Last weekend, Mike and I hit our one year anniversary! With how ridiculously quickly we got engaged, I feel like some people probably thought we wouldn’t even make it this far 😂 But far from the honeymoon phase being over, we have somehow fallen even more in love with each other than ever before. I have always said that my goal in life is to make each day better than the last, and while there have certainly been rough days here and there, I think on the whole, that’s been true of our relationship – it just keeps getting better and better.
I felt a lot of self-imposed pressure to figure out how to celebrate our first anniversary. After all, this was the FIRST one – we have to do it right and set the traditions for many years to come!! Or at least that’s what I told myself. But we ended up being pretty low-key about it after all. Our new puppy Becca (yes, we got a fourth pointer!) had to go to an all-day training class on Saturday the 27th out in Northern Colorado, and I used the trek up there as an excuse to get tickets to see one of my favorite bands, Brothers Osborne, at the Greeley Stampede. So that meant we woke up on our actual anniversary in our adventure van, in a fairgrounds parking lot. Which maybe isn’t the most romantic, but felt really perfect and us? I guess Mike has made me a Van Life convert!
But as much fun as it was, we told ourselves that wasn’t our real anniversary celebration; we’d actually celebrate July 4th weekend, when we planned a van trip to our future dream home, Crested Butte. It seemed especially fitting to celebrate our anniversary there since we had done a “Family Moon” with our parents in Crested Butte right after the wedding 🥰
We packed up the van on Wednesday night so we could leave right after work on Thursday, and we were thrilled for the weekend ahead. But after a delicious Brie burger and truffle tots at the Buena Viking (seriously, best burger place I’ve ever been to; we always stop when we pass through BV), we were on our way down Cottonwood Pass when one of the van sensors started going off. Our left rear tire was dropping pressure, fast – it was all the way down to 50 when it was supposed to be 80. We stopped at a pull off, and since Mike couldn’t find an obvious nail or hole, he settled in to get the spare out and swap the wheels.
While Mike was changing the tire, I had deja vu to the last time I got a flat tire (actually, two) – on my way up the sketchy road to Mount Princeton, where I legitimately thought I was going to die. I was with a date who I had been seeing for a few weeks, and the two of us were such opposites in how we handle stress that we just made each other more upset instead of making it better. After we finally got home, we mutually never reached out or spoke to each other again 🤦🏼♀️ Oops! But this tire changing experience was very different – Mike was stressed out, and I was able to help calm him down; he then did the same for me when I got stressed on Saturday about missing my planned workout.
So all that to say – the weekend definitely did not go as planned! After putting on the spare, we shifted our Thursday night plans to stay in Almont; we then headed straight to Gunnison on Friday morning to find an open shop to fix the original tire so we wouldn’t be driving without a spare. As it turned out, the tire was fine, but the rim was cracked in a manufacturing defect, so we’re stuck without a spare anyway until we can go through the manufacturer to get a new rim. What a frustrating waste of a rare holiday morning off work! We tried to make the best of it with a yummy breakfast and some outdoor gear shopping in town while we waited. But in the afternoon, Mike convinced me to brave the heat (and my deep hatred of working out any time other than first thing in the morning) and we enjoyed a lovely hike up the Snodgrass Trail in Crested Butte. I was so glad he insisted we do this!
Right now, I’m not training for anything of my own. However, I’m signed up to pace our friend Jeff in the Leadville 100 in August – so that means I need to be able to handle 10-12 hours and 40 miles of trails. And not just “handle” that at a survival pace, but as Jeff’s high-energy coach/cheerleader/mule who can make sure he survives and gets to the finish line. Honestly, it’s much more daunting than if I were just doing an ultra myself! To ensure I’m prepared, I’ve been working with an AI coach, Athlete Data, which I absolutely love. Not only does it put together weekly training plans for me, but I can chat back and forth with it on WhatsApp and get instant answers to any questions I might have about my training, my body, my nutrition, etc. In this case, I told it that my planned 4 hour morning hike had become a 2 hour afternoon heat-of-the-day hike, and it assured me that was fine as long as I got back to my planned long trail run on Saturday morning. On it!
Except that we slept deliciously late on Saturday, finally waking up at 7:30am. We still had time to fit in the Lower Loop that is a Crested Butte classic, but if we wanted to watch the annual Fourth of July parade, I didn’t have time to add the extra mileage my plan required. Instead, I kept it as a simple (and mostly flat) 7 miles, and just basked in the beauty of the famous Crested Butte wildflowers 😍
Honestly, this was probably my favorite part of the weekend. For many years, I was envious of my friend Amanda, who regularly hit the trails to run while her husband David mountain biked in the same area. “I want to find a partner like that!” I always thought. Well – now I’ve got it! Mike did almost the same Lower Loop I did, though on a bike, he was able to cover a bit more mileage and added Budd’s Trail onto the return trip. He started behind me, and passed me around the two mile mark. Running with two of our dogs through a field of flowers, with Gothic Mountain looming ahead and the Slate River ribboning to my right, and then having my husband pass me looking strong and sexy on his mountain bike… this was a dream come true.
When we finished, I hopped on a bike myself so we could quickly get to the parade route from the trailhead. I’ve written before about the Town of Superior Fourth of July parade and how much I love that symbol of small town life. This year, to be honest, I teared up a few times at the Crested Butte parade – not just when a group of proud veterans kicked it off, but anytime I got to see the pride of the participants in their community and their country. I am not often very patriotic, and right now is an especially tough time to be proud of our country, but this parade brought out the “proud to be an American” in me.
We spent Saturday afternoon relaxing on the Slate River – Mike fished while puppy Becca swam and explored every inch of the riverbank. Meanwhile, I alternated between reading (this novel) and cold plunging, as I have come to learn I strangely love sitting in an icy river!
Of course, this weekend couldn’t let us have too peaceful of an afternoon. As we were packing up, Mike accidentally dropped one of our walkie talkies directly into the fast-moving river! The next few minutes were pure chaos as we both tried to run downstream to snare the walkie talkie before it disappeared for good. In the process, Mike fell flat on his back in the river, soaking everything in his backpack. I wasn’t much more graceful, slipping on the wet slate while sprinting downriver myself, all while screaming “Forget the walkie talkie! You’re more important!” Meanwhile, Becca barked frantically from upriver, convinced we were abandoning her forever. She then decided to create her own subplot, apparently thinking “these two idiots could use one more emergency.” When I slipped while climbing the steep embankment back to the car, Becca took advantage of Mike’s divided attention to take off into the brush. It took us ten minutes of frantic searching to find her, with Mike positive she had been dognapped by the car he saw driving down the road in a hurry. Fortunately, we managed to recover both the walkie talkie and Becca, with only a minimum of yelling at each other in the meantime 😂
Once the excitement was over, Mike headed back down to the river to destress from the stress of our initial relaxing, while I chose to curl up in the van bed with my book and the dogs. In spite of all those shenanigans, I still think of the afternoon as super relaxing – I guess it’s true what they say about the last impression being the most important! We closed out our Fourth of July with a fun dinner at Bonez before heading back to our campsite for some more reading and relaxing under the stars.
Speaking of relaxation… Sunday morning found us sitting out with our lattes listening to the river and taking turns answering questions from our Best Self prompt cards. It was so peaceful that when Mike suggested skipping our trail time to instead head back home sooner and beat the traffic, I happily said yes. I slightly regretted that move an hour later when I felt super guilty for missing yet another activity on my training plan, but I chatted with my coach and agreed to a Peloton spin when I get home, and will make up the trail time tomorrow before work. Yay for flexibility!
So was this the anniversary weekend of my dreams? Maybe not, as it definitely didn’t go according to plan. But I’m feeling pretty refreshed going into the work week ahead, and I’m with the husband of my dreams 🥰 That’s the most important part!
Cheers to another year of adventures, another year of watching the sunrise together as often as possible (that was one of my wedding vows), and another year of our marriage getting a little bit better every single day. I don’t totally know how that’s possible for it to keep getting better, but I’m excited for it 💕