Jill: And I Thought I Had Motivation Issues

I'll be the first to admit that I haven't quite figured out how to exercise regularly now that I'm a mom of two.  My training is like someone learning to drive a stick: full of jerky stops, starts, and lots of stalls.  My real runner husband has done a much better job figuring out how to work in his training, whether during lunch or late at night.  But apparently even real ultra runner types struggle with cheese motivation too.  Here's my husband's facebook update this week:

What I was supposed to do tonight: run 11 miles.
What I actually did tonight: ate 2 cheese coneys and a large fry in my car.

I love this man.

Jill: Catching Up--The Wine Report

It seems I have a little catching up to do around here now that school's out and I'm settling into a summer routine with the kids.  So without further ado, I present Catch Up Post #1.

Apparently we here at the club have an awesome knack of scheduling races to coincide with drinking events.  I know, I know, this would seem obvious from our love of all things wine, but in all honesty, we have scheduled our races and then found out about the drinking opportunities later.

Example #1:  We ran our first club race, the Jingle Bell 5K, on Stephanie's birthday weekend. Turns out she planned a wine and cheese girls party to celebrate the evening of race day.  Run, wine and cheese.  Perfect.

Example #2:  We all signed up for our 2nd race as a club, the Shamrock Shuffle, without knowing that it was being held the same weekend as the Cincinnati International Wine Festival. Seriously, I'm not making this up.  The stars are aligned for us when it comes to running and drinking.  I imagine those stars look something like this:

In addition to the traditional race reports, I will now be posting wine reports as well.  It just seems fair.

Cincinnati International Wine Festival Report

Several hours after finishing the Shamrock Shuffle my still-recovering-from-the-death-flu hubby and I met up with Steph and her betrothed and headed down to the Wine Festival.  You should know that the Cincinnati International Wine Festival is not just a place to try a billion great wines.  It is also a huge charity fundraiser that benefits over 30 different organizations.  That's right, folks, there's nothing we like better than running and drinking for a cause.

Here we are with our commemorative glasses still empty and shiny. It will be the last time until we walk back out.

Despite the look on Steph's face, this is PRE-drinking

We then bravely entered the convention center and joined the throngs of charity-loving wine guzzlers.  And when I say "throng" I really mean a very, very large crowd.  I know this picture from the Wine Fest's website isn't the best, but it should give you an idea just how many people love charity around here.

All of the aisles were that jam packed

To be honest, as much as we enjoy wine, the size of this event is overwhelming.  There's simply too many booths and vendors to be able to try everything, so we needed a strategy to help us pick.  Did we look for award winners?  Nah. Too easy.  Did we choose based on the history or reputation of the winery?  Nope.  That would require way too much reading and we only had 3 hours.  Did we choose based on grape type and variety?  Heck no.  All wines are equal in our eyes.  Finally, we settled on a highly trusted method for choosing our tastings.  With a few exceptions, we stuck to vendors that had to meet at least one of our two criteria:  either a really fun winery name or a really fun bottle label.  Yeah, we are super high class.  After making that decision, the rest of the night pretty much went as planned:

Let's not forget, though, that where there is wine, there is also CHEESE!  Yay!

I get a little misty eyed remembering that table

A little square bowl of heaven

And if cheese wasn't enough, there was also an amazing selection of mini desserts.  First, how awesome is anything that is mini?  And second, most of them were chocolate.  Rock on wine fest, rock on.

I think I may have eaten these before my first glass of wine

You'd think the night couldn't have gotten any better, right?  Well, let me show you just how wrong you would be.  At the end of the evening as we were headed out, we were lucky enough to spot a booth that was giving out free ice cream mini pints.  Not just any ice cream either.  It was Haagen Dazs.  And that is how you end the perfect evening.

Jill: Thank goodness we had all that wine, cheese, and ice cream to replace those calories we burned running that 5K this morning.  Steph: What 5K?

Jill: Park Life

Steph and I had a really nice run this evening at one of the local city parks.  Our hubbys watched my kids at the playground.  The weather was wonderfully cool.  The view of the river was lovely.  The birds were chirping.  The bunnies were venturing out for their evening snacks.  And someone, somewhere behind a tree or bush was getting high.  Ah, the joys of city parks.

Steph to Jill: Do you smell that?