Whelp, the weekend came and went a little faster than we would have liked. We were kind of getting used to 3-day weekends and, personally, I was shocked that the general public was expected to get back to the grind today. The nerve!

I’m not sure what’s going on with the weather around here lately but it was gorgeous out this weekend. We woke up to a balmy 45 degrees on Saturday (a far cry from a week ago, that’s for sure) and took advantage of the beautiful weather by heading out for a run. I’m not sure what has come over us but we’ve both gone off the deep end a little and signed up for (rather ambitious) events. Admittedly, Justin is a little more ambitious than me; he’s doing a a GORUCK Challenge in March in Boston and a Tough Mudder in May in Vermont. He has been training for a few months now and is getting pretty pumped about both of them.

I was having a little trouble understanding what the GORUCK Challenge was all about so I did some research and summed it up as best I could:

It is inspired by Special Forces training and led by Green Berets. It is an 8-10 hour/15-20 mile guided tour of a particular city. The route is kept secret until the day of the challenge. Some of the challenges are overnight. Participants wear backpacks containing 4 or 6 bricks (depending on your weight) for the duration of the challenge. Everyone who signs up for the challenge in a particular city is on the same team. The goal is to complete the challenge as a team and work together to solve problems and overcome obstacles; if one person is having trouble running while wearing their backpack, the other people on the team figure out a way to carry it for him (or her). I’m a little fuzzy on some of the other details, but I think that at some point you have to carry another person (maybe up stairs?) and the group has to carry a big log for a period of time, and there is some swimming involved.

Image courtesy of http://goruckchallenge.com/

The Tough Mudder description (from the website above) sounds equally insane:

“Tough Mudder events are hardcore 10-12 mile obstacle courses designed by British Special Forces to test your all around strength, stamina, mental grit, and camaraderie. With the most innovative courses, half a million inspiring participants, and more than $2 million dollars raised for the Wounded Warrior Project, Tough Mudder is the premier adventure challenge series in the world.”

Yowza.

Justin’s events make mine sound really lame, but here it is: I signed up for a half-marathon in May. No obstacles, no bricks in backpacks, no logs and the only person-carrying that is likely to take place will be if I get weary and latch onto the nearest runner. I’m excited for it, though; it’s something that I have wanted to do for awhile and I’m glad that I finally bit the bullet and signed up.

So with our lofty goals in mind, it was really nice to be able to head outside for a not-so-frigid run together this past weekend. Luckily Justin wore his backpack full of bricks so that leveled the playing field a little bit. I suggested he put B in his backpack so that we could enjoy the nice weather as a family but he passed (Justin passed, not B – he was all sorts of ready to hit the road as Justin’s training coach). He looked less than pleased to be left lounging on the couch:

Don’t worry, B got to enjoy the nice weather too. After Justin and I ran around for awhile we filled Brody’s backpack up with bricks and he ran around too (just kidding about the bricks, PETA). But he did get to chase his favorite frisbee around like an animal and fell asleep in the car on the way home.

The past few days weren’t completely successful on the cooking front. We had some salmon that we didn’t want to waste so I looked around for a recipe that would jazz it up a little. We are both fans of seafood but I’ve never been able to warm up to salmon. I always think of it as a really fishy fish, if that makes any sense, and I usually stay away from it. I found this recipe and decided to give it a shot, figuring you can’t really go wrong with honey and mustard, but holy moly was I wrong. It was horrible. It’s hard to pinpoint what the main problem was; I thought it was terrible because of the salmon, Justin thought it was terrible because of the honey and mustard mixture. Either way, we ended up eating asparagus and rice for dinner. Oh my gosh, we can’t even talk about the salmon without cringing. Even Brody was shocked at how bad it was and this is a dog who used to try to eat cigarettes off of the ground (ugh).

I also made some lackluster Honey Cornbread muffins. Justin and I agreed that they were good but not really anything to write home about.

Oh well. You win some, you lose some (hopefully the latter won’t apply to our lofty goals).

We hope you all had a lovely weekend!