Wrap-up and Planning

It’s been a good week following last weekend’s half marathon. On Monday, I felt like my normal self and went to the gym as usual. A run on Tuesday confirmed that everything was in working order. Being the dorky accountant that I am, I had to look at all of my race statistics. I don’t like to pay attention to the ones that say that I finished behind 64% of the others in my division. I also ignore the one that points out that 69% of the entire field beat me. No, throw those away immediately. I prefer the ones that show that I passed 99 people between the water stop at 8.8 miles and the finish, as well as that my last mile was the second fastest of the race. Yes, let’s talk about those some more.

The race was also a good one for Mike. He had a personal best by 5 minutes. He’s in the middle of marathon training right now and this little test shows that it’s going well.

I used this race to try something new. I run a little crooked, which means I get a hot spot under my right arm. I’ve used Body Glide before and it works for a while, but it’s already rubbed a little raw from training and I didn’t want to risk two plus hours of agony. I put a mole skin patch on it for this race to see if it would help and if it would maybe work for a marathon. Mike hates the term “mole skin” so I’m jokingly refering to it as my “race patch”. It worked! Of course, it looked like I have a 5 pack a day cigarette habit that I was trying to quit with the world’s largest nicotine patch under my arm. It was worth it. It stayed on for the whole race and I don’t have a raw spot .

Today, I had another kind of race planning to do. With Mike racing at Ironman Wisconson this year along with Natalie and Amy, and I thought it would be fun to volunteer. A friend agreed to volunteer with me and registration opened today. They don’t tell you what time they will post the shifts, so I had to stalk the web page. I got on the computer at midnight but nothing was posted. Then I got up at 5 a.m. and still nothing. Back to bed. The kids left for school and I was getting tired of checking it when at 8:15, shifts started popping up on the screen. What to pick!? We had talked about volunteering for an early morning shift at the swim/bike transition or on the bike course, but there were so many options to choose from. I also knew that the best ones would be filling up fast, so I felt pressure to pick something quickly. Every time I refreshed the screen, more jobs would pop up and the available slots on the current jobs was dropping. When I saw the posting for “Finish Line Awards”, I knew I had found my calling. My friend and I will be handing out medals and t-shirts to finishers between 3:00 and 6:00, which will give us a front row seat to the race winners. We’ll spend the rest of the day cheering for everyone and should be done working in time to watch them on part of the run and for the finish. I’m very excited and I can’t wait to work on my medal draping and cowbell ringing techniques!