Boy, I’d love to tell you how awesome my did this week, and show you my big loss on the scale, but unfortunately, I would have to pull out a picture from months ago in order to make that happen. And since that would be a big fat lie, I’ll just show you the reality:
Damn. After losing weight last week using my new macro targets, I had high hopes for this week. Unfortunately, it was just not to be.
I feel like I was pretty active last week. For starters, I got up super early and ran almost 8 miles with a couple of friends Saturday morning. We started at 6am, and we were in a great spot, right by the water, as the sun was rising.
It’s views like that that remind me why I love getting up to run before dawn. As we came to the end of our run, we passed by a bridge over the channel, and my friend Toddra and I had to do a little “Rocky” pose:
It was actually Toddra’s idea, LOL! She has a great sense of humor. (If you’ve been reading my blog a while, you may remember that she was one of my relay runners during my marathon last year.)
After the run, which turned out to be 7.8 miles, I went home, cleaned up, and then took the kids out to my father-in-law’s property. If you’ve been reading my blog for a long time, you also know that I can spaghetti sauce and salsa every Labor Day weekend. I take off Friday and Tuesday, making it a five-day weekend, and I do nothing but home canning, including not only the tomato products, but also raspberry and blackberry jam. I’ve been super geeked about blackberries, because, for the first time ever, our blackberry bushes that we planted several years ago are in full, crazy bloom!
That was just two day’s worth of berries, and let me tell you, there is so much more where that came from. And there’s still so much more on the bush! Blackberries are really expensive, so I usually only do one batch of jam, but I’m so excited to not have to spend any money on blackberries this year!! It’s my favorite jam, so I’m really looking forward to making it with my own blackberries.
On the downside, we were unable to get a garden in this year. In years past, we have planted anywhere from 100 to 140 tomato plants, but the last several years we’ve had very poor results due to the difficult weather conditions. Too dry, too wet, too hot, too cold…you name it, we’ve experienced it in the last five or six years. On top of that, we are close to the lake, and that means that our soil is really more like riverbed, and very clay-like and unfertile. It has been a challenge to keep our garden thriving, but in the 12 years I’ve been doing this, there has only been one year that I didn’t have to supplement my garden with tomatoes bought at the local fruit and vegetable market. They’re not as good, plus they’re not cheap!
This year, after we were unable to get the garden in due to the soil being too wet (and us running out of time with all of our spring activities), I resigned myself to just buying them all from the fruitstand. But then, in June, my father-in-law told me that I needed to come visit his property durians tomato season, because I could have all the tomatoes I wanted from his garden.
I was like, “OK, sure,” but I didn’t really think I’d get all that many. But as it turns out, my father-in-law planted a small farm!
Those are the 3 bushels the boys and I picked last Saturday afternoon in the heat. On top of that, I picked another bushel three days earlier, and then just yesterday, I picked two more. I’ve gotten over 240 pounds of tomatoes from his garden, and he still has so many more that aren’t even ripe!! It’s like Christmas in August for me! 🙂 I’ve processed and frozen all but 2 bushels, and I’ll get more this weekend and continue. It’s a lot of work, but come Labor Day weekend, when all I have to do is thaw the processed tomatoes and dump them in the pot, I will be so happy I did it!
You can imagine that picking 3 bushels of tomatoes in the hot sun was pretty tiring for my two boys, who don’t get nearly as excited about the tomatoes as I do. 😉 But I’m not a terrible mother. After it was over, I took a detour on the way home to the local dairy farm:
Calders Dairy Farm in Carleton, Michigan has the best ice cream anywhere. The boys were so excited, and actually, so was I:
That’s a single scoop, but the funny thing is, it’s actually about a third of what they normally give you. I had to ask them not to give me a ton, because I knew I still had a school event to go to that night, where there would be plenty of cookies. And there were. :/ So, while I did earn 700 calories with my run Saturday morning, I did eat pretty much all of them. Last week, I ran for two hours, but I left a lot of calories “on the table,” so I think that’s probably a better bet for me ifi want to actuly lose weight. Which kind of sucks, but it is what it is.
In other, much sadder, news, I was stunned to find out on Monday morning that one of my coworkers passed away suddenly Sunday night. 🙁 He was only 59, and it was a shock to everyone. He was a former wrestler, and had actually made the Olympics in 1980, but was unable to compete because of the US boycott that year. He was still very active, and absolutely loved to talk to me about anything that had to do with exercise. I sit by the coffee maker and the microwave at work, and he would often stop to talk to me while he was getting his coffee. He loved to ask me about my running, and just last Friday morning, he asked me the same question he asked me pretty much every day: “Did you run this morning?” 🙂 We had a great conversation about my half marathon training, and then we talked about Olympic wrestling, and he told me all about the changes that have taken place in the sport in the last 30 years.
When I woke up Tuesday morning, extra early to get in my interval run, Denny was one of the first things I thought of, which made me very sad. On top of that, I didn’t even want to go out and run, because I wasn’t looking forward to doing the intervals. As I went through my 10-minute warm-up, I thought about my upcoming intervals, 4 x 10 minutes at Zone 4 (around race pace for me), I was really dreading it, not even sure if I could do it. Just a minute or so later, I saw, to my surprise, a shooting star. They aren’t common, even where I live out in the country, and I just knew that it was Denny, cheering me on. Inspired, I pushed through all four intervals, and it turned out to be a fantastic run. 🙂
Denny was a great guy, and in passing, he leaves behind a wife and two daughters, one of whom is still in college. It’s times like these that I am reminded that life is definitely about more than what a scale says.
Rest in peace, Denny. <3
Thanks for reading.
