snippets

Took this picture over break and wanted to share it here:

Crows dive-bombing a bald eagle at Seward Park in Seattle, taken the day after Thanksgiving 2008. There are some other new ones up on my flickr.

In the past week I have:
- started eating right, thanks to Precision Nutrition (and a bit of willpower)
- ridden every day, including around 70 miles on Saturday, an hour on Sunday, and an hour and a half today, bringing my 3-day total to somewhere around 100 miles
- turned 26 years old
- gotten an Oregon drivers license (goodbye, ever paying sales tax again!)
- assembled some sexy bike parts for a major upgrade to the Serotta
- thrown a pretty kick-ass birthday party
- reached the fundraising minimum for my liveSTRONG challenge participation (thanks to everyone who has contributed!)
- started lifting weights again
- started running (just a little, don't die of shock!)
- and begun my second quarter at grad school.

My schedule this quarter is pretty conducive to being able to ride a lot, provided I get my ass in gear in the morning: all my classes and other responsibilities are after noon, and on Wednesdays, I don't have anything before 4pm. I predict many mornings out on the road resulting in a silly shit-eating grin on my face all day.

I've also discovered that I can run to the top of the hill behind my house and back down in around 10 minutes, giving me a fast workout to do before breakfast, which will almost certainly pay off come 'cross season. Eventually I'll start doing it twice, but for now, I'm just running up and down once. And by "running" I mean jogging and intermittently walking uphill and running downhill... though my goal is to be able to run a bit further before I have to walk each day, and eventually I'll be able to run the whole thing. Ultimately I hope to get to the point where I can just sprint up that fucker like it's nothing... but I'm a long way from that.

Life is good.