1150 steps & Dirty Girl 5k

There is no rest for the weary. :) Three days after completing my 100 mile challenge I flew to Chicago for my birthday vacation/to visit my friend Chrissy. Instead of the basic sight seeing stuff you might expect, we spent about 90% of our time outside doing some form of physical activity. When I arrived on Thursday we drove up to Wisconsin to Lake Geneva. It was BEAUTIFUL! And they are experiencing an unusual heat wave, so it was a great way to spent a hot afternoon. The water was clear enough to actualy see the botton of the lake! It was amazing! Treading water for an hour took some work though. Upper body strength is definitely not my forte. Friday was spent at Starved Rock State Park. The park is gorgeous and has about 13 miles of hiking trails. We did not walk all the way, but I would estimate that we made it probably 4 miles or so. Of that, Chrissy counted 1,150 stairs that we climbed. Thankfully, we did most of them going down because Chrissy remembered the path that she did with her mother and we went backwards through it. The best part though was the Dirty Girl 5k Mud Run that we did Saturday morning. It was a 3.1 mile long obstacle course that was scattered with mud pits we had to crawl through. Unfortunately we were not able to actually run most of it becuase of the mud and the water socks I was wearing (I forgot that I had donated the tennis shoes I had planned to wear until the night before my trip.)Plus, the grounds were the run was held was clearly not designed for a run. Our best guess is that it used to be farm land based on the neat little rows covering all of the fields. To keep from rolling an ankle (which I did towards the end of the run) you had to watch your footsteps and make sure they stayed in the valley between two rows. But, it was still a BLAST! All but one of the mud pits were bascially giant baby pools filled with water and mud. The second to last pit though was PURE mud keep icky with a continual flow from a sprinkler. We had to army crawl through all of them. We also climbed a wall, a cargo net, a hill of hay bails, and dodged our way through tires, and climbed a hill with a rope. I was surprised by how easily I accomplished each task. :) It was really fun, but very gross. That night we went to a concert at a football field which required us to stand for several hours anad then trapsed through the city, including Navy Pier, on Sunday. Other than some kind of outdoor activity most of what we did was eat! Chicago has some delicious food!