10K LOTR Virtual Villains Challenge and Thanksgiving

The 10K medal — we should be receiving our medals sometime in December.

I recently did the 5K LOTR Virtual Villains Challenge, so my husband Christopher decided to sign up for the 10K.

Although we did a combination of walking and some running for the 5K on the trail, we decided to just walk the 10K. We haven’t actually walked that far at one time in a while, and we woke up before sunrise with temps below freezing on Thanksgiving to do it.

Since we started walking before the sun was up, we didn’t get as much sleep, we skipped coffee (I usually try to have at least one cup — helps me get going, without overdoing the caffeine), and we barely had anything to eat. That was a bit of a mistake, because a little over halfway we both started feeling the energy draining (especially poor Christopher). I wish we could have had a little more practice to build up, as well as better planning, but we walked 6.56 miles (we went over the 6.21 or so we needed) when we could have easily just slept late — we’re still happy with it, even if it had taken us twice as long to walk. 😉

We picked another trail, paved this time, and it had a lot of hills as well as some flat sections. It was another very pretty walk, and although we didn’t see any herds of deer, we were about 12 feet away from a hawk sitting in a tree near eye-level!

Here is a link to a few photos Christopher took on the walk before his battery died… thankfully, I had my phone app tracking our progress.

Thanksgiving 10K walk Flickr set.

Christopher cooked us a simple and light Thanksgiving dinner after a little rest when we got back home. I think the worst part of doing that, was despite a few sore spots on our feet, I wanted to go go go! We kept thinking we should go for another walk that evening. We had other plans for the day after Thanksgiving, however. That meant we needed to get up very early again and try to get caught up on sleep.

We’ve been meaning to go hit some of the Texas caves since earlier this year, and we finally got that chance. We went to Longhorn Cavern State Park. A quick roadtrip down and back. I used my iPad to get some of the photos, and didn’t want to use flash. I did post some of the better ones here on Flickr:

Longhorn Cavern State Park Flickr Set.

It’s been a great holiday weekend hanging out with my best friend, doing healthy activities together, and seeing something we’ve been meaning to check out since earlier this year. I look forward to more memories as this year comes to an end, and we start another! 🙂

And of course, here is a screenshot from the 10K (I took another, not shown, at the very end of the walk since we went over the distance):

The screenshot when we hit the required distance — we actually walked 6.56 that morning. Unfortunately, we ended up running out of energy a little after the halfway point thanks to lack of sleep and enough calories, but we’re still happy we did it. We decided at the last minute to go ahead and sign Christopher up for this one, since I had signed up for the 5K.