Ready for the game

A peek at skijoring

It's City of Lakes Loppet weekend!

Though I'm no longer doing much Nordic skiing (it was my main sport back in high school), I love, love this annual urban ski festival in Minneapolis. I volunteered last year with my friend Lindsay (we met on our high school's ski team, so this is a fun activity for us to do together), and this year, Lindsay asked if I wanted to volunteer again - this time, at the skijoring race.

Do you know about skijoring!? I knew about it in theory but had never seen a skijoring race for myself before today. It's a ski race in which the skiers are attached to their pup via a long cord, and the dog (ideally) pulls the skier along to make the pace even faster.

This is a bold statement, Reader, but I think it's my new favorite sport to spectate.

It didn't hurt that bright sun was shining at Lake Calhoun and there were hundreds (thousands?) of people (and tons of dogs) milling around the area, which also served as headquarters for the bike race, kids' races, classic skiing races, vendor village and other events going on today. (The 42K freestyle - or skate-skiing -race and a bunch of other events are tomorrow.)

It also didn't hurt that (unrelated to skijoring) our shuttle from Uptown over to Lake Calhoun was via horse!

There were 10K, 5K and 3K skijoring races, and Lindsay and I were part of the volunteer team that helped the racers line up by bib number, in rows of 10. It was sort of organized chaos, as you can imagine, and I was so impressed by the dogs. (Wish would love the sport itself but would not enjoy the crowds and the other dogs.) The dogs were excited (lots of barking at the start!) but I didn't see any squabbles (canine or human).

One highlight of the event was running into my friend Emily and her pup Doc at the start line. It was his first race!

We helped with some crowd control and then got to watch the start of the races! The leaders were fast. The dogs were having a ball.

The 10K was two laps around the lake's perimeter, which was snow-covered and groomed for both skate- and classic-skiing. I got to see Emily and Doc zoom by at the halfway point.

On our way out of the festival, Lindsay and I made sure to take a picture together (for the second year in a row, so it's officially a tradition).

January was a dismally cold month in Minnesota, and though today's temperature couldn't have been much warmer than 15 degrees or so, it was wonderful to ring in February at an event where so, so many people were out celebrating winter instead of fighting it. It was a fun and refreshing afternoon.

Monthly photo project: Halfway point

One of my 101 in 1,001 goals is to take one photo of the same place every month for a year. Inspired in part by how I love a good time-lapse video, I also thought it would be fun because in one particular moment, it's tough to imagine how it looks in a completely different season. (Case in point: the early photos in this series look pretty dreamy to me right now.) I wanted to see what this place in my city looks like in every month of the year.

I choose a place I ran by regularly enough to get one photo per month, and I wanted an open space with trees (to include fall colors, of course).

I grabbed January's photo this week, so I'm halfway there now. I present to you: August 2013 through January 2014!

I didn't feel too much urgency in January because I figured this month's photo would look much like December's, but even in comparison, I like that the footprint snow tracks changed over the month.

I am really excited to see what the spring photos look like now.

Getting outside

Today the temperature climbed into the upper 20s and I spent nearly an hour outside. Saturday's long run felt like weeks ago, so the bright sun and blue sky seemed nothing short of amazing.

First, I went for a run and looked at the shadows.

Then Wish and I went out for our evening walk and decided to play in the snow at a neighborhood park instead. The snow is nearly-but-not-quite too deep for him, so he got a good workout in while we tromped through the snow.

There's nothing groundbreaking in this run-sky-shadow-Wish a-few-of-my-favorite-things post, but the fresh air felt like something special today. The little things.

Marvelous Monday: Week 4

A quick Marvelous Monday to begin the week!

1) Inspired by my running buddy Molly, I've mixed in some interval training on the treadmill over the last few weeks. Today's workout was a 10-minute warmup, then a ladder of one, two, three, four, four, three, two, and one minute(s) at a moderately hard pace, with one-minute recovery jogs in between each interval. If it were possible for a workout to fly by on a treadmill, this one did! I like ladder workouts.

2) I woke up to -15 degrees and a -40 windchill, but I have to admit that today's big blue sky was pretty.

3) Josh made tortas from our Rick Bayless Mexican Everyday cookbook for dinner tonight!

4) Over the last few months, my glasses have gotten so loose they fall off my face if I look down. I finally remembered to bring them in for a quick repair over the weekend, and I am so excited to have them fit correctly again.

5) At Trader Joe's last week a bottle of grapefruit juice found its way into my cart and I'm curious about how it will stack up to the fresh stuff.

What's nice about the start of your week?