So much has happened over the past few months; time for an update because those weekly posts sure weren’t getting posted!

Running

In early March I ran the Lake Sammamish Half and PR’d with 2:31:10! I went into this race with 0 expectations and goals other than to finish after spraining my ankle in early February. It was still swollen at the time (and heck, can still bother me today!), so I tried to rest up and stay off of it a lot the week prior. The day was beautiful and I had a fast friend to pull me along till mile 11, when I tried to push the last couple miles. My previous PR was 2:37:48 also at this race but in 2016!

Then, in late April I ran the Blooms to Brews Half and PR’d again with 2:28:34!!! Oh my gosh you guys! I broke 2:30!!! I’m still excited whenever I think about this! This was the first time I had ever run with pacers and it was such an enjoyable experience to listen to other people chat and distract me from my brain telling me it was too hard to run so fast for so long. I was so emotional after I finished, I had a hard time holding tears in while waiting alone in line for my beer, ha!

I’m considering this last bit running related, but with all this hard work I can actually see a tiny bump of muscle in my arms now without flexing! It’s the small things right?! For those who are already slim and muscular, this girl is impressed with herself. Consistently working out/doing strength work over the past 6 months and NOT letting myself go in-between half marathons has definitely had some noticeable results. Now I just have to keep it up till my very first marathon in October! I’m pumped!

Money

We’ve also made a good deal of progress in the money area and have paid off 2 loans! With that we just have a little bit of my husband’s student loans (~$8k), and a credit card (~6k$) to pay off. With so little left, we should be able to pay it off within the next few months and then I’m looking forward to saving up for our next goal of…

Buying a house! I’ve mentioned this was a goal for this year already and we started house hunting with a realtor and talking with a mortgage lender a month or so ago. We may have gotten the order of those two things backwards, but we learned a lot from going through all the motions of getting pre-approved and looking at places.

Unfortunately, we don’t have enough saved up for a down-payment to make the monthly amount of a mortgage and all the associated costs (PMI, taxes, home insurance) small enough to live comfortably with in the area that we’d like. (Hellooo to lenders telling us we could do $2600/mo just for housing 2 people and 2 cats? Heck no.) We heavily suspected with the small size of our down payment savings account that this was the case but wanted to make sure there were no secret options of free money available to us (we make too much, boo). Sure, we couuuuld still buy a house now, but I would rather we not spend so much of our income just on housing. This was very disappointing to me as I was getting excited looking at places and dreaming about the future, but it totally makes sense.

And because we’re not buying a house just yet, we’re still going to need to move because we won’t be renewing our rental lease in August. That means new apartment/rental hunting! It’s too early just yet for an August 1st move, so we’ll be looking as it gets closer to July. Rent prices have gone crazy in the 8 years that we’ve lived in the Seattle area, so we’ve got some decisions to make on where we move to next, and how much we’ll need to declutter.

Looking forward

All that and now it’s comfortable to run outside again. Scratch that, it’s now moving into too warm to run outside again. Life has been a little stressful money-wise while trying to wrap our heads around buying a house, but since that’s been put on the back-burner, it’s back to relative normal and we have smaller goals we can tackle more comfortably. (Die loans! Die!)

My next half marathon is the Snoqualmie Valley Half this Saturday! I’m not sure how I’m going to tackle this half (no 2:30 pacers; the “slowest” is 2:20, boooo), but I think I’m going to just try to have fun with it. I’ve only run this course once before and I’m sure to get a PR for this course no matter what since I wasn’t in the best of shape last time around. After that I am so excited and nervous to start marathon training next week!

What have you been up to?!