Quick Sand

For my internship this summer I am doing a study for the BLM on the St. Anthony Tiger Beetles out at the sand dunes. Yesterday me, Haley and Matt went out to do some collecting and plotting. The school lets us use there vans and we have a Ranger to drive around the dunes in. Well within my little group I'm the only one with a permit to drive the school vans... So i'm driving this 12 passenger van, hauling a trailor with a ranger on it, everything is going fine, we get out to the dunes and turn off on this road that finds its way back to some smaller dunes where we know there are some tiger beetles. Since we know we can find them there we decide that it would be a good place to start... well all is going well until we have to turn off the road onto a smaller less traveled road, on this smaller less traveled road we hit a patch of very soft sand! Needless to say that is as far as we went. Lets see.... I took the road less traveled by and it really did make all the difference. We were stuck as stuck can be, so we did all we could do... we started digging! After a while we gave up and did what we went there to do and came back to the van for round two. We eventually gave up again and headed for the main road to flag someone down to help pull us out. And just our luck we caught someone from the BLM who knew exactly what we were out there to do. Luckily he laughed about it and pulled us out with his big rig pretty quickly. Now we are headed back out tuesday..... hope things go smoother this time!

13.1 Miles

In about 8 weeks my goal is to run a half marathon, which is 13.1 miles. When people talk about their bucket lists or in other words the things they want to do before they die, I have always came up with the thought that it would be pretty awesome to run a marathon. Well thats how this whole shindig got started. I was talkin to my FHE brother Daniel and he asked me to name three things I wanted to do before I died. So I told him...
1. See the Northern Lights
2. Learn to play the violin
3. Run a Marathon
Well he loved my list of course. But we really started talking about the marathon and he said he would love to run one too. So we started getting all worked up and excited, thinking we could train together and run one at the end of the summer. Well between our two schedules we didnt find any that worked for the both of us so we started looking at half marathons, and we found one.... only its only eight weeks away from saturday. (June 5th, in Sun Valley, Idaho) Which means training and training fast. So all this was decided sunday evening and we started training the very next day. So this week we started with some 3 milers. We run every monday, wednesday, thursday and saturday which gives us tuesday, friday and sunday off. The schedule for the nine weeks of training goes something like this...
Week One: M-3, T-off, W-3, Th-3, F-off, Sat-4, S-off = 13 miles
Week Two: M-3, T-off, W-4, Th-3, F-off, Sat-6, S-off = 16 miles
Week Three: M-3, T-off, W-5, Th-3, F-off, Sat-8, S-off = 19 miles
Week Four: M-3, T-off, W-5, Th-3, F-off, Sat-10, S-off = 21 miles
Week Five: M-4, T-off, W-5, Th-4, F-off, Sat-11, S-off = 24 miles
Week Six: M-4, T-off, W-6, Th-4, F-off, Sat-12, S-off = 26 miles
Week Seven: M-4, T-off, W-5, Th-4, F-off, Sat-9, S-off = 22 miles
Week Eight: M-3, T-off, W-4, Th-3, F-off, Sat-8, S-off = 18 miles
Week Nine: M-3, T-off, W-3, Th-Walk 2, F-off, Sat-13.1, S-off = 21.1 miles

Which Gives a grand total of.... 180.1 Miles in 9 weeks.
I'm only in the first week right now and its feeling pretty impossible... but Im also pretty determined so we will see what happens over the next couple weeks. It was really hard starting because I havent really ran much since August, and the air is so much thinner up here because the elevation is so much higher. So training my lungs and body to run up here is alot harder than back home. My first three mile run was alot harder than I thought it was going to be, I was struggling to get enough oxygen almost the whole run. But I can already feel myself getting better and its only been a few days, I can feel myself getting stronger too, and my endurance better. Im just hoping it improves enough, fast enough to run this half marathon.
But I have already gone 9 miles! Plus plenty of walking in between to help keep my muscles loose.Which is pretty good I think. Saturday is my first increase, its only by one mile but one mile feels like forever when you are running :)

If you want to check out the site here it is
http://www.sunvalleyhalfmarathon.com/Race_Details.php

Happy Easter!

Easter is my favorite holiday, We get to celebrate our Savior and remember all he did for us. This year is even more special because its also General Conference weekend!! The only way this weekend could be better is if I was with my family. Happy Easter Everyone! I love you