Happy Early Easter!

Hey everyone, I hope that you are having a great weekend!  Blogging on a Saturday night... I'm pretty cool, huh?

Anyways, I ended up having a pretty busy week and haven't had the chance to blog until now.  It's nice to have busy weeks, especially, as I mentioned, I am "fighting the blues" just a little bit.  Let's recap on that a little bit.

On Wednesday morning I woke up early and when I stepped out of the house to go meet the girls to run, I opened the door to a couple inches of snow on the ground. WHAT?!?  It had been around 70 on Monday!  So ridiculous.  After being in milder temperatures in Europe for a month, I felt so discombobulated and didn't know what to do.  What do I wear?  How will I stay warm?  Should I start my car?  Ahhhh!!

We did a 3-mile run that was one of the worst runs condition-wise of the whole season.  The city was not prepared for the weather and there was no salt on the ground so the whole road was just a sheet of ice.  We had to tip toe run and "balance beam" run through the tire tracks that made a somewhat ice-free path for us to run on.  It was not fun and I am officially SICK and EXHAUSTED of the cold.  I'm done.  No more!

Luckily the weather warmed up throughout the day and by the evening most, if not all of the snow was gone.  I had a fun evening where I went to the All Over Albany 6th birthday party.  I go to this event every year and I always love connecting with people in the local blogging community.

Plus, it is always in a cool location and there is great food, cupcakes and drinks.  This year was especially cool because I met some really interesting people from the Mop & Bucket Co. improv group and was invited to be a "celebrity" judge at their show next Friday night!  I am pretty sure that the word "celebrity" is synonymous with "random person" in this case, but whatever, I am vain and they said "celebrity" so I am going to continue to call myself a "celebrity judge."  I am really excited about the opportunity and think a bunch of my friends are going to come out and watch next Friday.  Stay tuned til then to see how it goes and thank you so much to AOA for a great event as always!

Thursday morning I rejoined my friend for a Tough Mudder workout, the first for months.  And in the time that I stopped the workouts and went away and returned, they've advanced a couple levels on the workout plans and things have gotten a bit... tougher!  But it was nice to get sweaty in the gym again and I am really getting excited to train more for this race and run the Tough Mudder in May.  If you are interested in the workouts we have been doing, you can check them out on the Tough Mudder website.

That evening after work I caught up with more old [and some new!] friends for drinks.  I'm excited because I think I've recruited a couple new people to join our morning running groups and some more local runners to do races with.  It was also just fun to see friends and catch up more after my weeks away.  I'm looking forward to this summer and enjoying time outdoors with my local group of friends.  It's funny because time goes by so fast and you don't always realize it.  It seems like just yesterday I was writing my "5 year" blog post about when I first moved to Albany and now in a blink of an eye, another year has passed.  My friends here mean so much to me and take care of me in many ways.  Thursday's night out was really needed and left me really happy.

As did our great 5-mile run on Friday morning that was followed by a Starbucks Friday with some special guests.  This week has been killing it with the sunrises.

It is one of my favorite ways to start a day, and I was lucky enough to have the day end in one of my favorite ways also.  With my best friends in Boston!  I don't have any good pictures of us or of the delicious food we ate at Back Bay Harry's but it was fun.  We also started the evening with a drink of Sam Adam's Marathon Brew at Dillon's on Boylston.  Boylston, and the rest of Boston for that matter, is completely decked out in marathon excited.  It was so exciting and fun to see and I was definitely feeling a bit of runner envy seeing everyone walk around with their bags from the expo and marathon jackets on.

This morning I tried to shake out some of my runner envy by going for an easy 3 mile run around Back Bay and towards Fenway.  There was a B.A.A. 5K going on and lots of runners dressed up for Boston and I am so excited to be there on Monday and so excited about the idea of someday running the Boston Marathon.

I have been wondering what could possibly be as good as the feeling of running my FIRST marathon but I think that running the marathon that I grew up watching on television every year could possibly do it.  Running the marathon that is so symbolic and meaningful to me is definitely something I will someday do.  Bucket list: ADDED.

I do feel like I am going a little bit nuts with the races lately.  I am right now signed up for at least one 5K, 3.5 mile race, 10K, 15K, half marathon, marathon, relay race, mud run, and triathlon between now and October.  I am a race registering fiend and I just keep finding more marathons to add to my list of ones I want to do.  I had lunch with Daniella on Friday when she was in town for the day and we just kept listing off all the marathons we wanted to run.  New York City! Chicago! Berlin! Istanbul! Boston! Amsterdam! London! Barcelona! South Africa! RUN ALL THE MARATHONS!

After my morning in Boston I head to Rhode Island to spend the day with family, which was really amazing.  Ate way too much food and got to see my mom and grandparents for the first time since the marathon, which was really exciting.  And luckily, it was an incredibly beautiful day, which made for a really nice afternoon like with my mom & bro.

I hope that you are having as great a weekend and enjoy your weekend - no matter what you celebrate!