Tuesday, March 15, 2011

St. Patrick's Day

It has been a couple of weeks since I managed to get on here and get my thoughts and happennings into writing.  This has happened for a couple of reasons: 1) I was in glorious Butte, MT for work the week of the 7th, 2) I have been working on baseball umpiring rules and tests, 3) I have a bunch of spring type activities to do around the house, and 4) I ran the first of the three races on my schedule this spring. 

Where to start in the catching up. The race was definitely the highlight of the week, so let's kick it off there. I was up in plenty of time, had a small breakfast and then started getting dressed. At which point, Mr. T was raring to go. He wanted a race number too, and as you can see in the picture, he got one. Mom made him one and we taped it to his "Daddy's Little Helper" shirt and off we went to the race.


It was possibly the nicest morning for a run so far this early spring. The weather was sunny and in the low 50s when I got going. The course started off going downhill away from Kimo's and into Columbia Park, where it followed the foot path for a little over 3 miles and came back. There was a water station near the 2 mile mark (also the 4 mile mark coming back) where I managed to grab a cup of water both times. The second time I stopped long enough to drink the water, walk for a few seconds and then get going again. There were two great things that happened as I finished the race. first, Lindsey and Tyler were sitting about a tenth of a mile from the end and as I am huffing my was towards the finish line I hear, "Yeah, Daddy!" Which was absolutely amazing for me. Second, as I got close enough to see the clock at the finish line I saw that only 54 minutes had elapsed, so I kicked it up a notch an finished my first 10k race at 55:30 seconds according to the clock. My official time was 55:17.5. Wow, I managed to do this under an hour, and qualified for the yellow bib at Bloomsday in May.

It was a pretty good way to finish off the week. Especially after I got done with my business trip to Butte a day early.  I was in Butte to watch engineering scale demonstrations at MSE where they were scaling up the geopolymer we are testing.  After a bad start to the week, where we didn't have success with the initial formulation.  We ended the week on a positive note.  I also managed to get my baseball umpiring rules test done last week too, and am now ready to get going on that this spring.  It is also time to start working on the yard.  I have seeds to plant, a garage to clean, a wheelbarrow to fix, some dirt to move, and sprinkler valves to prep. 

I will be back in a couple of days with a rant about electronic answering services and to update everyone on this week's running activities.

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