The fall and winter months have been a bit of a whirlwind at the Moore house. Between bootcamps, the Olympic Tri and my Marathon I’ve been training like crazy all fall. Saturday and Sunday workouts would often last 2 – 3 hours and then would require a 2 – 3 hour nap afterwards lol. Then we were busy as usual prepping for Halloween and before I even had time to blink, Thanksgiving and my Marathon were upon us. We just had a few short days after my family left before it was time for our next adventure: the first Christmas celebration with family. I almost didn’t realize how soon it would be here (meaning I needed to do that Christmas shopping earlier than usual) but somehow managed to get everything together in time. On Thursday we drove from our house in Florida to Myrtle Beach, SC (about 8hrs) to see Ryan’s dad and stepmom Mary. Mary’s kids (our age) live in Maryland so they figured if they had a home in Myrtle Beach they would be half way between the Maryland kids and the Florida kids. It wasn’t a super long visit but it sure was fun! Insert Read More Break
On Sunday November 30th, I completed something I never thought I would even attempt: a full marathon (26.2 miles running race). It all started earlier this year when my running partner (at the time) Angela and I were discussing our next race and decided we wanted to do the Space Coast Half Marathon. This race is very popular because they are doing a 5 year series where each year’s medal is of a different space shuttle (2013 Columbia, 2014 Challenger, 2015 discover, 2016 Endeavour & 2017 Atlantis). If you do three out of the five years you get an additional medal and if you do all five years (half or full or a mix) then you get yet another medal. Since the series is so popular, the half marathon sold out in less than a day and we missed our chance to register for it. We pondered back and forth for weeks and the full marathon started to fill up too. Finally, we agreed that now is probably the best time to do it since neither of us have kids, both of us had a normal work schedule and we had a committed running partner to make the long runs go easier. So we bit the bullet and signed up for our first FULL marathon.
Did everyone have a nice Thanksgiving? I know we sure did! My dad, stepmom and brother flew in from Texas on Wednesday. We got everyone settled and ran a few last minute errands before the Thanksgiving feast. This year I picked up a smoked turkey from Broken Barrel Tavern (a local favorite) and it was so nice not to have to stress about whether it would come out right or not!
I can't believe I didn't blog about the Battle of the Bridges Triathlon! On Sunday September 28th, 2014, I completed my first Olympic distance triathlon. I had done numerous sprint distance triathlons before and I had done the Battle of the Bridges sprint distance in 2011. But I had never done an olympic distance. This race was 1500m swim, 23km bike and 10k (6.2mi) run. There were only 30 female participants in the olympic distance!
As I mentioned in the previous post, we always try to play a new game at Halloween. This year, I decided to try out a photo scavenger hunt that you play using your mobile phone. The app is called Scavify and I wanted to share my experience using it in case you want to do a scavenger hunt for an event.
Happy Halloween everyone! As usual, we had our annual Spooktacular Halloween Party on the last saturday of October (10/25). We were a little concerned that maybe it would be a pretty small party this year since both of us changed jobs and were no longer present at Harris/Piper to talk it up and get everyone out there. But our friends still came out and we had a great night as usual!
This year I have really been focused on getting us eating better. Sometimes we slip back into our old ways but for the most part, we are eating WAY better than we used to. We rarely ever get McDonalds or other fast food (except Panda Express which actually has a few healthy-ish options), we go to sit-down restaurants less, we get pizza less than once a month now (compared to almost once a week before) and the foods that I cook for us have fresher ingredients and fewer calories and carbs. It can be a struggle to find meals that are healthy, easy to prepare and taste good so I’ve spent a lot of time scouring Pinterest. The problem with that is that it’s easy to get overwhelmed…and it’s easy to get on the wrong track and end up looking at 50 different peanut butter pie recipes…Then I stumbled across a recipe from a website called Dashing Dish. The more of these recipes I tried, the more I liked and I decided I’ve tried enough of them to do a review now.
When my husband and I first bought our house, the home inspector pointed out several little things that we were able to ignore but there was a damaged valley on the roof that would need to be repaired. We asked them to fix it but the countered with an offer to give us back some cash instead so we could get it fixed after the sale. We agreed…but I wish we hadn’t, we’ve been in the house for 5 years and are just now getting around to fixing it.
For Labor Day weekend, Ryan and I had plans to go to a wedding in Ohio for some of our friends. We debated whether to drive or fly but the flights were kind of expensive and we certainly hadn’t budgeted for this weekend trip. So we decided to drive up to Ohio for Labor Day weekend – and I’m so glad we did! We would have missed out on some pretty fun things if we had flown in and just stayed near the hotel.
Since we had decided to drive, I decided to see if there were any races that weekend and there happened to be a Sprint Triathlon only half an hour from our hotel. And I could easily fit my bike in the car…I couldn’t help myself, I signed up, heeehee. Sunday morning I left Ryan happily passed out in the warm bed at the hotel and got myself and my gear over to the park by 6:45am (kind of late for a tri actually).
I am a part time quilter, full time engineer and hope to one day become a full time quilter. Feel free to read along as I explore quilting, cooking and anything else that strikes my fancy.