Moab Relay Marathon

I am on such a roll! Three new posts in about a week, I might actually get caught up, and anyone who actually bothers to read this will know what has been going on in the life of Shanno.

In April I headed down to Moab to run a marathon relay with Rebecca, the Crazy Alaskan, and Prucilla. For those of you who don't know Rebecca, there are many reasons why she is called "crazy". Not only is she from Alaska, which automatically makes her crazy, she also thinks that running uphill is fun. She considers a marathon a "walk in the park" and she regularly eats caribou (just not on Sundays). It was her idea to do this relay marathon. As usual I neglected to train, but still had a great time. The course was beautiful! Rebecca ran the first leg, which happened to be the longest with the most uphill sections. I ran the second and Prue ran the third leg. This was the longest distance Prue has ever run and she cruised through her leg of the race no sweat! The group who put on the race do not rank very high on their ability to communicate and organize, so unfortunately we were unsure of exactly when the race was going to start. The problem with this is that Prue and I didn't show up at the transition point until after Rebecca had already been waiting for 20 minutes in the freezing cold. But even with this delay our team took 12th place!
Anyone who has run long distances knows how important it is to load up on carbs the day before the race. We have perfected this skill. This is a sample of our "carbs".

Prue had to drive down separately, so while we waited in the hotel for her, we got a little creative with the towels.
Another necessity for a race is a fake tattoo. We were able to obtain some high quality ones at the local gas station.


After the race we cruised down the river road to the "Indian Ladder" where we indulged in our "crack" habit.

Going Up

This is the view from the top

Chillin' at the top

On the way down

One more crack

After our "experimentation" with crack, we headed to Arches and saw, believe it or not... some arches.

Thanks for an amazing time gals! Next year let's go to Alaska - I'll practice being crazy :)

DC 1/2 Marathon

The National Marathon and 1/2 Marathon were being held the last weekend of March and it was a great excuse to finally go out and visit Emily and Brett. Brian and Heidi also flew in from St. Louis and Brian's MTC Companion, Doug, flew in from Alabama. It was the opening weekend of the National Cherry Blossom Festival and the Kite-Flying Festival.

DC is such an incredible city. There is soooo much to see and I think I only saw about 1% of it. The first day there Emily had to teach her 4th graders and Brett had school so the rest of us were tourists and went site-seeing around the Mall.

This is the National Archives Building where the Declarartion of Independence is held. There was an enormous line to get in, so we just looked at it from outside.

This is Brian "sticking is to the man", sort of.

WTF? This is art?

This is 3-D, but does it bend in or out?

The Smithsonian Castle

This is inside the Aerospace Museum. You could spend all day in here and still not see everything.

This is Doug riding the longest escalator I have ever seen. It is at the Metro stop near the National Zoo.

Heidi is such a cute pregnant lady!

Getting ready to embark on the "Asian Trail". Is this what it takes to become Asian?

These next pics are for you Prue, I thought you would appreciate them.

This is where all the tree-saving poop comes from.

Brett at George Washington Law School.

This is us after the race. So far, this was my favorite race. There were about 6000 runners. We ran past the capitol and along the mall and then through the some of the neighborhood areas of DC. It was really cold, but my legs just went numb. This was Brian's first 1/2 and he killed it. Brett was under 2 hours and I beat my last time by about 15 minutes, so we were all pretty happy.

After the race we walked down to the Washington Memorial to fly a kite, which didn't go so well. It was really neat to see so many kites though.

Mesa Verde

So it's been a really long time since I posted anything to my blog. I'm in Hawaii right now waiting to go to a Luau and thought now would be a good time to post some updates to my life. I'll start with my trip to Mesa Verde. Prue, Spencer, Roger, and I cruised down to meet Ry-Ry who was cruising up from good ol' Lubbock, TX. This was my first experience in Colorado outside of the Denver airport and I'll have to admit that it was pretty sweet, cold, but sweet! We didn't make it to the KOA outside of Lubbock until about 2:00 am and it was freezing! Prucilla and I slept in the car hoping it would be warmer in there, but it wasn't. Our first stop was Mesa Verde National park. The place is full of some pretty amazing Indian ruins. Here are some pics.

Prucilla the musician, who knew? Eating the food of the land...Navajo tacos.

After the excursion to Mesa Verde, we had our own episode of Miami Ink. Here are our sweet tats.




Ry Ry, Kelly, and T-Rav took off to check out Telluride and we cruised down to check out Four Corners. Thanks for another awesome spring trip Ry!



When we got to Four Corners, it was closed, but we somehow managed to make it in anyways.




By the time we were done using our fence jumping skills, we decided that it was time to get back to Utah. We drove into Moab and decided that we needed to hike to Delicate Arch, in the dark. Spencer took some amazing pictures with his SLR camera, but I don't have them yet. So here are some from my dinky little one.