Most Productive Weekend EVER!!

For weeks, you’ve all been hearing me go on and on about my tomatoes and all the work I’ve been doing on them.  Well, this past weekend was the culmination of my efforts…the time when I finally put all those blanched, peeled, cored, and quartered tomatoes to good use.

Every year during Labor Day weekend, I can all the spaghetti sauce and salsa my family uses during the year.  Before you think to yourself, “Well, that’s not a big deal,” let me explain that my family loves both of those things, especially salsa. In fact, my husband goes through So Much Salsa in a year that for the last four or five years, I have secretly wondered if he drinks it straight from the jar when I’m not looking.  😉 Seriously, we go through a lot of salsa.

I worked my butt off this weekend, getting very little sleep (4-5 hours) each night, with the culmination coming Monday night, when I went to bed at 4:30am Tuesday morning, only to get back up at 6:30am because I had to take my kids in for their first day of school.  I had processed and frozen about 160 pounds of tomatoes in preparation for this weekend, but to get me to where I needed to be, I still had to process another 250 pounds this weekend alone. That is a lot of tomatoes!!  But it made for a ton of salsa and spaghetti sauce, which  is what I was going for, and that made it all worthwhile. 🙂

Here are some pictures of the weekend:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been doing this every year for 8 or 9 years now, and although it is exhausting, I always feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment when it’s over.  This year, however, I felt a whole new sense of accomplishment.  Why? Because, in addition to all that canning, I did something else that I had never done before during any canning weekend (or just plain ever, for that matter):

I ran seven miles!!!!! 🙂

Actually, I ran a total of 10 miles this weekend, but on Saturday morning, after I got my raspberries at the farmer’s market at 7am, I decided I wanted to see if I could increase my longest distance run.  Since my farthest distance to that point was a 10k (6.2 miles), I determined I would try for 7 miles, just to see if I could do it.  And I did!

 

 

I ran from downtown all the way to the state park and back.  It was incredible! I had gotten only about 4 hours of sleep the night before, and those last 2 miles were brutal. But after running 5 miles, I knew I wasn’t going to give up!  When I got to the 7 mile mark and stopped, my legs were absolutely Jello…in 4 months of running, I’ve never experienced that before!  I very nearly collapsed on the grass in front of Subway. 😉  I did make it across the street to my car, and once I got my water, I sat on the hill in the park.  A nice man walking by took my picture with my phone.

I’m laughing in the picture because I was so exhausted, I couldn’t figure out how to make 7 fingers on two hands. 😉

After my run, I then went back home and canned spaghetti sauce until about 1am Sunday morning.  Then I was back up again at 6am to do more canning all day Sunday, this time until almost 2am.  Monday morning, I got up and, even though I was mentally and physically exhausted, and even though it was hot and humid as hell, I knew I couldn’t skip my intervals two weeks in a row, so I ran three miles with intervals at 8am in the heat and humidity.

 

 

I did not beat either of my previous two interval runs, but I did figure out how to avoid the traffic on the main road by warming up for only .9 miles instead of a full mile. 🙂

Once that was over, I was back in the kitchen until 4:30am Tuesday, but at that point, I was done!!   It was a looong weekend, but when it was over, I had some very tangible rewards for all my hard work:

That is 60 quarts of salsa, 39 quarts plus 1 pint of spaghetti sauce, 27 half-pints plus one quarter-pint of raspberry jam, and 9 half-pints of blackberry jam.  Yes, I am crazy. 😉  But I am also one who loves home canning, because I love having my own homemade goods waiting for me on the shelf, ready at a moment’s notice, all year long. 🙂

As great as it feels to have all those jars in my basement, the one thing that is different this year than any of the previous 8 or 9 years of doing this is that, this year, I not only feel great for having done all that canning, I feel incredibly accomplished and proud of myself for running seven miles!  I just can’t even describe how good it felt to know that I had accomplished this tremendous feat–that’s halfway to a half-marathon!!!  And to think, I did it just four and a half months after I started running!

I have heard people talk about the “runner’s high,” and I can say that I have totally drunk that Kool-Aid. 😉  All weekend long, no matter how tired I was, or how sore my feet were from standing on them for hours and hours on end, I would just take a moment and think to myself, “I ran 7 miles.”

And suddenly my mood was brightened considerably. 😀

Before I end, I want to share my “collage” picture.  I got this idea from a friend who, due to his job and his wife finishing her nursing degree, had to live apart from his family for over a year.  He was all by himself in one city while his wife and three kids lived 7 hours away.  He used to make the roundtrip drive every weekend just to be with his family, and when he got back to work on Monday morning, he would do a new collage of his kids from the previous weekend’s pictures for his desktop background.  Those collages helped him get through over a year of separation.

I did a “canning collage” last year, and I loved it so much, I did another this year.  Here it is (click to see the detail–it’s pretty large):

Thanks so much for reading!!