Spring!

Yeah, so I'm not gonna lie. I totally did that today. But apparently CBS decided that Celine Dion on Oprah was more important than watching some nerds play basketball, so I had to go to a bar to watch the Cornell-Stanford game (which ended with predictable results - no karmic balance for Danielle).

But, I still did take advantage of the sunny 54 degree day, as it is supposed to snow again tonight and there are no temps above 50 in the ten day forecast. So I went on my first outdoor bike ride today! Yay! So much better than the trainer! I did just a really short ride (6 miles), since it was windy and I haven't really done any bike maintenance in a long time so I didn't want to end up ten miles out of town with a blown tire or something. I just wanted to get out and ride for a real!

And on my trainer, there are no brothas on the street corner to vocalize their appreciation of my a$$ in spandex.

Seriously.

In addition to my little bike adventure, I went running with Kori. A new sushi place opened in Ames, so we made a pact that if we ran four miles (which is long for both of us these days), we could get sushi after. My runs these days have been lame. I am running like 10:30 miles. It sucks. Last Thursday I tried to do a 5 mile run and was just done after 2.5 miles (and that took me 27 minutes).

I took the bus home.

Seriously.

But today, she totally kicked my ass. We did 4 miles at 9:40 pace. Actually the first three miles were 9:45 and the last one was 9:30. I thought I was going to throw up. I wasn't wearing my Garmin, just my heartrate monitor and I was easily in Zone 4 the entire time. And Kori kept saying things like "I'm going to be slow today, yadda yadda yadda."

The sushi place was decent, although not as good as the one in Des Moines, mostly because it does not have cute bartenders who give us drinks and shots all night and not charge us for a single one. But maybe it was because we went straight from running and smelled bad.

Other news: I officially have half a relay team for the Madison to Chicago 200! So space is filling up kids! Send me a check if you want to run!

And other news: I saw this today on a NASA blog (this picture is from March 1st). This was taken in Tromso Norway, where Lisa and I are running the half-marathon in June. Of course since the half-marathon is in the middle of the night, this implies that it will be too light to see anything cool like this, but it is still an awesome picture:Of course, since everyone in the world is laughing at the value of a dollar, even though I can get to Europe on frequent flyer miles, I am sure it will cost me a months salary for the ticket from Amsterdam to Tromo.