Losing a friend and my weekend

I’m still in shock. I still don’t have any words to express because I still don’t understand. Yesterday, the world lost a bright star. A young man who was going places. Someone who cared, someone who was respected and loved, someone who no one could say a bad word about. He was a high school classmate who I had literally just seen in church the day before and been up in front of church with him only 2 weeks ago. He passed away in his sleep, likely from underlying health conditions he’s had for a long time.

I’ve dealt with more than my fair share of loss and I don’t know if that makes any subsequent deaths easier or harder but this is the first friend of my age to pass away and I’m shaken. Please pray for his family and close friends who are devastated, and also for our whole church community who is really feeling this loss.

At one point, while I was processing the news, I started to feel angry and I really needed to just go for a run. Brady was having a pretty hard time with the news so we didn’t go right away, but we ended up going a couple hours later, just before dark. We’re still dealing with moderate winter temps so it was about 50 degrees and lightly raining when we started to run. It matched the way we were feeling.

I ran hard because I felt the need to push myself since I was upset. I’m just starting up running again so I’m still doing short run/walk intervals but I tried to keep up a good pace through all of the runs even though I was struggling through a few of the later ones. It was hard and I had to keep up the positive self-talk to keep feeling good but I made it through and I’m happy with the run. Brady ran around with me the first time to help keep my pace up, and then he went for a quick 21 minute run around the lake by himself.

2.4 miles done.

I’m thinking that this week I’m going to start working on a mantra/goals board to help keep me inspired throughout training. I’ve been pinning things to my “Fitness Inspiration” board on Pinterest for a while now and I’m going to use a good number of things from there to help me put it together. I’ll probably also use some pics of when I was lighter weight and feeling healthier as well as a list of some of my reasons why I’m doing this anyways. Here’s a link to my board if you feel like you could use some inspo as well!

It feels trivial to talk about the rest of my weekend after the heavy bombshell I dropped at the beginning but I’m still going to share because it was a good weekend before we knew.

Wednesday the first day of my yoga streak and I’ve been keeping up with doing a 30 minute exercise every day since. I’m still using the Gaiam Yoga Studio app and I really like it. I also went for a sunset run and it was gorgeous. 50 degrees, glowing sun, and a watercolor sunset. I’d run every day if it was always this perfect.

We promptly celebrated our healthy endeavors with an amazing but not-so-healthy treat at Marble Slab. I had mint ice cream with brownies mixed in and a scoop of cotton candy with sprinkles over top. Perfection. Literally perfection. I love sugar way too much.

Friday night was our typical light the fire and eat yummy food while relaxing evening. I made up a crockpot Panera-style Winter Vegetable Soup with pesto and it was yum. yum. yum. This was the best pic I got but I still wanted to share. So filling, so healthy, so delicious. Having extra pesto made it even better.

Shadow was loving the fire and she sprawled herself in front of it for over an hour.

US Figure Skating Nationals were this past week and I’ve been loving it. I really wanted to take ice skating lessons as a kid and I dreamed endlessly after watching movies like The Cutting Edge and the Ice Princess. Karen Chen was the ladies champion and she had a gorgeous short program which I’m gonna plop right here and make you watch.

Mariah Bell was also one of my favorites and I’m really excited to see how she does at Worlds in a couple months.

–>Yep, I’ve still got my tree up. It’ll come down when I actually have a place to put everything. Moving is hard!<–

I watched the pairs and ice dancing in the evening on Saturday before Lisa and Steven came over for our dinner date/game night. Steven taught us how to make homemade pasta and we had fresh garlic bread, salad, homemade lemonade and a full dinner of amazing food made by us!

We had ice skating on in the background while we played Clue which Brady won. Then we flipped over to Settlers of Catan after ice skating finished at 11. It was the longest single game I’ve ever played and the first time we’ve ever run out of development cards.

It was funny because Brady won, but then we found out Steven had already won but hadn’t said anything because he wasn’t sure of the rules. There was so much laughing because anything that happens after midnight is just plain funny. We finished our game close to 1 in the morning and after they left I felt the need to have a clean kitchen before going to bed so it was a pretty late night.

I’ve already said how Sunday went so that was my weekend. Again, keep our community in your thoughts and prayers as we all deal with this unexpected and painful loss.

 

How was your weekend? 

Anything you need special support or prayers for?