Barn Estimate

Last week we had a contractor out to give us an estimate on building our barn; the cement floor, the upright posts and the roof. This will be connected to the existing arena, a 10 foot aisle and five 12X12 stalls with  2 foot of cement outside the stalls doors into the runs, like our old barn had. The roof will be metal that is screwed down under the arena metal.
We will add the outside and dividing stall walls ourselves, much of it over time but just having an estimate is so exciting.
$13,450 covers it all and that's a lot less than we thought it might be.
For the inside stall dividing walls we have all those Longacres boards that will be perfect, each one of those has history already and now we will use them for our horses. There will be hay storage above the stalls, water in the aisle and at the ends of the runs for the automatic waterers I've been saving for so long. We aren't sure where the tack room will go as of yet but if I was to turn the extra stall in to a tack room I could sell the shed tack room I brought here and that would reduce the costs of the barn.

The horses have been in the front pasture all week, eating down the 4-5 foot tall grass so that Lan can mow it in 3 weeks. By then, the back pasture will be ready for them again.

At work, bids came out for summer and I got a 35 hours per week shift, perfect for me. Mostly days, one midnight to 10am shift. It will be nice to be bringing home more than $1,300 every two weeks.

I'll be getting estimates for the new hardwood flooring this week. I really like the looks of the stone look tiles too but real hardwood, not laminate, is the way to go. The value of this place will go sky high. Lol, ok, it already is. We've done so many awesome upgrades and have so many more planned.

RUNNING NEWS
I've been reading some running books from 1995 and 96, can't believe how much things have changed. One is a book written by a woman, for women and she said if you're a beginner runner you should be running 8 minute miles. That made me laugh, but she sounds very arrogant when she's bragging that she ran marathons with 5 minute miles. That's not how you're going to make women want to respect you, it makes slow women hate you. You're supposed to be encouraging the slow ones and the beginners, not making them feel totally inadequate.  I was planning on passing this book on to one of the newbies at TriBabes but now I'll just drop it off at the post office. I'd feel bad if one of the new triathletes got it and felt slow.

I've got Harstine Island Half Marathon this weekend, should be a teensy bit faster than last year since I've been working on the hills for a month now but I have no idea what my time was last year. I just know it hurt like hell for 3 days afterward.

MCM training is progressing very well. I've got a plan and so far am ahead of schedule. I've got injury and illness time built in, as I did for Ironman, and I shouldn't have any body pain I the days following. Well, as long as I remain jnjury free and am able to train all summer. And I can since I know my days will have a great schedule. This will be a first for me.

The Hardest Runs

Once in a while I decide to go out for a run and sometimes they are easy but other times they are really hard from the get go.
Yesterday morning I hitched a ride to the lake, Lan was going to swim and then run with Andy and I was just going to run. Right off the bat it felt hard, couldn't get a rhythm or get my breathing right, my legs had mysterious pains, etc. I always stretch at 1/2 mile and after that I felt a bit better, but not a lot. Looked at GPS, said 11:47 and it took me a while to figure out it was pace, not mph. For me, that's a good clip but I'm used to seeing mph.
So I ran and walked, Sydney, Spruce, Madrona, Oak and Bethel Burley roads. I had half mile to go when I realized if I hurried I could get 5 miles in an hour so I started doing strides and finished at 1:01. But then I remembered that I had stopped to talk to some parents about their kids getting on the buss and I didn't stop my watch, taking 3-4 minutes to talk to them. So I actually went a bit faster than 5mph. More like, 5.05mph.
Granted, this was all downhill but I had to slow down going down Oak, it's pretty steep and I am saving my knees for old age.

Hiking

I've been trying to go hiking one day each week and so far Linda and I have gone 5 weeks in a row.

Banner Forest  7 miles
Lake Lena. 9 miles
Carbon River Ranger Station. 13.1 miles
Wildcat Trailhead. 6 miles
 Stottlemeyer.  8 miles
Mt St Helens. 8 miles

Some of these have been absolutely amazing hikes. Lake Lena has the Valley of Silent Men, OLD growth fir trees, hundreds of years old and many have fallen recently so we were walking under them. It was also all mossy and green, so cool.

Carbon River had Green Lake and an old mine.

Stottlemeyer is a localish Forest, many mtn bikers and trail runners like to go there.

And Mt St Helens. We went on May 18, 2016, the 36th anniversary of its big explosion. That was cool because we didn't have to pay the $8 hiking fee. We hiked out 4 miles, up onto Harry's Ridge which looks directly into the opening of the volcano. We lunched at the feet of geological equipment and saw steam coming up from the new dome. Spirit Lake was beautiful but weird with so many trees still floating in it after all see years.

All these trail miles are making my legs stronger and I think it's good cross training that is making me stronger and faster and stops my legs from hurting when I run.  I have Harstine Island Half Marathon in 2 weeks and I hope my legs don't hurt two days later like they did so badly last year.

Tacoma City Half Marathon

Well that's done.

The run itself went well, being a training run for me I was good until about 10 miles and then it was more walk than run. The weather was in the mid 70s by the finish and it was along the waterfront so an absolutely beautiful day.

I ran and walked with Kim for a while, then a Marine doing the full with a 50 lb pack on his back.

My finish time was 2:46:00 and I'm ok with that.

 This is the third time I've run the TCM half and this time it almost didn't happen. They moved the start to Gig Harbor airport and didn't make that clear in their email so we went to Tacoma to ride the shuttles and missed the last one. Then none of the volunteers knew where the start was at. Ugh! But we found it and got there about 10 minutes before the start and I was happy once again.