We drove to Colorado today, and I was really tired. Then I went grocery shopping with Aimee and we saw (not one, but) THREE FOXES on the way. THREE! One of which was all sad and confused and totally froze on the side of the road and we just got to stop the car and stare at it for a while!

Foxes are perhaps the cutest animal alive. That’s all for tonight. We’re jumping on the snowboards tomorrow, so I’ve gotta get my beauty sleep.

I got my hands dirty this weekend.

I didn’t really have much of a choice. My plants were looking pretty ragged, and it’s already the time of year when I have to reign in the summer’s wild overgrowth. Before long, it’ll be too cold to have them outside, and they’ll all find their way into the house. I can’t believe it’s that time of the year already. How the hell is it November? Yesterday it was August and 100 degrees and now it’s Daylight Savings? My mind is boggled. My ivy might have been the teeniest bit root-bound. Oops. Note to self. Re-pot earlier next year.

Zack thinks ice cream is the best dessert ever, and I say the best dessert ever is actually Creme Brulee. Who’s right?

I was wondering if it was almost time for my period, and then I rented Bridesmaids and cried through the whole movie. So I’m glad that’s all cleared up.

Well, as it turns out, I can’t run or work out on a consistent basis unless I have a piece of paper or a trainer to tell me what to do and when to do it. I’ve tried to just be the kind of person who runs whatever distance they see fit, whenever they feel like it, but apparently, I’m the kind of person that sees it fit to run, oh, next to never. And that’s not often enough to make the Health Department or the American Heart Association happy.

So I’ve resorted back to my old-faithful. Where would my running be without Couch-to-5K? I’m still adjusting to the barefoot running, and now, since I’ve been not running for so long, I’m having to re-build my lost endurance, too. I had originally thought I’d just go back through the whole Couch-to-5K program with the toe shoes and ease into barefoot running that way, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The first week didn’t challenge me (read: keep me entertained) or leave me sore, so I knew that I could step it up to the next week and be alright. I decided that I was going to jump a week every time I went on a run until I found the place where I needed to “start” the program.

The next run, I did the Week 2 intervals and when I got done I felt great. I felt awesome. I even called Zack and bragged about how good I felt. I allowed myself the caveat that it’s not how you feel directly after the run that’s usually the problem with the barefoot running. It’s the way your calves feel the next day that determines whether or not the run was within your proper ability range.

But the next day I still felt great. I told Zack that I still felt great. I told him the next run, I’d be moving up to Week 3′s intervals. He asked if we could perhaps do the Week 3 run that evening. I agreed! Not only did I still feel great from the day before, but also the weather had taken a steep drop that afternoon and cooled down about 25 degrees. Any time the summer heat takes a 25 degree nose-dive into “temperate” or “bearable,” it gives me a serious jones to get outside and do something active.

Trick is, I always run faster when Zack’s around. It’s not a conscious decision that I make, it just happens. I’m not sure if it’s because when he’s around I’m paying more attention to the way that I’m running (because I have someone watching me) which causes me to keep a more consistent cadence and pace, or if it’s some part of my ego that forces me to go faster because I know that he slows his runs WAY down when he goes out with me. Perhaps I speed up to meet him in the middle?

Are you guys doing the math, here? 1.) Jumping whole weeks of the training program at a time. 2.) Running two days in a row (which is something I haven’t done in over a year? At least?). 3.) Zack speed. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that Zack and I sprinted the last 90 second interval of the Week 2. Maybe not my brightest idea ever, but it was fun. Sprinting in the toe shoes is just like being 7 years old again.)

If we’re choosing to look at the bright side here, we can celebrate the fact that I have definitively located my starting point for Couch-to-5K: Barefoot Edition. And let’s just choose to look at the bright side. I mean, I’m sure my calves will feel better again eventually, right?

Kona is, according to many guidebooks, the best place in the world to dive with Manta Rays. In the 70s a hotel discovered the giant lights they were beaming into the ocean also happened to be attracting a load of plankton. And where there are plankton, there are things that eat plankton, e.g. manta rays.

After the sun went down, we tossed on our wetsuits and went out with lights to find the manta rays. Unfortunately, they didn’t get the memo that we were coming. None of them showed up. Zack and I weren’t too disappointed, though. We still got to be in the ocean at night time with a billion million fish swimming around us. The people in scuba gear at the bottom of the ocean were sending up giant columns of air bubbles. I swam above them so that the bubbles all fluttered up around me. Cognitively, I knew that it was just air from the scuba divers, but somehow, it still felt magical.

If for nothing else, the night was a success for having given me memories of my very own to associate with my favorite R.E.M. song, Nightswimming.

Zack showed me this video today and I’m totally in love with it. Anyone who loves Radiohead as much as I do will love it, too.

I, like most majorly-stressed out Americans, carry a lot of tension in my shoulders. And that tension in my shoulders often transports itself to my whole back, and down through my butt, and down both of my arms.

A good (and by “good” I mean a 2-hour beating) massage usually solves this problem for me (and by “solves” I mean that it resolves some of the numbness in my arm and the severe pain around my left shoulder blade). On Monday, I had one of those good massages. I am lucky enough to know two massage therapist who are strong (and tenacious) enough to work these steel-cabled muscles of mine back into functioning parts of my body. Monday’s massage wasn’t just any massage. It was me laying on a table for two hours while Jayme the Masseuse worked my body over with her elbow and any other hard surface she could use to get my muscles to “give a little.”

The moment she laid her hands on me she said, “Dear God, Sarah. Do you have headaches?” A question that I get asked at the beginning of every single massage I’ve ever received. “No, I don’t get tension headaches.” She said, “You’re lucky. I have clients that aren’t even ALMOST as messed up as you are, and they have crippling headaches.” I said, “Nope, I just have this pain in my shoulder and my left arm goes numb.” Jayme said, “AAAAAH. No wonder you don’t have headaches. It just goes the other way.”

This is how great/mean Jayme’s Monday massage was: on Tuesday, she sent me a text message asking me if I was okay and how badly I was hurting. When your massage therapist feels the need to check up on you the day after she wails on your back for 2 hours, that was a serious, serious massage.

I felt great for 5 days; I was on the top of the world. Stupidly, I totally undid everything that Jayme worked so hard for. Because Zack and I just watched Cinderella Man and DEAR GOD, I can not watch boxing movies without turning into a stressed out ball of tense muscles and flinching and groaning and begging Zack to PLEASE JUST TELL ME HOW IT ENDS, OKAY? I spent the last 1 and a 1/2 hours twisted into a little contortionist ball in the corner of our couch, arms halfway covering my head, watching Russel Crowe get the crap punched out of him so that his family would stop having to starve their way through the Great Depression.

Sorry, Jayme. You free tomorrow?

I took off my watch at the pool today for the first time in about 4 years. I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, to find that now, instead of a white watch tan line, I am just sporting a watch-shaped sunburn.