Once again Jes and I have decided to push ourselves into new territory. I suppose it is a perfectly normal phenomenon to continue pushing yourself, but never in my life did I think we’d end up here. Here of course being that last weekend we officially decided to start training for a half marathon. The Atlanta Half Marathon on Thanksgiving Day to be exact. Seeing as how we’ve never ran for more than 6 miles at any time, we’ve committed to more than doubling that over the next 16 weeks. But for the first time in a couple months we are both feeling seriously motivated to hit our goal.
On Monday we set out to find a training program that would get us to 13.1 miles over the next 16 weeks and found one pretty quickly. The build up is surprisingly gradual, so this week we set out on Tuesday morning to get started. The training schedule has us running on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays with varying distances each day. The weekday runs are going to be before work, so luckily the farthest we will have to run on a weekday is 5 or 6 miles. Saturdays will be the day for our long runs and Sundays are a shorter run, designed to ease you off of the longer run the day before. This week we were able to easily complete the training schedule that was laid out, and next week is pretty easy too. After that we start getting into somewhat uncharted waters and we will see just how far our little legs can take us.
But that’s not the only thing that happened this week. And when I say this week, I mostly mean yesterday and Friday. Friday we hit a major house milestone with the new house as we now have a fully executed contract to build our house. We started working with our first builder in the middle of March, and now a full 5 months later, we finally have a contract to build it. That was also the last piece of info that the bank needed, so now we are just waiting on the loan to close and we will be ready start the demo work.
Yesterday was perhaps the most action pack day either of us have ever had in our lives. We started off by driving to Brookhaven to do a nice 4 mile run, and we went to Brookhaven to do it because we had 7:15am breakfast plans with the Henry’s. It’d been a week or two since we’d seen our godson, so we were very excited to get to spend some time with himand he’s really starting to come alive. Oliver was awake for (almost) the entire time we were there and was quite entertaining. We had breakfast at Flying Biscuit and hung out until about 9:45am, when it was off to our next adventure for the day. We left Ron and Kate with a tuckered out sleeping baby, so even if it was his normal nap time, we’re taking credit for leaving them with this:
Speaking of photos, our next adventure was the final piece to our Photo 1 classes. The instructors organized a meet up at Oakland Cemetery in downtown Atlanta. Oakland Cemetery is the most famous cemetery in Atlanta and permanent resting ground of Margaret Mitchell, among many others. The conditions (extremely bright sunshine) made for very difficult conditions to get some good shots, but I actually enjoyed the challenge of having to deal with the harsh lighting conditions. I think we both did a really good job of finding not only interesting things to take pictures of, but also finding a way to do it with the harsh lighting conditions.
After about 2 hours at the cemetery it was time to move on to our next assignment for the day. We had two different appointments for house stuff. The first of which was to look at some slabs for our countertops and the second was to work on the design for our cabinets. We are trying to keep to those posts separate from our weekly posts because there is so much thought that goes into them, so if you are interested in reading more, go ahead and check those posts out. But let’s just sum up those meetings by saying that we got the perfect countertops, at a steep discount, and are extremely excited about the cabinet design. I think we are getting everything we want out of our kitchen and couldn’t be more excited.
Finally we ended the day by entertaining our good friends Charlie and Caroline at the condo. After such a long day it was really nice to just sit and relax with some good friends and let the rest of the day just wind down. We ended up grilling burgers and corn, and Jes made her (now) famous Oreo like desert. After such a long (and successful) day, it was the perfect way to round it out.
Which brings me to today. We have completed our short run for the day and are once again going through the constant struggle of trying to train Radar to be a better dog at Caribou. The rest of the day will mostly likely be spent doing things that are normally considered not that fun (laundry, finances, etc.) but I’m looking forward to it. In between loads I am sure we will bust out the boats and books and enjoy the hot Sunday afternoon. All in all it’s been a very eventful week.