Note: My mother, sisters, and I were invited to do the Color Run as Kohl's Yes2You Rewards VIPs and were given free race entries for the race. My sisters paid my nephews' entry fees themselves.

I have done a lot of races but have never tried the Color Run. When invited to try it by Kohl's Yes2You Rewards, though, I was game. The whole family got involved, and that is what made it such a fun race. My mom had never done a 5K before, and even though my two older nephews had done a local Color Run, they had never done anything quite as long as this.

It's important to get lots of selfies.

Just to be safe, we brought a wagon for the two littlest ones. Here is the whole team getting ready to start!

We went out to lunch like this!

"I want to rule the interwebz!"

Last week Roni posted a question-and-answer from an anonymous poster who called herself Martha. I thought Roni did a good job of thoughtfully answering, though maybe that she gave too nice of a response what was not, in my opinion, a nicely-asked question. The commenter painted my friends (and let's face it, me) in an ugly light, ignoring every positive thing we are and try to do to focus in on all of our worst flaws.

Some of my friends had fun with it for a little while going on about until Roni asked them to stop, which was fine too. I didn't care much about them hurting "Martha's" feelings, but it wasn't helping to portray our group in a better light.

There is a Hans Christian Anderson story called "The Snow Queen" that starts with a wicked sprite:

One day he was in a very good humor, for he had made a mirror with the power of causing all that was good and beautiful when it was reflected therein, to look poor and mean; but that which was good-for-nothing and looked ugly was shown magnified and increased in ugliness. In this mirror the most beautiful landscapes looked like boiled spinach, and the best persons were turned into frights, or appeared to stand on their heads; their faces were so distorted that they were not to be recognised; and if anyone had a mole, you might be sure that it would be magnified and spread over both nose and mouth.

There are people who read blogs and feel very funny and clever because they can hold a mirror like this up to bloggers they dislike and make them look ridiculous. There are also people who get genuinely frustrated because they see people making choices that go against their stated goals, and express this frustration in away that comes across as harsh and not constructive.


I know that this is just a fact of life online, but it's sad that the honesty and vulnerability that makes blogs really helpful to read also leaves people open to attack. Some of my favorite bloggers have stopped posting much about their personal lives because they got so many mean comments that they just couldn't handle it, and that's a shame, because I loved their voices and their posts. Now they post about trivial things or not at all. An author I love, John Green, recently had an even worse experience, dealing with from anonymous jerks.

I don't have a great wrap-up for this post but I would definitely recommend that you let bloggers you love to read know that you support them with a comment or email now and then. We can't let the haters win.

I know I haven't blogged in a long time.  Not long after I got back from Fitbloggin', I switched from planning my own training with advice from a coach to actually paying for triathlon coaching.  Suddenly, this is getting serious.


I actually had to message my coach and ask for her to scale back the program, which was originally 12 hours of hard training. I had an allergy cough all last week -- a lot of people here seem to have it -- and on Tuesday I was supposed to swim and could not face it when I wasn't breathing well on land. On Friday, I couldn't get my run done for the same reason.  The modifications for Saturday and Sunday: A 2-hour interval bike ride was changed to a 1-hour recovery ride and a 5-mile run was switched to 3 miles.

Setbacks aside, I got in almost 9 hours of training and felt pretty good.  I really surprised myself. And this was 9 hours of swimming, biking, and running.

Fitbloggin' itself was a lot of fun. I had three bummer experiences: My flight on the way there was delayed, my contact lens broke, so I had to wear my glasses the whole time, and my FitBit broke, so I couldn't count my steps.  The rest of the great things that happened more than made up for that. Of course, the most important thing about Fitbloggin' is to get as many silly selfies as possible:


 There was also a lot of dancing, yoga, Zumba, and other fitness fun. It was a very active weekend.


There was a scavenger hunt, which our team won, so I have a free pass to next year's Fitbloggin! Here with my team taking a picture near the Marijuana Dispensery. We did not go in. Just because it's legal there doesn't mean it can't cause trouble here.  Steve, Tracy, Libby, and I were having way too much fun to need that kind of thing anyway.



 And of course, the Fitbloggin' 5K.  I started out running on my own but ended up finishing with the fabulous Robbie. Running at a mile high is tough!