Finally home and settled with the kids in their spaces and pizza dough rising in the microwave. I always feel more settled and at peace when I have the kids here with me, like there is a part of my identity that is dormant when they are not here and as soon as we walk in the door I remember that part is there. The last couple weeks have been very busy, packed with all of the things that make my life what it is.

Recovering from the Spider Mountain race was pretty easy, I did end up running a bit on Sunday and then pushed through harder workouts for the rest of the week, even getting in a quickie trail run on Wednesday with Marisol at Northshore, a first for me. We did about 5 night miles and I came home after and cooked up some pasta and settled back in for what was going to be a great weekend with the kids. I picked them up on Thursday afternoon and we spent the weekend going on long walks and making pancakes and enjoying the communities that we are a part of as much as we can. Saturday was a beautiful day and we walked through the TWU garden and then past the Pioneer Woman statue on the way to Quakertown Park. The kids hadn’t seen then new playground and they had a blast running around and playing with the other kids that were there on that windy afternoon. We walked home and then stayed up late watching Marvel movies before heading to bed.

Sunday I got up and ran and then Denise came over after for vegan sourdough pancakes and mimosas. I have to promise the kiddos that I’ll bring home runners for breakfast and so far it has been a successful practice. Marisol came over in the afternoon and brought things to make chicken and spam musubi, Sophie even tried some. We had some people over to plan a scavenger hunt for the running club and it looks like it is going to be a lot of fun on April 11 as we make people run around the downtown area!

Leading into this week ahead of spring break, I knew things were going to be a little crazy but it didn’t turn out to be that bad. I got back on the climbing wall and I think after taking a couple more days off this weekend while I am traveling with the kids I will be back to 100%. I pushed my pace a lot while I was running this week and clocked a couple of 7:30ish miles during runs on Monday and Wednesday. Social run I had planned to run slow but Ben asked me to lead and then told everyone that I was bragging about how fast I was…fucker. My legs were pretty well cooked but I wanted to put on a good show so I ended up with a 24:46 5k, good for my 2nd fastest effort at that distance. I knew I needed to take a break after such a heavy running couple of weeks and took yesterday off but got in a solid hour of climbing before I decided to call it quits for the weekend.

Sunday I am packing the kids up in the car and heading out to Santa Fe to explore the mountains and to see Meow Wolf again. I went a couple of summers ago with the Spiderweb crew and it was such a cool experience. I came out of that trip in a weird place, one that would eventually lead to divorce and moving on, but I think I’ll save that for the Santa Fe trip and do some deep diving into that.

The kids are stoked and I’m a little exhausted from the week, I think we are going to just relax.