Spring growth - all over the place!

I decided the garden is looking good enough to brag about so here are a few pics showing highlights of spring growth. This is my favourite thing by far: zucchini blossoms!!!!

It's my first year trying zucchini in a container and so far, success is palpable! There are four flowers already, and the veggies are already taking shape. Unfortunately, as you can almost see in the photo, some kind of wee black bug has taken up residence on the zucc, so I nuked them today with Safer spray. Cross your fingers for me that it does the trick. I hate garden pests! My tomato is promising big things but there's no fruit yet, and my sugar snap peas are reaching for the stars!

I don't know why but my snow peas are NOT showing any sign of growth. I planted them the same day as the sugar snap peas but while the peas are now taller than chest height, the snow peas are still only about 4 inches tall. Any advice on snow peas is enthusiastically accepted! Also, if you look closely at the sugar snap peas photo you might notice the first small white flowers at the top of the stalks. Fresh peas are on their way! :-D

My garden is thriving and reaching new heights, and I'm trying to match its success in my trail running. The 50km ultra trail race is coming up on July 11th and our training runs on Sundays are getting longer and longer. Every week now is a milestone for me as I pass my longest distance ever run every seven days. This past weekend was a huge weekend of running since I ran the 5 Peaks trail race on Saturday (the shorter distance rather than the longer distance, which I thought was wise because), and a 38km training run on Sunday. Seriously. I know there are a lot of marathoners on here that can churn out a 38km run without batting an eyelid, but this is all new territory for me, and my IT band is NOT used to it. I had quite a bit of pain in my left knee and hip during the run, and on Monday, but by Tuesday it had calmed down and I'll go for a short city run tonight to test things out.

I think mostly my body was telling me that I'm tired, that I need rest, and that I'm doing more than I ever have before and I should take care of myself. So that's what's happening. I've found a new physio who I adore, and her stretches have been really helping this past week. I see her again Thursday. Also I'm trying to book a massage this week to work on my left IT, but the dude hasn't called me back yet to schedule. Maybe I should call again? Or try a different therapist? A highly recommended book on vegetarian diets for endurance athletes is finally in and on hold for me at my local library, so I'll pick it up today. I'm looking forward to learning more about what my body needs right now and how best to fuel its herculean (to me, anyway) efforts.

The race training group got a photographer out on one of our training runs a few weeks ago, and me and Jane showed up in a couple of the shots. He was positioned only about 10 minutes down the trail so we still look really fresh, which is NOT the case after 4 hours of running. I'll put the link to all the photos after the pics here; there aren't very many but they do show the snow we were running on for about 2 hours. Very, very difficult going up since the beaming sun was melting the snow under our feet, and very, VERY fun coming down as we boot skiied and whooped and hollered! I'm in white/purple, you know, the one with the little pot belly, and my running buddy Jane is wearing all black and hamming it up for the camera.


Oops, you'll have to click on the first running image to see the whole thing. Not sure why blogger is resizing it...
Photo link