With 2 hours to kill at Dulles airport before our flight, I figured now is as good a time as any to update the bloggity blog with the exploits of the past week!
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| Pre-Flight Bevvies at SFO |
As expected, our trip to DC was full of fun times. We started the week off with one of my roommates from college, Krissi, and her fiance, Mike, in Reston, VA. We rented an awesome mini-van...which we will never be purchasing!!
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| Yes, be jealous... |
Day 1: National Mall, Washington Monument, American History Museum, and Washington National's Game.
Here's Jay trying to install rivets in a plane - needless to say, he wouldn't be hired for that job.
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| Jay looks SMALL!!! |
Night with the Nationals and the soon to be Chevaliers!
Day 2: As I'm still in training mode for Wildflower - which is next weekend (gulp)!!!!, the trip was still filled with training sessions. One of my favorite parts about traveling is running in new locales, and Reston had a great trail system which was basically connect the dots (dots being wooden markers) for a 4 mile loop. I ran the loop on Day 2. I made a wrong turn, but found these amazing houses and managed to extend my run to 5.5 miles, which is what I was aiming for.
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| New trails are my favorite!! |
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| Can I live here, please? |
Since we were away from our pups and missed them terribly, we dognapped Coolie and hiked at the Sky Meadows State Park.
Day 3: We checked into our hotel in Arlington. BF was sleepy, so I took advantage of nap time and did a 6.7 mile run towards Washington DC on the Mt. Vernon trail.
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| Navy-Merchant Marine Memorial on the Mt. Vernon Trail |
Since I had to get in some swim sessions, I found an awesome gym 2 blocks from our hotel, Sport & Health Crystal City, which offered a 7 day free trial - DONE!! Beautiful gym and great pool.
Then we hit up the Expo for the Nike Women's 1/2 Marathon, had lots of photo shoots, tested out Nuun flavors, found my name on the wall of runners, saw Olympian Sanya Richards-Ross, bought some new Nike race swag, and finally made it to dinner at Founding Farmers. Ahhhhhh-mazing! Definitely a very worthy splurge meal!
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| I found my name!!! |
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| Wheee!! Seriously - lots of photo shoots! |
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| Selfie on the Georgetown Canal |
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| Olympian and Gold Medalist Sanya Richards-Ross |
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| Nice Coat! Yummy Cocktails ;) |
Day 4: Friday meant bike day...normally I absolutely despise a spin bike. I really just can't get into it. It is really nothing like riding my own bike on a trainer, but unfortunately this was my only option. Welcome to the Sport&Health Cardio Theatre!!!! So the gym has this room, full of 1 of every cardio machine out there. It's dark, with red accent lights, it's cooler than the rest of the gym, and it has a huge movie screen playing different movies throughout the day so you can get totally distracted from doing a long run or spin. Far beats the mini tv's at most gyms! So I saddled up for a 1.5 hour ride with my awesome new Nuun waterbottle and X-Men. Good times!
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| Hitting up the Cardio Theatre with my cool new Nuun water bottle |
After getting in our workouts, we metro'd it up to Union Station, toured the Supreme Court, walked around the Capitol building, and saw some fish and some jewels at the Natural History Museum. I love all things Food Network, and was stoked to find that our hotel was right by Spike Mendelsohn's Good Stuff Eatery. So we noshed on some turkey burgers, rosemary/thyme fries, and (mini) toasted marshmallow and very berry milkshakes :)
Day 5: First I put another swim in the books, then we headed out to the National Museum of Crime and Punishment. If you ever go to DC, ABSOLUTELY put this museum on your list!!! Super interesting exhibits, cool interactive stuff, and obvi hits close to home for both me and the BF given our lines of work in the justice system.
On our way to check out the home of the Prez, we stopped at the District of Pi for some early carbo loading of Deep Dish 'za.
And given that I was to run 13 miles the next day...we headed back to the hotel to veg out in front of the tv. As much as we wanted to keep packing stuff in, we definitely took to heart that this was VACATION and RELAXATION was absolutely necessary! Then I laid out my race gear and drifted off to dream of race bibs, aid stations, and that little blue box!
Day 6: RACE DAY!!! In an effort to keep this post manageable, my specific race recap will follow in Vacay Part 2! But suffice it to say that the Nike Women's 1/2 is one of my new favorite races, and I might be tempted to make this an annual race...
Day 7: Sad Day - Vacay is done :( I fit in one last swim before packing up our stuff. Not gonna lie - I'm super proud of myself for sticking to a general training schedule while out here. Hopefully it was enough to prep me for Wildflower! We fit in one last stop to Arlington National Cemetery before heading to the airport. The beautiful weather from the rest of the trip gave way to the last of the April showers, which was very fitting for such a thought provoking stop.
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| JFK Gravesite |
All in all, we had an amazing trip, but can't wait to get back to the pups, work my muscles at FNS, and start tapering for Wildflower!
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