Saturday 15JUL2017

Day was slightly off kilter … JZ took a spill in a typical teenage game of tag (or whatever they call it these days) and had a pretty sore wrist this AM.  He was treating it gingerly, and so after XC practice (5 miles) (of course) we went and had it looked at:

If you look carefully on the left hand side of the pic, there is a little shadow on the bone to the left of the mouse cursor.  That is a slight fracture of the scaphoid bone – apparently the most common break in the wrist. 

So it was into a splint, and casting to occur later this week.

Small problem with that though is he was to leave on a backpacking trip on Sunday AM.  So now he is not.  We’ll see what we can do with casting and if we can catch him up to his Scout buds in NM later in the week. 

Thursday 15JUN2017 BRR Meet #2

More fun at the BRR track meet.  JZ jumped in the steeple – an event he has talked about doing for a couple of years (since he saw me do it).  The officials lost count of the laps and he ended up doing an extra one (3400 meters).  All fun, and he is still figuring out the event. 

I did the mile.  Even in the warm up I was questioning if I should do it because the left hammy was clearly not happy.  A few accelerations on it as a part of the warm up really left me questioning if racing was the smart thing, but as it held without yelping, I decided I line up.  82 (for 409), 2:44, 4:06, 5:30.  I felt like I was running on one leg most of the time. 

This effort was different than the one a few weeks ago where I felt gassed from 400 meters in.  I think that is because of the more conservative start but I like to think there is a bit of fitness / race familiarity there as well.  I ended up sitting behind this guy a 400 meters and was almost feeling like I was cutting and slowing my pace a bit to sit there.  That was true until he started to accelerate away a bit and then there was nothing else there for me to do.  I got caught by two young women outkicking me in the last 100. 

Given I have done not a single bit of specific work to move my fitness since doing the last race, I am not surprised that I ran the same or maybe a hair slower.  Getting this hammy right and doing some correct work will move things a bit.

10.2 miles on the day.

End of week update

Okay, so this is pretty impressive.

Number 1 son made some bones in a FBLA competition. 

With some of JZ’s night driving we did the annual check in on some of the local Christmas lights.  Tincup is always a highlight.  And there is house you have to “tune into” that is always a hit.

KZ enjoyed a weekend up in Nuremberg doing some Christmas shopping.

Apparently things over there are a touch different with Knecht Ruprecht.

A bit of an off week for training for me with the travel to Two Harbors, MN.  It ended up being a bit more of a “meh, maintenance week” sort of thing.  I did get a dozen plus with Shad on Sunday and then another four with JZ later that afternoon … 16 plus in a day made me realize how I have not touched that sort of stuff in a while. 

Week end update

The boy turns 16 this week.  We celebrated this weekend.

We picked him up a GPS so he could join the ranks of runners who over analyze everything.


The BrHS girls got a slot to NXN.  They are going to Portland.

It was a pretty tense week for them to wait this out to find out if they had the slot.  Most folks thought it was a no brainer that they’d get in, but they still had to wait it out.  They got the news Saturday night.  It was pretty exciting times for them.

Another 70 mile week for me and I played around at Teller Farm again today.  It actually feels like fall now.

The week included the Turkey Trot 5k, some turnover sessions earlier in the week (Mon, Tues) and some work at altitude when we hit the mountains for the weekend.  It is pretty amazing how little snow is up there.  I ran through a lot of the old mine equipment, enjoying the fact that I was finding new trails even though I have been puttering around up there for close to a decade now.

Good interview with Alex Hutchinson over on the Final Surge Podcast.

I’ll put a plug in for Andy:  guy has a passion for Leadville and is looking to bring his love for that game to coach those that want to be a part of that nuttiness.  Good luck man. 

Weird setting Christmas without KZ.

Back at work

Love that this kid is living it up in Germany. 

I am off to the DC area for a few days of work.  It is my first “fly to” gig since leaving a large corporation and starting my own company.   Even though I am out of the downtown DC area, I decided to head down to the Mall to get a jog in.  It was about 25 minutes of travel to get to it (via the Metro) but the Mall is always a bit inspirational to me, particularly the memorials.

For what it is worth, it is a mark of success and thus a milestone to get back to travel to do work.  Nice to be making it under my own company …  at the same time, the thrill of travel (planes, trains and automobiles) is not the greatest of fun.



JZ has been making progress on some aspects of his Eagle project (a dodge ball pit for a local church).  We spent a good amount of Sunday working some of the metal bits.

Northern Tier Canoe Trip

So I have been off in Canada for the last two weeks in the Boundary Waters, camping and canoeing with my son, his Scout buddies and a few other parents.  The trip was out of the Atikokan Ontario Boy Scouts of America base camp.  We started our trip to the camp on Thursday the 14th, flying into Minneapolis, then staying at a Minnesota National Guard Armory that night outside of Duluth, then driving up to Ontario on the 15th.  We were dropped off about an hour and a half from the base on Saturday the 16th and we paddled, portaged, camped around 115 miles until Monday the 26th.  Yesterday we took the full day to travel back home to the Front Range.

I have about 300 pictures I collected and I posted most of those under my Facebook account.  I will put a few up here over the next few weeks.

It was an incredible trip.  One of those ones that blog post can’t really capture.  I mean, I could tell you how hard it is to portage a canoe and gear in crotch deep mud that is sucking you down.  Or what it is like to hear mosquitos banging on the side of your tent with their wings sounding like a squadron of Japanese Zeros so loud you are not sure if you’d sleep.  Or that we traveled over a hundred miles and only saw a sliver of the Boundary Waters wilderness and it was this huge untouched land of water, trees and wilderness.    Or what it is like to hear the mournful cry of a call of Loon as you look across the huge expanses of water.  Or how I was belly laughing to tears with my son in a boat as we fished.  Or how I stood in a grove of trees one day as the rain came down on us in buckets with thunder roaring over our heads and noticed that all our crew had simply fallen asleep in its glory.  But as they say, “you had to be there.”

We were “out there.”  I did use a GPS watch that I charged off a solar cell so that I could have the track of our route for memory sake.  I also had a my phone as a camera, but there was not a drop of cell signal.  This trip represents the longest I have been “off the grid” in terms of time in well over two decades.  No contact with home, work, or anyone other than the people I was on the water with and the few others we’d cross paths with out there.  We saw three other Scout crews, maybe three boating fisherman, and passed less than a handful of secluded cabins over our ten days. 

There was no running.  It was just not going to happen.  We stayed on small islands where the cover beyond our camp was so dense that it was not even possible.  I didn’t miss it really.

The route …

Friday 24JUN2016

Yup, she starts the next significant chapter today.  There is definitely an odd mix of feelings on my part.  Concern and worry as  the parent who sees their child going so far away for so long, but also clearly understanding she needs to “leave the nest” to take those next steps in life.  Going to miss that kid.

AM – 6.1 miles, jogging, strides, then weight room work.

Links stuff:

• The email I got tipping me to this one simply said, “welcome home Floyd.”
• Today’s listening:
   
• Crappy break for HS phenom Drew Hunter.
• Nike got its head together.
• I was poking through Running With The Buffaloes recently and started wondering where some of those guys ended up.  Remember Brock Tessman?  I then lost time considering not just runners in that book but loads of runners that have been a big names and just disappeared.   
• Latest ATC. 
• I was asked for my take on WS.  I have been pretty much not paying a ton of attention to it, although I am interested to see how Wyatt does.  Beyond that, I am not really attuned to it.  Or HR.
• Wassdoc blog … long overdue to add that to the roll to the right.
• Venturing into the political, a good balanced LRC podcast on Brexit.

Afternoon – the 40 minute loop.

You can learn pretty much any menial thing off Youtube.  KZ tagged the passenger side mirror backing out of the garage and we had to replace it.  Ordered the mirror on Amazon, it showed up the next day, watched a 3.5 minute Youtube video and then replaced the mirror with JZ. 

Thursday 23JUN2016

AM – 40 minutes with BrHS with a handful of strides at the end.

Got in some 20-25 minutes of gym work post.  Again – screwing around:  planks, push ups, ab work, lunges, squats, etc

Link stuff:

• Here’s how you take a beer mile and suck the life out of it.
• No Ritz in Rio.
• Good HOR, covering the recent PED track news
• Quick listen on the brain and performance (sort of).

PM – little 40 minute run.  Used the phone for Strava, and it was completely wonky.  Here is a picture of the map of the run how it normally looks on the left.  On the right is today. 

 

So today’s route measured over a mile what the distance actually is, and in turn translated that into a pace that I was clearly not running.

Graduation Weekend

Kali and Nat on the first day of high school and the last.

Nat is essentially my other daughter.  I have known her since before her birth, as we met her parents in birthing class almost 2 decades ago now.

The weekend … A great weekend of family (folks came in from out of state, there were several reunions), love, song, happiness, and a graduate.

I will put up more videos of Kali and Nat’s senior recital but here is one for now.

I was busy enough over the weekend that I had to take pause at time to consider this rite of passage and what the event meant.   KZ and I talked about it Saturday night (late, way after everyone else went to bed) … high school graduation is not a high academic bar, but this instead represents a social right of passage of child transitioning into adult.  And it is magnified as it is for many young people of this community. 

However, when sitting at KZ’s senior recital, feet away from this amazing young lady who is my daughter, hearing her sing the opposite was true – I almost had to completely separate myself from it to not breakdown in tears of joy.  I almost did it, but when her and Nat put up “Good” together from Wicked, I felt one tear slip as the song closed.

And then I lost it damn it.

I love you KZ.  You might be an adult now, but part of you will always be a little kid like this.

PS – no running.  Achilles not any better.