Pining for the Fjords

A few months ago, we saw a really great deal come through in an email from Travelzoo.com for a hotel voucher in Avila Beach, California.  Avila Beach is roughly four hours north of where we are on what the folks there like to call the “Central Coast.”  We’ve visited Avila before, and we liked its quiet ambiance and close proximity to other things in the area, like the coastline and the great vineyards in Paso Robles.  When we found out that the voucher would work for the time period in May when the Amgen Tour of California (arguably our biggest bicycle event in the US) raced through, we were in and booked our stay without further ado! Thus, early last week found us packing up the truck (while the electric car is great, we didn’t want to have to stop and wait for it to charge every 85 miles on a four hour trip) and heading out of the greater LA metro area.  When you’re working on getting out of LA in that direction, you have several routes to take, but once you ge...

Photos and stories of our recent trip to Avila Beach, Paso Robles, and other parts of the Central Coast will be coming as soon as I sort through the 8 million pictures I took of the Amgen Tour of California.  In the meantime, more on the yard! Okay, in the last yard update, I mentioned how last fall, we planted dwarf cherry laurels and two kinds of bamboo in the back yard; we also built a retaining wall and added herbs to the front yard landscaping.  As fall moved into winter, our work on the yard stagnated a bit, due not to the temperature (which was, of course, delightful here) but to the near constant rain.  As some folks may have heard, California in general was deluged with rain earlier this year, and our area was no exception; there was so much rain that this one season single handily pulled most of the state out of the decades-long drought it had been in, and several ski resorts in the mountains think they'll be open until the 4th of July due to the snow accumula...

As I mentioned in the blog last week , Sunday, May 7 th was the annual running of the O.C. Marathon event, and I did the full 26.2 mile distance.  Let us commence our tale! To start out with, although I was working through the knee issue I mentioned in last week’s blog, overall, I felt pretty good about my readiness for the race.  I’ve been working toward qualifying for the Boston Marathon for the past few years, and my tempo and long runs had all been on a pace that would help get me there; the marathon qualifying time for my age group at Boston is 3:40, and that would mean an 8:23 overall per mile pace.  I’d been working to be just a bit faster than that, and I was planning to attempt to run 8:20 miles overall, thinking that if I planned to be faster than my 8:23 time, I should be able to account for any issues that might crop up over the course of the race. The day before the race, Chris and I headed to the OC Fairgrounds and Convention Center, the finish...

Well, my dear blog readers, tomorrow is the big day - the O.C. Marathon, the full marathon for which I've been training for the last 3-4 months.  I'm sure I'll have a race recap up next week, but until then, here's a gear review to keep things running-related in the meantime. Although I have a tendency to be clumsy and fall down, over the years, I've been pretty blessed not to experience the overuse injuries that often plague runners.  I tend to have shoulder/neck issues, but I combat those by stretching every night, sleeping on decent pillows, and being aware of my upper body placement at most times.  Every now and then, a weird pain will creep up on me, but if I'm careful with cross training and the like, I don't tend to have major injuries that put me out of running for more than a week or so. I say all of this with dramatic foreshadowing, as back in early March, I started feeling some weird pains in my right knee.  Coach had me doing a body weight st...