And a Turd Pie in a Pear Tree...

Workout: finally doing THE CORE (yes, I've been a dirty liar the past two days and haven't actually done it)

Let's talk about this past week in run/hike-land:

Saturday: 5 miles at the Coastal Trail! It was a blast
Sunday: a beautiful 2 1/2 hour hike and an epic 250-mile drive to flee -20 degree temperatures
Monday: 4 frosty miles near the dog park followed by a 5.8 earthquake
Tuesday: 2 ice rink miles and a half-assed filler post that, for some unknown reason, generated mega views
Wednesday: rest
Thursday: 4 undocumented miles and frozen coffee

Total: 15 jogged miles and 2 1/2 hours of hiking

Not great, but not terrible either. At least I got some hiking in there. I'm looking to up my time in the mounts over the coming weeks (well, starting a week from now).

I do believe Bailey is not only dumb, but also disgusting (and yet I still love her to pieces). I present to you this picture taken on this morning's walk:

That thing she's eating? Obviously moose poop. Even worse than that though, it's a frozen disc of moose poop. Turd pie, if you will. That revolting creature carried that thing all the way home with her, and there was nothing I could do about it. Her turd pie may be the strongest argument yet in favor of keeping her on a leash.

Two other shots from my walk:

DNF. What a loser, amirite?

I've done it-proven that aliens exist!

I took today off work to study for finals. Although I've crossed quite a few nagging "to-do" items off my nonexistent to-do list, I have yet to actually study. The day is young, however!

6 miles on tap for tomorrow. My longest post-stress fracture run to date. Wicked excited.

An Awkward Reunion

Workout: 4 miles, pace  unknown

I'll get to that oh-so-mysterious "pace unknown" in a second (that's called "pretending you've got something really exciting to talk about but not talking about it yet, thereby forcing people to keep reading"-at least, I think that's the technical term). So my challenge from yesterday? Nailed it. 4 miles outside. And just as I suspected, it was no big deal. Really. It wasn't actually 15 below, so that certainly helped, but it was definitely still below zero. Eight below? I don't know. Does it matter? It was cold enough to freeze my coffee.

#coffeefail. And YES, I instagrammed even this piece of shit picture. Deal with it. I ended up waiting an hour for this to thaw enough so I could spoon it out. #AKproblems #stophashtagging

So, about that pace unknown. UGH. Big ole rookie mistake. My garmin ran out of batteries. This doesn't happen to me. In fact, it's literally never happened to me. I usually freak out about it running out of batteries when it's at like 90%. The one thing in life I'm anal about. It's a tragedy, really. What if I only ran 3.96 miles and not 4 miles? I'll never amount to anything! Anyway, I was pissed. I'm pretty sure the heat (or lack thereof) had something to do with it. So no splits for you today. Just believe me when I tell you they were 3 minute miles, NBD. But really, it was probably something around 9:45/mile. But who knows for sure. It's the eighth wonder of the world (15th? How many of those have we got these days?).

I ran at a new place! Well, sort of. It was right next to the scenic road to school, but it was trail-ish and woodsy so that was nice. I spent about a mile getting there from school, spent two miles on the trail, and then one final mile getting back to school.

I've pulled a fast one on you. This is almost exactly the same picture as the one above, only I focused my camera on the sky and not the trees. 

Obligatory creek photo

Run felt great, body felt great, blah blah blah thanks Hal you're the best, lemme buy you a drink sometime. I felt like I could have kept going for miles.

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I had kind of a weird experience at work. Let me preface this story by saying that three years ago, I had a summer job as a nature counselor. You read that right. A nature counselor. I don't think I had even talked to a kid before I took that job, and I knew that I would either be the most hated counselor or most beloved. There would obviously be no in-between. Fortunately, it ended up being the latter. They called me Lynx (we weren't allowed to tell them our real names, which now that I think about it, is fucking weird), and I'm pretty sure I had at least one kid hanging off of me every waking moment that summer. It was actually a ridiculously fun job, at least when I wasn't having to come up with an endless number of nature activities (which, by the way, is HARD. Apparently "nature walks" every day of the week aren't acceptable educational activities).

Anyway, my story. One of my favorite campers was this sweet girl named E (no, I'm not going to tell you this kid's real name, are you crazy? The internet's a creepy place, y'all). Well, my office building had a holiday party tonight, and I suddenly saw E. As she came running by, we happened to lock eyes, and I'm pretty sure there was some recognition there. So what did we do? Did we have a joyful reunion and reminisce about the good old days? No. What we did was pretend we didn't know each other. I was so embarrassed. What am I, two years old? No. I'm (ostensibly) an adult. It's my job to make this kid uncomfortable as hell by forcing her to acknowledge that we know each other (but then having tons of fun remembering the aforementioned good old days!!). Oh well. Twenty-five and still learning basic life lessons.

Counselor Jeano.

To Be Continued...

Workout: THE CORE

Y'all are crazy. I write a bullshit post about nothing yesterday and suddenly my page views jump up? On the one hand, maybe it means I'm a whiz and can write interesting things without even trying. On the other hand, it suggests that perhaps my bullshit is better than the stuff I put an effort into writing (the idea being I should just give it all up). I'll choose to ignore that possibility.

Today's Anchorage-y photo theme: COLORS!

 This building is atrociously ugly, but its colors are delightful.

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I was cruising the blogosphere this morning, as I tend to do, and I happened to come upon this review, which pissed me off. I want to be clear that I mean nothing against the blogger herself; she's fine. Great, even. I read her stuff. My issue is with shoe companies using the "barefoot running craze" to sell shoes when they clearly don't care about/understand the whole idea behind barefoot running at all. This shoe advertises itself as being "the next best thing to naked feet," despite the fact that wearing it is pretty much the shoe equivalent of being on another planet. There is no similarity whatsoever. A zero-drop shoe isn't barefoot. It's just a zero-drop shoe.

Let's put aside the whole "is minimalism dumb?" question. That's a discussion for another day (another 'nother day-too much anger surrounding that issue). "Barefoot running" means running barefoot. Period. I'm not a barefoot runner (except during the odd mile when I am). If my shoes don't count as barefoot, neither do those damn shoes. 

Love these things

So what's my point? I don't have one, really. It just pisses me off that companies can slap a buzzword like "barefoot" on everything to sell more product, and it bothers me even more that doing so actually works. Ugh.

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In other news, it's still cold.

I think I may have finally hit my temperature limit. I have four miles to jog tomorrow and I may just decide to do them inside. I was curious to see when this would happen. Now, I could most definitely run outside and be completely fine. I'd warm up in a few minutes. I'd probably even enjoy it. But I guess that somewhere around -10 degrees my mental game collapses. Although now I'm worried that I've just challenged myself to run outside tomorrow. To be continued...

Filler Tuesday

Workout: 2 slow miles, 10:15 average; possibly THE CORE if I ever manage to get up from my chair

Those things look like they've been through hell. They haven't. Not sure why they're so dirty.

I ran in these guys. I don't think I talked about them in my shoe overview. They're pretty much Pace Gloves with some more padding for the roads. I don't like them nearly as much but I've been running almost exclusively in my Pace Gloves since they're the only pair my Yaktrax fit, so I thought it would be good for me to wear something else. I don't know, it made sense at the time.

I don't really feel like writing today so I've decided this is going to be a filler post. Yep, you read that right. I'm telling you that I have jack shit to tell you today. I was supposed to get all random-y on your ass, but I don't feel like it. Blame the weather. And maybe the light.

But actually, don't do that. I'm just tired. Blogging is hard. I have, like, -20 readers. Putting in a ton of effort right now wouldn't be rational.

Here are some pictures I took while at work:

The ocean. It's frozen.

That's all, folks.

A Big Earthquake and a Run

Workout: 4 miles, 9:38 average

Before we begin: as I was in the middle of writing this, there was suddenly a BIG earthquake. Now, when I say big, I mean big. Alaska gets legit earthquakes. Not that 4.0 shit that scares East Coasters. I was in a 7.9 earthquake in Iquique, Chile in 2005 in which there was a moment where I literally thought I was going to die (it didn't help that I was standing on an elevated platform hanging from the ceiling by cables on the top floor of a mall), and which made me fall to the ground. That was big. The earthquake I just felt, while not as big, was still enough to make me run from the house in my towel. It's 0 degrees outside. It was also big enough that shit fell off shelves. I'll let you know how big it was once the news reports it. That's two large earthquakes in three days... I'm hoping that's not a signal that "the big one" is on its way. Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled verbal diarrhea.

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If my average pace is any indication, running in cold weather makes you run faster. It's a scientifically-proven fact. Although let's be clear that in this case, "science" is synonymous with "Jeano who lives in Alaska."

Anyway, I went for a run after class and it was great. Cold as hell, but relatively fast and requiring relatively little effort. Nearly every run has been awesome since I started my most novice of novice plans, but this run felt particularly fantastic.

I won't bore you with the details, but here are some pictures.

Alaska Native Medical Center

Frosty face take two

Fogged up iPhone doing pretty things

You may notice that the sun seems to be going down. Yes, it's setting early these days. Don't believe me?

That made me slightly depressed until I realized we'll hit our darkest day in only a few weeks. It really hasn't been bad so far. I remember it being far darker when I was in high school. Teens are so dramatic.

Wait, this is a progression run, right? Even if your pace only increases by 4 seconds per mile? Score.

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It's funny how amped up I always am to run outside in freezing cold weather, yet the prospect of taking my wench of a dog for a walk afterwards is torture. That's mental training right there. If only it would WARM UP, maybe it'd snow a little. We sure could use some.

250 Miles

Workout: 2 1/2 hours of hiking near Lost Lake, 250+ miles of driving (this is not exercise, I just think that's a big number and wanted to share it with you again)

We made a bird friend. PSA: DON'T FEED THE ANIMALS (this is a rule my dad has yet to learn)

I mentioned yesterday that my dad and I had plans to go hiking near a town called Hope. Well, we didn't go to Hope. We went to Seward, which is 120 miles from Anchorage.

Let me explain. Before leaving out house, we looked at the weather. It was 8 below zero at that point, but the forecast had a high of 11 for Anchorage, so we figured it would warm up. Feel free to call us idiots for not looking at Hope's weather. We assumed it was the same.

We drove along the Seward Highway, which may quite possibly be the prettiest highway drive in the U.S., but is also unfortunately the most dangerous highway in the U.S. (if you look at accidents per mile). I could be not entirely right on this-don't quote me-but so many people are killed on this road each year. The road itself isn't that bad, really, but there aren't a lot of passing lanes so assholes in trucks try to speed past people while going around curves and inevitably crash head-on into someone in the opposite lane. This happens ALL THE TIME. 

This is the only picture I got because I spent most of the time gripping my seat and staring at the road, willing cars not to hit us.

Anyway, when we stopped for gas about 30 miles outside of Anchorage, it was 4 below. Okay, not warming up as fast as we had hoped, but getting there. Literally two minutes later, the car's thermometer had dropped to 22 below. You read that right. The temperature dropped 18 degrees in a matter of minutes. I figured it had to be a mistake and looked up the weather on my phone. It confirmed that it was, in fact, cold as balls outside. Shit.

I kept waiting for my dad to turn us around, but to his credit, he had me check the weather in other nearby places to see what was going on. If nothing else, we could call it a scenic drive and be content. Surprisingly enough, Seward was allegedly enjoying temperatures around 20 above, which we didn't actually believe but decided to pretend we did. Seward it was!

A few years ago, a friend and I hiked to Lost Lake, a gem of a hike with spectacular views from the get-go, and I've always wanted to go back. There's actually a 15-mile run to the lake and back every August. I was kinda sorta scoping out the trail to see if I would ever be capable of doing it, and I think that I could (with a gazillion walking breaks, mind you). Unfortunately, if all goes to plan I won't be here for next year's race, so screw you, Lost Lake Run! Tangent over. You can approach the lake from two different sides, so my dad and I decided to leave from the trailhead closest to Seward since our car had the other trailhead at 12 below zero.

We knew we were in for a treat when, probably ten minutes in, we got a quick view of this guy:

As we continued up, the view got better and better.

Full disclosure: this was on the way back. If you think real hard, you can imagine us walking up it.

This is the same view, but it's still awesome.

The ascent felt pretty gentle, but on the way down I realized it was actually kind of steep. We probably gained somewhere around 1,500 feet. It's not as steep as Flattop, but seemed like a similar gain over a longer distance.

We had been hiking for about an hour and a half when we suddenly came upon a cabin. This was THE nicest cabin I've seen in the wilderness. On the outside, it looks like a legit nice house. IT HAD A HEATER (gas-powered) INSIDE. I'd live there.

We were entirely too excited about this cabin, but you have to admit, it's pretty awesome. It can be rented, and we have decided we have to go back at some point. This is an absolute necessity.

This belongs on cabin porn, right? They could have angled the cabin so I could get more of the view in, though. Rude.

We ate some lunch, 

Flattering this is not. I was eating my sandwich.

talked to the birds (see photo above), and headed down. Before starting back to Anchorage, we took a short detour into Seward, which is so incredibly pretty. If you ever come to Alaska, go to Seward and Homer. Don't think, just go. Both are very maritime-y but surrounded by mountains. They've got the best of both worlds!

 And eco-friendly!  That's a wind turbine.

Then we hit the road back for the 2+ hour trip back to Anchorage. It was definitely a long way to drive for what turned out to be a short hike, but I'm so glad we got to do it!

Tired

And now I'm going to go bury my head in books.

Coastal Trail and Fake Fireplaces

Workout: 5 miles back at the Coastal Trail!

The Sleeping Lady sleeping. Typical. This was at 11:00 a.m., by the way. The moon is up way past its bedtime.

I was fortunate enough to be able to go to the Coastal Trail for my "long run" today (note: my long runs, at this point in my plan, are not actually long). It takes a while to drive there, but it's so worth it. No skiers, very few people at all, really, and ample space for Bailey to run free.

I was going to run along a different part of the trail as part of my sort-of not-really plan to do a "photo tour" of the entire Coastal Trail, but that siren Point Woronzof was calling me, so I had to go to her. I mean...

... right? I had to go here. I would like to point out that there are, in fact, enormous mountains back there, despite what MiPhone would have you believe.

Things started off pretty cold.

My body seems to go through this weird heat cycle as I run. I'm pretty cold when I start. Duh. It's 0 degrees out. But within three minutes or so, I'm sweating profusely on top, but I can't feel my feet. Well, I guess there's feeling down there, but it feels like some foreign object has invaded my shoe. A boulder, perhaps. This "foreign object" is obviously my toes, but since they're numb I guess the rest of my foot thinks it's feeling something else. I love my shoes, but warm they are not.

Love you, li'l guys. And your li'l Yaktrax friends.

As the run progresses, I have a "Eureka!" moment when I suddenly realize I can feel my toes again, only to realize my upper body is now quite cold. Shit. The profuse sweat produced earlier in the run doesn't help things. I finish the run slightly but not unreasonably cold and blast my car's heat as high as it'll go, take the hottest shower that's ever been taken, and huddle under an electric blanket for a few hours. Then, suddenly, I feel like I'm on fire and have to open my window. What a dope.

So anyway, my run went really well.

No, I'm not trying to make you think I ran more than I did by pushing the lap button more than necessary. I've convinced myself that pushing it when I turn around on an out-and-back means my garmin won't cut off the last bit, which it actually seems to do anyway.

 I guess it takes me a while to warm up. Those paces are what an even effort looks like for this schizo.

I find it hard to believe this elevation chart because the Coastal Trail is flat, but it's the same in both directions, so maybe it's accurate?

More pictures from my run, for your viewing pleasure.

The end.

Tomorrow my dad and I are planning to go on a hike near the beautiful town of Hope, so get stoked for some pretty views. I know that's the only reason you read my crap.

Please excuse me while I do homework by this fake fire.

Apparently that's a thing now? Fake logs and a fake red log glow but a real flame? AND A REMOTE CONTROL?! I'm house-sitting for my neighbors for a couple of weeks and this is the kind of shit I've been set up with. Livin' the dream.