. My NFBF is a technical trainer and he made his entire class go online to vote at the start of their training. I heard stories like this every day. It was CRAZY! I could not believe the amount of support that was criss-crossing the country (and the world, actually, because one friend was voting from India) for Frankie.

The Bacon Bits having a voting party on the final day:

I kept an eye on the current vote totals all day every day for two weeks. It was quite a roller-coaster ride! I would be leading when I went to bed and then be in second place when I woke up. My main competition was a lady from Indiana. The two of us had a mad race to the finish.

And then on the Monday after voting ended, we got this announcement on the PetSmart Charities Facebook page:

And the winner, with 1,599 total votes, is Jill Diamond and her buddy Frankie! Thanks to Jill and Frankie, a local animal shelter of their choosing will receive a $1,000 donation from PetSmart Charities. Way to go guys! 

 

I have the best friends, family and co-workers EVER! My supporters ROCKED! Thanks to everyone and your 1,599 votes! You guys are awesome!

As promised, here is the video of Frankie:

And here is the video that I entered for Mo that they did not chose as a finalist: