Weekly Review May 15-21

Happy Monday, all!

View of the Sweetgrass Hills from a recent trail run.

Here with a Weekly Review of last week's Fitness, Farm, and Life!

Fitness
My week wasn't as slow as the previous week for fitness, but it wasn't stellar, either. I had a minor accident on Wednesday which put a damper in a few of my plans. More on that later, though! Let's just jump right into the week's breakdown!

Sunday-4.2 mile trail run!!! Love trail runs so much!

Monday- rest.
Tuesday- 3.2 mile run before school.
Wednesday- worked cows... more to follow!
Thursday- Divisional Track meet in Great Falls = no dedicated workouts.
Friday- 30 minutes yoga, 15 minutes leg strength routine, 30 minutes incline walking on treadmill
Saturday- 30 minutes/2.75 miles light jogging on treadmill

No biking this week because, again, it was really rainy and all our roads were too wet to ride on at the times I would have been available to ride. I also didn't swim. I had planned to go to the pool on Friday, but, well, you'll see as you read on why that didn't end up working out.

Year to Date through May 21-

Running: 217.05 miles 
Walking/Hiking: 67.2 miles 
Yoga: 980 min 
CC-Ski: 500 min / 14.1 miles *Done for the season
Alpine Ski: 3 days *Done for the season
Mountain bike: 38 miles

Farm
Another busy week on the farm. Jeff and Tom finished seeding our organic farm ground on Tuesday, which was another nice accomplishment. We knew it was supposed to rain on Thursday and off and on throughout the weekend, so it was good to get the seed in the ground before the moisture hit. The other major task of the week was vaccinating our calves and sorting our cow/calf pairs into breeding groups and then getting them out into their pastures before turning out the bulls to join them. We didn't have enough help from friends or neighbors because they were busy with their own tasks, and, again, we really wanted to get this chore done before another rain system hit, so I had to take a day off of school to help out.

Mama cows are very noisy when separated from their calves!!!

Calves are less noisy and typically quite curious.

Once Jeff had brought all the cows and calves up to the corrals from the pasture they were in, it was time to sort the calves off of their mamas and vaccinate them.

This went really quite smoothly. I helped work part of the squeeze chute and helped with the sorting process.

Then, we were tasked with sorting the cows into their breeding groups. I was in charge of moving a metal gate and sort of using it to allow some cows from a larger pen into a smaller pen, while keeping other cows out of there for the time being. Well, even though really our cows are used to people, used to corrals, and typically work very smoothly, they are still unpredictable, very large animals. One cow decided she did not want to go into the smaller pen and backed up forcefully into the gate I was holding...which resulted in me catching the metal gate with my chin, and expressed as a deep gash under my lip.

Jeff and Carol walked me back to the house and Carol, a former First Responder, examined my lip and assessed that I probably should have it looked at and might need stitches. A quick trip in to the clinic in Chester and a visit with medical provider left me with three stitches under my right lip. Honestly, I'm quite lucky that the damage wasn't much worse.

Icing my face after receiving stitches. Fun.

With fresh stitches in my face that I wasn't really supposed to get wet, I had to put the kabash on my plans to swim on Friday and really took all exercise fairly easy until several days later when I knew they were set and good to go.

Jeff, Carol, and Tom finished working and sorting the cows on Wednesday and then later Jeff and Tom brought them out to their respective pastures. I was bummed to miss out on the rest of the day because I do like working with the cows and I really like driving them to pasture. I'm sure I'll have more opportunity in the future! I'm glad my "incident" wasn't any worse than it was. If nothing else, I have a decent story. I may have a scar, too. Perhaps having a story and a possible scar will up my bona-fide Cowgirl quotient?

Life
Last Thursday was Divisional Track in Great Falls. We had qualified almost all of our kids for Divisionals, so a great number of our athletes competed. Overall, it was a mixed bag of performances. I'd say largely people did well. We had a lot of personal bests and gritty performances. I was very proud of the hurdle crew that I worked with throughout the season. In the end, we qualified eleven of our student-athletes for State, which will take place this Thursday through Saturday in Missoula. We will be represented in the following events: Boys-- 4x100 relay, Pole Vault, Javelin, Shot Put, 100 Meter Dash, and High Jump. Girls-- Pole Vault, Shot Put, Discus, and 800 Meter Run. Should make for a fun weekend with so many kids qualified in a variety of events!

I am also very excited to watch Christina Aragon compete at the State Meet this year. She is a phenomenal distance runner from Billings who has already competed at some high stakes meets, including recently at the Payton Jordon Invitiational. Right now, she is ranked fifth on the all-time fastest high school girls 1500 meter run list, with names like Mary Cain and Alexa Efraimson. And she's from Montana! Check out this article from FloTrack if you're interested in learning more about Aragon: 4:16 High Schooler Christina Aragon...

Jeff and I also attended some Graduation parties over the weekend as both North Star and Chester-Joplin-Inverness celebrated their High School graduations this weekend. It was interesting to see people's reactions to my stitches as we attended events together.

All in all, it was a good week, even with a minor hiccup. Hope you all had a nice week, too!

Harvey always has to be first!