Wasatch Back Relay

Believe it or not, this is not a house post!!  This past weekend I was part of a team - Hip Hop Chicks - that ran the Wasatch Back Relay - a crazy road race that is 188 miles long, from Logan UT to The Canyons ski resort in Park City UT.  I've been told many times before and after that I was crazy - and I was telling myself that Friday night!  I have been doing a lot of running to get ready for this and felt somewhat confident that I was physically prepared - the week before the race I did 7.5 mile, 8 mile and 4 mile runs.  But holy cow, was I wrong!!  This was brutal - physically, mentally and emotionally, and I was so grateful to have such a supportive team - no way I could have done this without them.  I definitely learned that I'm not as physically and mentally tough as I thought I was!  Anyhoo... some pictorial evidence...

Liz, me, Bridgette, Trish, Kate and Joni

Here we are before we left for Logan Friday morning... these women are truly amazing!  I really only knew Bridgette before Friday morning... funny what spending 30+ hours together will do! I heart each one of them!

Map of my first run - an easy 5.1 miles - and me before I started, I think at about 1 or so.  I had no idea how hot it would be - and running at 6 am doesn't do much to prepare you for that!!  But it went OK...

Here we are after we all completed our first run - don't they all look like runners, except for me!?!  The allergies started kicking in about here...  lots of sneezing, a faucet for a nose, itchy eyes... pretty miserable.  We had about 3 hours while the ladies in van 2 took over....

Most of the HipHop Chicks as Liz started on our 2nd set of runs:

Bridgette, Kate, me, Wendy, Joni, Trish, Shannon, Caitlyn, Muranda, Kadee and Sarah

And here's my 2nd leg... 8 miles up East Canyon to the reservoir.  I started at about 11:30 pm and finished about 1 am...  I felt pretty good the first 5 miles, but the last 3 or so miles just seemed really steep - I could see the lights for the exchange point and they just kept getting higher and higher and higher.  This was the point I thought there was no way I'd ever do this again - full-on insanity!!  I was ready to go home and sleep and eat and never put on my running shoes again!  When I was finished we went to a high school in Coalville and had some food and got to sleep on the gym floor.  For the first 15 minutes I thought wow - this is the softest gym floor in the world, and then after 15 minutes I thought wow - this is the hardest gym floor in the world!  We had about 3 hours before we needed to leave to make it our next exchange

My final leg...  an "easy" 3.1 miles at about 11 (I think... things were definitely blurring by this point!) on Saturday.  I was so done...  once again hot, little food during the previous 24 hrs, little sleep, sore, and not GI distress but definitely discomfort...  (if I have to use a "honey pot" anytime in the next year, it will be too soon!!).  I don't know that I've ever been so happy to see someone as I was when I saw Wendy at that exchange point!!

There was gorgeous scenery along the way...

Oh wait, did I put this under scenery??!  There were many teams who dressed in costumes - this guys teams name was Pants Optional - and to their credit, at this point they were in 3rd place in the men's division and only 3 miles behind the team in 2nd place (they ended up finishing in 4th place, finishing in just over 20 hrs!).  And they started about 8 hours after us!!

The chicks of van 1 at the finish line at The Canyons Resort:

Talk about a bunch of white girls playing at being gangsta!  

I was pretty set Friday night on never ever even thinking about doing something like this again, but a couple of days later I'm thinking it wasn't so bad...  Next time I'll be better prepared and have better expectations of what I'm getting myself into!  And as a team we did pretty well - 36 out of 127 women's teams and our finish time was just over 31 hours.  I was so in awe of the all the women on our team - they were each amazing, and I wish I was the runner that they are, and the good people that they are.  I wasn't as horribly sore as I thought I might be, although I haven't run yet... not sure if I'm brave enough to try tomorrow morning or not!!

 Wasatch Back 2011?  We'll see...

Week 8 - I think...

I have lost track of what week we're in, and I'm too tired tonight to try and figure it out - so 8 sounds good!

This week's accomplishments include:

INSULATION!!

And... DRYWALL!!

(Just to make everyone who lives in my neighborhood jealous - this is my new closet!!  It's so huge!  I might need to go shopping just to fill it!!)

And, we even started to get a little new siding up (hopefully now my neighbor will stop telling me how ugly my house looks!!):

And I think my sprinklers may have even been re-hooked up - had to make some adjustments to accommodate a new window well!  Which is good since our cool, wet weather seems to have moved on.  It's crazy to see this all happen - it seems like a house again!  I'm so excited to move back in and enjoy a kitchen with lots of counter space and a dishwasher, a basement with livable space that doesn't seem too dungeon-like, a furnace that won't have to be re-lit multiple times during the winter and I could go on and on and on...

WINDOWS!!!

Great Room:

Kitchen:

Master Bedroom bumpout:

Master Bedroom:

Basement family room and one of the bedrooms:

Bunk room window (poor wet Salsa...):

About halfway through?

According to the original schedule, we should be about halfway through...  and Contractor Matt told me this week that he thought we were on schedule... that would be lovely... oh how lovely that would be!!

So... to my highly trained eye (!?) it looks like most of the wiring is done and hooked up to the new electrical panels:

And there's a bathtub in the new full bathroom downstairs... it looks kind of funny - just a tub - no walls or toilet or anything else... just a tub...

The new window wells were backfilled...

And I was going to ask them to save me the extra dirt so that I could fill in my sink hole, but before I had a chance to ask

they filled it in for me!!

Windows are suppose to be here early this next week and once those are in then insulation will get put in the walls (novel thought there... walls with insulation, who would've thunk it?!) and let the drywalling begin!!  My new light fixtures will be here on Monday (yahoo!!  Thanks Ryan!!) and I picked out kitchen cabinets this week and interior doors and a new front door (happy day!!  no more layers of insulated foam around the frame!!) and mouldings and that kind of good stuff.  It's moving right along... dare I hope that in about 6 weeks I'll moving back into my house?  I keep thinking of the movie "The Money Pit" and how the answer to every question about when (when will the plumbing be done?  when will the floors be done? etc) was two weeks, two weeks... for months and months and months!!