A New Garden

My parents came over yesterday to help me start a garden in our backyard. My friend Helen and I had rented a community garden plot two summers ago, and I loved it. We were pretty successful with our plants--we had tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, potatoes, and even a watermelon. However, it was somewhat tough to get out there on a daily basis to water, so when D and I moved into a house with a backyard, I was excited to have my own garden.

Helen and I at our garden with bags and bags of harvested potatoes :)

I knew I wanted a raised garden bed (our soil isn't that great at drainage, so raising it helps, plus I thought it might help keep rabbits out), but that was all I knew. I looked up some options online, but I definitely wasn't set on anything. My parents brought a bunch of bricks with them that were from my grandpa's (on my dad's side) jewelry store that I had the option of using (free materials, woo!). I wasn't sure how using bricks would turn out, but I decided to go ahead and give it a try.

We started by going to Menards to buy a bunch of dirt. Since we were raising up the garden slightly (we decided to do about 4-5 inches above the ground), we would need a decent amount of dirt. We ended up getting 20 bags of black dirt (!) along with two bags of sand to mix in. I also picked out several vegetable plants to buy, and bought some packets of seeds.

Once we had all of the materials, putting the garden in went pretty quickly. The hardest part was digging up the grass where the garden would go, but even that wasn't too bad. Once the bricks and soil were in place, I planted all of my vegetables, and my mom planted a bunch of flower seeds in the front (I hope they grow!).

View of the garden from the garage.

Close up of the garden

There were several extra plants that wouldn't fit in the main part of the garden, so my dad decided to plant an "overflow garden." He thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if spending $30 on soil and putting the work into elevating the garden would improve the outcome of the plants. We will see. :)

Overflow garden--even if the plants grow well, it's just not as pretty as the main garden :)

Since I took most of yesterday off to get the garden in place, I have a lot of work to do today to study for finals! I have a statistics final tomorrow evening, and my robotics final on Wednesday evening. After that, another semester will officially be over. :) Have a great week, everyone!

Purdue Sprint Tri Recap

Hello all! Sorry for the disappearance. :) Even though it's been almost two weeks, I want to give you guys a recap of my first sprint tri of the year! My friend Helen came from Michigan to do this tri with me, so I was excited to have a friend share the misery fun with me.

This race has a wonderful start time of 10 am, so we were able to wake up at a reasonable time, have breakfast, casually get ready, and then head to the start. The start/transition area is less than a mile from my house, so we considered just riding our bikes there, but we had our bags of stuff (towels, water bottles, sunglasses, shoes, etc), and we were going to lunch afterwards, so we loaded up the car and drove over there.

We were there about a half hour before the start of the race, but they were making it seem as if the race was about to start. They kept saying the transition area was closing soon, and in general were making me very nervous! It was funny because I had my HR monitor on, so I could see that as I got more anxious about being late, my heart rate kept rising. :) It turned out just fine though, and we got our numbers written on us and headed to the swimming area.

I was a swimmer in high school, so I am very comfortable in the water, and I always feel like the swimming part of a tri is my best area. This tri is in a pool and the swim follows a snaking pattern, which is nice (no scary open water swim), but also makes it very tough to pass people if you are faster than them. I passed about 5 people who were clumped together and realized there was a huge gap in front of them, which meant that once I was past them, it was easy going.

The bike portion of the tri is probably my weakest portion. The very first triathlon I did was at the end of my freshman year of college, and I didn't even know what a road bike was. I had a "mountain" bike from Walmart, which I didn't even know how to shift gears with hahaha! Now that I look back, that is so embarrassing, but at the time I didn't even know it was strange. I remember being one of the first people out of the pool and then I think every single person passed me on the bike! ha. I am a bit better than that now. :) I still feel like I could improve a lot through more consistent cycle training. When I did the Purdue tri back in 2013, there was this megahill which was very intimidating! They have since changed the course, so although there are several decent hills (to me, I'm sure to someone who lives in a hilly place, this course is very flat haha), it is very doable. I felt very strong through the entire bike course, which helped me a lot mentally. I look very happy in the picture below because the guy was at the very top of the last hill, and I was amused that he chose to be there where everyone was pretty tired/slow. I said to him, "Why did you choose to be right here?!" and started laughing, which made the pictures he took of me turn out pretty well. :)

After the bike ended, I was very nervous to start running. The last time I participated in triathlons was in 2013, and at the time I was definitely not a runner. I remember running after biking being so painful/awful. I was hoping that since I have made running my primary activity in the past two years, I would be more comfortable, and I definitely was! It was still hard, no doubt, but I took about 5 minutes off of my 5k time from the previous tri! The course went through campus, and was very similar to one of my normal running routes, so I think again I had a nice mental advantage. Here is a picture of me during the running portion.

Overall, this was the first triathlon that I have ever done that I didn't feel like I was suffering the entire time. :) I think this race made me more confident in triathlon racing and in running! I am so happy that I did it, and I am excited to continue to train and get even better. When I did this race in 2013, I finished in 1:31:49 (swim (300 m): 6:36, bike (20k): 48:28, and run (5k): 33:33), and this year I finished in 1:22:02 (swim (300 m); 6:33, bike (20k): 44:24, and run (5k): 28:30). I hope that all of you runners consider doing a Sprint Triathlon at some point! They are fun to train for, and it is a very different experience than running races. :)