When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Muddy!

Well, since Katie posted about her goals and mentioned my goals, I figured I'd finally tell everyone why I'm working out this summer.

I really do miss the days of swim team where I could run around the block without even getting winded. I never had a six-pack or anything (I had the physique of a pencil.) but I was fit. Now, I get winded getting up to change the channel on the TV... Yes, I'm out of shape, I know.

Well, I've been in and out of the habit of working out every week and I wanted to make a permanent habit change. I want to be in shape again.

Nathanael and Court and I have been wanting to train together and go on a giant hike (see post from last year) But we decided this just wasn't enough to get us all going. So, we upped the ante. We all decided to participate in the Tough Mudder.

Now, say what you will about marathon runners, dirty dashers, even spartan racers... NOTHING can compare to the challenge that is the Tough Mudder. Let me 'splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

The Tough Mudder is usually between 10-12 miles long. (this is just less than a half marathon.) However, it is filled with, on average, 27-30 military-style obstacles, all of which were designed by the British Special Forces. We're talking intense stuff here. No room for kidding around.

My "event", as it's called, is 10.1 miles with 28 obstacles. Here are some summaries: (All summaries taken from toughmudder.com)

Berlin Walls:
"Scale three 12′ wooden walls with the help of your teammates, strategically placed for when you are at your weakest during the event. While some Mudders have worked up the strength to ascend the walls alone, most need a boost from a fellow Mudder — they got your back, literally."

Boa Constrictor:
Crawl through a series of pipes that also force you into some freezing mud. Your legs will be useless in the narrow confines of the Boa, so use your arms to pull you down and out. There really is light at the end of the tunnel.

Electroshock Therapy:
Sprint through a field of live wires — some carrying as much as 10,000 volts of electric shock. Watch out for a hay bale or two or you will face-plant into some electrifying mud.

Fire Walker:
As the name implies, you’ll be running through a trench of blazing, kerosene soaked straw. You can expect about 4’ high flames. Build your lung capacity up before the event or you’ll be forced to inhale some nasty carcinogens.

Everest:
A quarter-pipe that you’ll have to sprint up and enlist the help of other Mudders to hurl you over this beastly mountain. Everest is coated in mud and grease, a combination which will likely send you right back from where you came. Call upon other Mudders to catch you as you run up the quarter-pipe or work together to form a human chain so that you can scale someone’s shoulders to finally summit Everest.  


Arctic Enema:
Many athletes use ice baths for recovery, but you’ll have a difficult time relaxing your muscles in this frigid dumpster. First you must bravely jump into Big Mudder’s floating iceberg abyss. Once submerged, find the mental and physical strength to swim through the ice, under a wooden plank and pull yourself out on the other end before you become hypothermic."

Keep in mind that this is a very abbreviated list.  There's 21 other unspeakable torture devices left on my course alone. (My "favorite" of which involves belly crawling through ice and mud under electroshock tendrils: The Electric Eel... *shudder*)

There are no showers on the course either, if you want to clean off, they meet you at the end of the course with a fire-hose. Yes, a real fire-hose, held by firefighters, hooked to a fire hydrant. Fun, eh?

Why am I doing this? He's crazy!! Why would anyone want to do that to themselves? Right? Right? Well, the TM website sums it up pretty well:

Tough Mudder has already challenged half a million inspiring participants worldwide and raised more than $3 million dollars for the Wounded Warrior Project. But Tough Mudder is more than an event, it’s a way of thinking. By running a Tough Mudder challenge, you’ll unlock a true sense of accomplishment, have a great time, and discover a camaraderie with your fellow participants that’s experienced all too rarely these days.

FACT #1 – Marathon running is boring.

And the only thing more boring than doing a marathon is watching a marathon. Road-running may give you a healthy set of lungs, but will leave you with as much upper body strength as Keira Knightley. At Tough Mudder, we want to test your all-around mettle, not just your ability to run in a straight line, on your own, for hours on end, getting bored out of your mind. Our obstacle courses are designed to test you in every way and are meant only for truly exceptional all-around people, not for people who have enough time and money to train their knees to run 26 miles.

FACT #2 – Mudders do not take themselves too seriously.

Triathlons, marathons, and other lame mud runs are more stressful than fun. Not Tough Mudder. As hardcore as our courses are, we meet you at the finish line with a beer (won't be partaking of that one, obviously), a laugh, and a rockin’ live band. It’s pretty hard to take yourself seriously when you’re covered in mud, so please don’t show up at a Tough Mudder without a sense of humor. 

FACT #3 – You cannot complete a Tough Mudder course alone.

To get through mud, fire, ice-water, and 10,000 volts of electricity you’ll need teammates to pick you up when your spirits dip. To get over 12 foot walls and through underground mud tunnels, you’ll need teammates to give you a boost and a push. Tough Mudders are team players who make sure no one gets left behind. To that end, all Mudders are expected to uphold our ideals and exhibit teamwork and camaraderie both on the course and off it. (This is one of my favorite things about it. They will not let you call it a "race". It is NOT. it is a challenge. Everyone is there to help each other and they don't even time you! It's all about EVERYONE finishing. Not about who can torture themselves the fastest.)

 
So that's why!  (Kudos if you read all of that.)
I don't know why I'm doing it. But I really feel I need to. I'm not out to prove anything to anyone except myself. I can do this, and I know once I do, I'll be able to do anything. I just feel like I need to do this. So, needless to say... There will be a LOT of training... Yeah, a lot...

Wanna see someone who is beyond serious about training? Nobody expects us to be this fit, but honestly... Check this guy out. (And keep watching, it gets better)  www.youtube.com/watch?v=YErZ5GjOyas

That's why I've been up three times a week weight lifting, running, swimming, and running stairs. Am I excited? Very much so. Am I nervous and scared out of my skull? See previous answer.

Wish me... not death...!

Home Improvement... Continued!

Okay, so I just wanted to re-post and add some pictures of our upcoming projects. I'm excited to get them started, but some may be a while off yet.

Nonetheless, here are a few pictures of what's to come!

This is our Berry Patch. Therein you may find raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, and some mystery berry. We're not sure what it is yet. :) We'll be lining the edge with river rocks to make it more visually appealing.

Apparently there used to be a "not-to-code" little room here that was later torn down. I'll be planting grass here and leveling out the dirt.

This is our shed. In the coming months, this may be demolished and you will see a nice, new shed in the background in the back corner of our yard.

This, along with our back fence, will have a single walk-through gate installed. It has been a real pain to have to walk all the way around our house to get to the other side of this fence. After this summer, no more!

More to follow. :D

Home Improvement... Where's Tim?

We really do love our cute little home, but we knew when we bought it that there were lots of little changes we wanted to make to it. (That's one of the reasons we bought it.)

We've steadily been working on things and we thought we'd give you all an update, especially for those of you who don't live near by and haven't been able to see our progress. We're sorry for not taking better "before" pictures or sometimes completely forgetting to take pictures at all. And these might not be in chronological order. And even with the missing pictures, this will still be a long post! Fair warning!

Gutters:

One of the very first projects we did last year was to add some gutters to the back of the house. They were sorely needed. Even though this winter wasn't too wet compared to most, we already saw how helpful they were.  The ground around the house slopes toward the foundation (that's bad, FYI) because of the erosion.

 (This picture was taken about 6 months after the actual installation. Don't mind the open blinds and curtains...Whisper likes to peek out and watch the great outdoors.)

The Tree:

Here's what our house looked like when we moved in. 

No one would know that behind that beast of a tree, there's a great little porch, with porch planters and flowers, another window, and some roses. We really liked the actual tree itself, it was quite nice, but man was it placed terribly... It had to go.

In October, Katie's cousin Shawn assisted us in removing the tree.  

        

Funny story... as Shawn was swinging away with his chainsaw... he buzzed directly through this:

Yep. A wasp hive. They were NOT happy. Wasps everywhere. We're lucky no one got stung.  He just kept sawing while I sprayed bug killer everywhere (probably not the smartest, but we got lucky.) It was kind of gross, hundreds of larvae fell out along with the queen...we killed them as quick as we could. And eventually we ended up with this:

 Whoah, there IS a house back there!

Sod:

We were satisfied with that for a few months. But as you can maybe see from the pictures, the area around the juniper was kind of gross. The juniper droppings were fairly acidic and killed off the grass below it years ago. So basically we were left with a large circle full of pine needles, blah soil, and a fairly large stump. 

We didn't want to pay to rent a stump grinder, so we took Katie's Dad's advice instead. I dug around the stump so the stump was exposed a few inches. Then I chopped it down with an ax and made it much, much shorter; then I buried it. What's left of the stump will rot off eventually, but the surface was level and you'd never know the stump was still there. We then found someone giving away free sod (KSL just rocks) and laid it down on top. SO much better. It took root and now, a few weeks later, you can't even tell it's new sod, it blends in flawlessly. 

We ended up having enough sod left over to lay some in our patch back yard. If you look closely at the left side of this picture, you can see the holes and patches that were present in our back yard before.

We still have some more areas to sod and possibly seed, but it's a huge improvement from last summer when we were tromping through dirt.

The Log:

Katie saw a log on pinterest that someone had turned into a flower planter. We thought it was a really cool idea and figured we'd do it eventually. She mentioned it to her coworker and the next time he was over at BYU's motion picture lot, he used the tow truck to grab a log. He then used a fork lift to put it in one of their trucks and Katie brought it home on a lunch break. I spent literally at least 10 hours with a hammer and a chisel hollowing it out. There may have been other faster, easier ways to hollow it, but this gave me the most control. And honestly, even though it was exhausting, it was very satisfying and kind of fun. This is one we're really bummed we forgot to take a before picture.

 

We planted seeds for a variety of flowers, but we also put pansies in for now so people know what it is while the other seeds grow.

The Garden:

Speaking of grass seeding...that's another thing we did! The previous owners of our home had a dog. Part of the reason why our back yard was so patchy near the driveway is because that used to be in the dog-run section. The yard used to be split into 3 sections--to the very left, a garden on the left, in the back, the middle right section was the dog run, and the very right was a drive way with a patch of grass behind it. After removing the dog run, we didn't like where the garden was. Katie's Mom suggested we move it from the left side of the shed to the right side of the shed. We thought about it and realized that made much more sense. The grass areas would be more continuous and there'd be one big stretch of grass for the kids to play in rather then two smaller, broken up pieces. 

Previous garden to the left of the shed: 

When we did this at the end of last summer/early last fall, we didn't have the cash to lay sod (not sure if we thought to check KSL for free stuff, but at that time of year there probably wouldn't have been anything anyway) so we laid grass seed. It was a TON of work. It had to be watered 3 or 4 times a day for a few weeks, almost a few months... but what came in came up well! 

That same stretch of grass this year:

Sorry it's kind of blurry...we forgot to take it with the real camera so we just used a cell phone. It looks greener in real life. We'll still need to add seed to fill in the patches, but overall it came in great.

And the NEW garden plot:

I tilled it and planted it about a month ago. We like it on the right side of the shed much better. For one thing, it's easier to get a tiller to it because the driveway leads right to it. For another, this soil is really rich and hasn't been used before for a garden. As I tilled it, it came up quite dark and rich and "fluffy". Of course, as I mentioned, this flows much better. 

The edging came later. We found some free river rocks on KSL (another plug for them!) and they make it look much nicer. We nearly killed our shocks transporting them...we may have put more in our little Corolla then it could handle (as we went over bumps, the tires rubbed against the wheel wells...) but we're done now. Well, except for the berry patch...we'll probably get another 20 or so rocks to line that.

We also made ourselves a little herb garden. Katie found another pin on Pinterest (yes, we BOTH love Pinterest. There are so many fantastic ideas on there, get over it!) to make an herb garden using a rain gutter. It's super cheap and really effective. We had a gutter piece left over so I made some drain holes in the bottom of it and then attached it to our shed.

 

Flower Beds:

We've put a lot of work into fixing up the flower beds. We're not sure if the last owners don't have a green thumb or if they didn't work on it last year since they knew they were moving anyway, but it was kind of a wreck. There's some pretty, flowering ivy planted in there that spreads really quickly if you don't keep it under control, so we had to remove a bit of that. So we did a lot of thinning and weeding. We also moved a few tulip bulbs. We have a lot of tulips (most had already reached their peak by the time we took this picture) which we love. We might move them again more strategically next year... we're not sure if some of them are taller varieties or if they only got taller because they had more water, but for some reason all the tall ones are clumped together. We also added more mulch. And our BIG project was the funny hose. We wrapped it around where the plants were growing and then we buried it. The hose will still water everything nicely, but you can't see anything but the few inches that hook up to the faucet.

Windows:

We replaced the majority of our windows a few months ago. Almost all of them had an outer window pane and then an interior window pane, but they were still old and some of them had cracks in the outer pane. Oh, and one of the windows was an original-- wood frame and single pane of glass--...from the 40s...and really, really drafty. So we got new ones. We figured if we were spending that much money on utilities during a comparatively warm, dry winter, we didn't want to know how much a cold, wet winter would cost us. We've already seen a difference in our bills and they look really good. Plus that's a great re-sale value to the house. We're being careful to not go over board on fixing and changing things. There's only so much added value you can put on a 2 bedroom house before it'll end up costing you more then what you can make up when you sell it. But new windows will definitely help when we're ready to sell.

We still need to paint the frames, but if you look at the second picture in this post, you can see the old windows. This is MUCH nicer. :)

Miscellaneous:

I chopped down 3 small trees. One in the front yard that was too close to our neighbors fence, one in the back yard that was so close to the fence that it ended up weaving in and out of the fence as it grew. 

                                                 

Oh, and  we removed a nasty ELM tree in the back yard. If you know me, you know I HATE elms. They are ugly, sappy, and they destroy foundations, lawns, etc. I've dealt with them before, and they're a PAIN. I didn't want to deal with that, so it had to go.

We moved a few flowers from the backyard to the flower beds in front. I also moved a small tree and a lilac bush.

I built screens for our crawl space vents, so now there's air flow but stray animals can't come in. 

I trimmed and shaped our bushes out front.

What's next?
We're not done yet! We have a list of things we plan on doing either this summer or in the next few years. Hopefully we'll be better at documenting and sharing them so they won't be in one ginormous post again! Here are the big projects coming up in the near future:

• Adding a chain link fence to the back of our yard. The left and right side of our yard is lined with fences (they technically belong to neighbors, but it gets the job done!) but the back is just barb wire and wood posts. Not good enough for when we have kids. Katie's Dad happens to have about 100 ft of chain link fencing he doesn't need anymore and he generously offered it to us. I have a friend who's going to install it for us. Hopefully that'll be in the next month or so.
• Planting privacy bushes. Once the fence is installed, we're going to add lilacs and some other plants that will hide our yard from the park in the back. Hardly anyone goes to that park since it's not well known, but when there ARE people there, it's kind of awkward... Plus maybe bushes will keep them from hopping our fence to retrieve their frisbees and balls...the barbed wire isn't keeping them out, as my poor smashed cucumbers can testify to :( (Really made me angry...)
• Removing the bushes out front. We don't like them but we don't have a way to remove them on our own. My friend who'll be installing our fence also offered to use his truck to rip out the bushes.
• Demolishing our chicken coop/shed. Our shed is half chicken coop (original to the house, from the 40's) and half shed. The shed side is decent and had recently been re-roofed, but the chicken coop side is a disaster, lots of water damage from the leaky roof and part of it is rotting away. We originally thought about just removing the chicken coop part and leaving the shed, but the same friend who's installing the fence and taking out the bushes builds sheds and offered to build us one pretty much for cost. He would also tear down the current one. He's a great guy with lots of skill. :) It's working out nicely for us. We still may wait to do the shed, but since we're saving a lot of money by not having to buy the fencing materials like we originally thought, we might have enough to do that this summer too. 
• Painting the kitchen, living room, and hallway. Oh, and the notorious pink room. Probably not til we're pregnant and know if we want it pink or not. But even if we DO have a girl, Katie doubts she'll want a pink nursery. She's thinking gray and yellow or maybe avocado and black. She wanted you to know.

So that's what we've been up to! And what we will be up to...volunteers for any projects are more than welcome ;)