5K

Some of the YW and YW Leaders in our ward ran a 5K on the 12th. So fun. We had been training for 3 months or so but I wasn't very diligent about it (I did run sometimes but not enough to be able to run a 5K). I ran probably a total of 2 miles and walked 1. I may have walked a little less than 1 mi. My rules for myself were that if I walked, I couldn't just walk leisurely, I had to be trying to walk quickly and then I had to run at least as far as I had walked. That kept me from walking for too long - I didn't want to have to run really far if I didn't want to :) 

My friend, Joe, filmed the start of the race. I like how I walked to the starting line (I didn't want to waste my energy!). He also did a pre-race interview but it's kind of a long video. During the interview, something hit  my calf and I looked down and it was a penny! And it landed heads-up. I picked it up and carried it the whole way for a good luck charm...because I needed luck!

This is one of my favorite action shots:

 The end of the race - finally! Not an awesome time but 4:38 less than my goal time of 45:00. And, actually, it took me 19 seconds to cross the starting line so my time was really 40:03 (but who's counting?)

Anthony showed up about 4 times during the race with this sign. It was fun because I never knew when he'd show up again and I felt guilty if I wasn't running so I'd run again if I had been walking.

I was very impressed with all of the girls and leaders - they all did a great job. Maybe we'll do it again...

once upon a january...

Okay, I said I'd blog about that place on the map snapshot I posted quite a while back. On my first day in Vilnius, we went to find a girl named Kristina whose address we had. My companion had served in Vilnius for 2 weeks total but it had been about a month since she had been there so she didn't know the city very well. It was dark when we went and we walked around for what seemed like two hours looking for this address. It was cold, snowy and a little bit scary.

There was a nice, icy hill we had to walk down at one point and we finally just turned around and went back up the hill, crossed the railroad tracks and went into a neighborhood (hoping to find a bus stop). We asked someone for directions and they told us how to get to the bus stop and mentioned that we shouldn't go "that way" (pointing to the way we came from) because there were lots of bad people that way. Nice. We got home that evening and during our nightly call from the district leader (a distant relative), he said, "By the way, here are some areas to avoid at night" and listed the neighborhood we had been in.  We avoided it at night after that.

The next morning, we went back and foudn this little village:

Behind me is a little hill with more little houses and more pine trees. It was really pretty all covered in snow. We never did meet Kristina.

Most of my time in Vilnius, the city was covered in snow. And the streets were covered with ice. I think I only fell 3 times, though. There were lots of little paths through the snow that everyone would walk on. One day (okay, so it probably took a week or so), the snow melted and we discovered that the snow paths we were using weren't actually where the sidewalks were, they were just the most direct paths from one place to the other. And, we discovered some ancient ruins underneath all of the snow (or at least some Soviet ruins...):