I think I have a pregnancy hangover today. Baby girl and I had a long, exhausting, but very rewarding weekend! This past weekend was the 10th Annual Eau Claire Marathon and my second year of being involved in The Blugold Mile cheering section. For those of you that don’t know, I work full time at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire and last year I volunteered to help coordinate The Blugold Mile. Blugold is our school’s mascot and The Blugold Mile is one mile of the Eau Claire full and half marathon that comes through campus and we have a huge cheering section made up of students. Last year I chatted about my first experience planning this event and you can read that here.
This year, I was involved from the beginning and it was such a fun, energetic and rewarding event to be part of! The marathon brings almost 5,000 runners to Eau Claire and the entire city gets involved. There are huge cheering sections all around downtown, neighborhoods have cheering parties and our campus plus other local schools gets involved. At The Blugold Mile we have the Athletic Band playing, all the athletic teams lined up on “Athletes Row” plus close to 100 student organizations out cheering on the marathoners. I had a crew of interns and a few volunteers helping out through the course of the year and we were able to pull off another successful event! With my love of fitness and living a healthy lifestyle, I feel so lucky to be part of something like this. It is extremely heart warming and rewarding to see the amount of college students come out early on a Sunday to cheer on people they may or may not know. The Blugold Mile shows that UWEC students are more than the stereotypical college student. They care about their community and want to support fellow classmates and community members that are achieving huge physical goals. It is so cool to see this event come together!
I have never and can pretty confidently say I will never run a marathon, maybe a half, but I still love being part of this event! I know and understand the amount of dedication and training it takes to conquer something like this and want to support these athletes any way that I can because they deserve and earned it! I am excited to see what another year brings being part of this event and making The Blugold Mile even better next year!
I hope you all aren’t getting sick of all my salad recipes because I have been on a salad kick lately. There are so many different ways to make a standout salad and I love creating new ones packed full of flavor. Salads don’t just have to be boring leafy greens or some fruit tossed in a bowl. I am here to help you jazz those salads up so you don’t have a boring tasteless salad. No one has time for that. With just a couple added flavors, this berry salad was made into something super tasty!
- 1lb strawberries, halved
- 6oz raspberries
- 6oz blackberries
- 6oz blueberries
- 2 mangos, chopped
- 1 tbsp honey
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 tbsp mint, finely chopped
- Rinse and dry all of the berries. Combined the berries and mango into a large bowl. Set aside.
- In a small bowl, mix together the honey and vanilla extract. Drizzle the honey mixture over the fruit and add the fresh mint. Gently toss the fruit until the honey mixture and mint is mixed in.
- Let chill in the fridge or enjoy immediately!