5K accomplished!

Yay! I did it! I'm so proud of myself. I ran a 5K without walking. But let's be honest there were hills that were killing me. And I didn't realize that a small increase in elevation makes it harder to breathe. But I did it!

We bought the necklace my sister is wearing as a reward. She is pretending that it is her gold medal. Dean of course didn't even need to get ready for the 5K. He just got up and ran it like it was no big deal. And the last time he even ran at the gym was back in May.

Also, this means that I get to cross off one thing off my "30 before 30" list. I still only have 20 things on my list. So when I come up with ten more, I will post it here! 

Yellowstone

Where does the time go? I am so amazed with people who keep up with their blogs. Before I show Yellowstone photos, I have to tell you that I can now run 5k! Yesterday, my sister and I ran it. Let me tell you, the last 1/4mile almost killed me. And today, I did it again! I am now ready for Saturday.

Dean and I went to yellowstone with our friends Ashley, Marti, Collin, and my sister Miya. It was unbelievably beautiful and humbling. I want to go back there next summer.

While we were there, we kept seeing this guy with a full-on beard who was biking everywhere. On our way back to the campsite from one of our adventures, we saw him struggling to go up this huge hill. He had his thumbs up while wobbling on his bike and barely making it. Dean and I decided to give him a ride. It turns out that he had just graduated from law school and decided before he started his full-time criminal law job, he wanted to go on a big trip. He had biked all the way from Canada! Can you believe it?

Of course we saw a bunch of bisons!

There were a TON of cool textures to be found.

Old Faithful

I bought this cool stamp to put in my National Parks Passport

Can you see the bear waaaaay in the right back corner?

Colorado

Colorado was so beautiful. We just spent most of the week driving around the mountains. And I loved their mountains. It was such a nice relaxing week. We went fly-fishing, hiking, and enjoyed the fresh air. 

We drove to Denver to visit some family friends. During the day though, we decided we wanted to visit the Butterfly Pavilion. Unbelievable. I thought I was dreaming. We had a few butterflies land on us and that was super exciting. It turns out though that we weren't supposed to touch the butterflies at all. We just thought you couldn't touch their wings...woops! 

We also went to the Denver Art Museum and saw the Yves Saint Laurent exhibit. It was just amazing! And Dean was such a great sport letting me stay as long as I wanted to, even though I could tell he was kind of bored and didn't really get the exhibits. Yves Saint Laurent has always been one of my favorite fashion icons. I didn't realize what a big deal this was at the time, but when I was in elementary school, my grandma would buy me Yves Saint Laurent clothes. I just always thought the YSL monogram logo looked cool. I certainly didn't deserve to wear them. 

One downside to the week was that there weren't a lot of food places that were open because we went during its off-season. But we found this amazing food cart where they sold all kinds of crepes. And they were huge too. Dean's favorite was the pizza crepe. Can you tell by his smile and his thumbs up?

Moab

Dean and my summer started with our one year anniversary trip in May. My parents graciously gave us their timeshare and we decided that we wanted to go to Breckenridge, Colorado. Since we both love road trips and plane tickets are expensive, we decided to drive there. How we ended up at Moab was actually a happy accident. I happened to see where Moab was on google map, 15 minutes before we had to take the exit to get there. We decided that we might as well stop by. AND since it was National Parks Week, we got in for free!

Moab was amazing. Pictures do not even do justice. You just have to go there. I definitely want to go back soon. And yes, I did get my National Parks Passport stamped!

Goals...

At the beginning of this year, my family decided that we needed to individually come up with 3 goals (spiritual, physical, and general) to work on throughout the year. My goals were:

Spiritual: Read the Book of Mormon (Bible study) more regularly.
Physical: Do some consistent, physical activity regularly. (I hate to work out so I refused to call it work out).
General: Be happy at work!

I will talk about my Spiritual and General goals more later. For now, I have a big announcement about my physical goals.

I started the year off by doing more Yoga but quickly decided it just wasn't making me feel like I worked out. Just Dance was going great until repeating all the dances started to get boring. And then, I found Pilates with Lara Hudson. BEST THING EVER. I will talk about that more later. But the big announcement is that I will be running a 5K at the end of this month!! "WHAAAAAAAT!? NOOOOOOO WAAAAAAY" is the reaction you should be having right now if you know me well. I unofficially vowed never to run "long-distance" after doing cross-country in high school. But when I found out that there's a charity/fundraiser 5K run for a girl at my church who's fighting cancer, I felt like I had to. And to be honest, I have been secretly wanting (but not really wanting) to do a 5K for awhile. I haven't paid yet, but I started couch to 5K and am confident that I will cross that 5K finish line running (or jogging) and looking good in my LaraHudson-trained body.

I will keep you posted....

this time, for real.

PS. A sneak peak of my summer updates that will be coming soon as well.....