Day 92. Wisconsin weather remains crazy. After a tiring (see: awesome) weekend, I was ready to get back into a normal pattern again and have a good running week. Of course, waking up Monday morning to an inch + of snow on the ground made me a little angry and very confused. Waking up Tuesday morning to the same thing just made me angry… Of course, the snow was gone by noon on both days but running in the rain and cold wasn’t really what I was hoping for. Nonetheless, I see the sun today and apparently we are getting warm weather pretty quick; so I will give Mother Nature only a glancing dirty look for the nonsense she threw at us this week.
I had to cut down on Sunday’s longer run, I wasn’t feeling all that great… so it didn’t make sense to compound that. I have a 15 mile spot this Saturday which may have to get pushed back to Sunday because Saturday is a full day for me. I just found out we are going to have GU gels on the San Diego course, and I found some of those at “The Running Co.” the other day so I get to try those out this weekend. Running gel is basically a gel packet of vitamin A & C, potassium, and a garbage load of carbs stuffed into a 2 oz, 100 calorie packet. You swallow this down with water every hour or so when you are running and it is an energy boost. Gel/runners = spinach/popeye.
The fund raising, while not over, has met it’s mark. The number given to us to try and reach at the beginning of the season was $3,900. I just made my own spot $4,000 just to make it a prettier number. But with the money raised from the benefit show last Friday… we went over the $3,900 mark which was the assigned goal. Thank you everyone x100. With that said, the fund raising doesn’t stop until May 30th or so, so if you are still able to give anything… please consider it, it is a great cause.
Have a good week. Pray for the Brewers… we need a turnaround.
Fundraising update: $3,953 of $3,900 raised. 101.4% raised. Training update: 92 of 127 days complete. 72.4% complete.
Thank you forever to everyone who came out and donated to the cause this past Friday night. I had a real good time. I was a little worried to start because we had a small misfire with the PA system … but once we had that figured out, everything was awesome. We ended up raising $714 dollars, which puts me almost exactly at the required $3,900 for the run. So thank you thank you thank you.
I have to thank my brother-in-law Jeremy for setting up the April 1st “secret” fundraiser that ended up raising almost $1,600… and my cousins Brittney, Annie, Eli and everyone at The Bar for letting me come out Friday and yell at people through a microphone. Together those two spots raised about $2,400 for me… and without them I would be struggling to find places to play and digging up dollars to add to my fund.
Good morning! Fox 11 just posted their feed from this morning’s broadcast. They copied the second of two songs that I was able to sing on air. This is actually a new song of mine that I am still “tinkering” with called “Melody Designer”. I wanted to give the song an initial test run so I gave it a go this morning. Hope it turned out ok! Oh, and for the record, they kept saying I was from New London on the air and on their website, but I’m a Hortonville fella over and over again and proud of it. I like New London, great city, but my allegiances lie elsewhere
So it took me about four full days of learning and relearning the lyrics to get all of these down… and even then I stumbled a time or two when I was recording this. Still a great song and a lot of fun to sing. A little hard finding places to breathe though I hope you like it! You should leave comments on my YouTube channel! It is only a step or two to get an account and if you subscribe you will be notified whenever I post a new video. Have a good week!
Day 83. I had these big plans to run back home to my parent’s house this past Saturday, but to do that I knew I was going to have to buy some kind of “belt” that could hold both water and some gel packs… and I just didn’t have the time to do it at the end of last week. It is a little over 12.5 miles from my door to theirs, so that run is going to happen… possibly this next Sunday? But instead of running home, I ended up running 15 miles in circles around my neighborhood. I didn’t exactly run them consecutively; I ran 5 miles, took a 10 minute break to stretch… then repeated that two more times. My splits for the three runs were 47, 42, and 46 minutes… at or around 9 minutes a mile… which is where I think I want to be once race day hits. I’ve read the average time for men to run marathons is 4 hours 32 minutes… and a 9 minute pace would put me just under 4 hours for the race… which would be great. A lot of people have been asking me what I would consider a successful time… and I have always said that I just want to finish… which is true. But I guess the three tiers of “success” for me come race day are going to be 1) Finish 2) Beat the average time for men (4 HR 32 MIN) and 3) Come in under 4 hours. I would be content with just the first, happy with the second, and ecstatic with the 3rd. *shrugs*
I’m playing at “The Bar” this Friday night, which is looking like it’s going to be a great night. My cousins have been awesome in setting it up and promoting it. There is going to be a $3 cover at the door and all of the money is going to LLS to help me hit my fund raising goal… which is inching closer and closer to the $4,000 mark and my goal. It’s going to be a fun night, you all should stop on out.
Fundraising update: $3,159 of $3,900 raised. 81.0% raised. Training update: 83 of 127 days complete. 65.4% complete.
Day 75. Absolutely crazy week in an absolutely good way. I got in a full week of running and the 8 miles yesterday were strong, which is a nice change from “struggling to finish†that I have been doing a lot of as of late. I am excited for this Saturday, because I have a 14 mile run that will give me a good indication of where I am in my training. Hopefully I am still excited after Saturday!
April 1st was awesome. I woke up to 17 donations in my inbox and was absolutely confused. I opened the first one (from my older brother Nick) and just figured that TNT accidentally duplicated the email and sent it to me 16 more times. The next donation was from my nephew Dominic (amazing considering he is 6 1/2 months old) … and then I realized that these were 17 unique donations. So then it took me about 12 seconds to realize someone must have said something to someone and there was a mass email somewhere. I called home and got the runaround from my sister, who just laughed and told me to enjoy the day…
24 hours and roughly 42 donations later… my donation total had jumped a little more than $1,600… more than doubled what it had started the day at. Thank you to everyone who donated thus far and on that day. It was a lot of fun checking the website throughout that day watching the total rise and a lot of people are going to benefit because of it. Thank you. I am also 98% sure who I am to thank for sending the emails out to everyone to make this happen and given our Ron Paul history… I’m assuming the term “MoneyBomb†was used in there somewhere. At some point I will compile a list of people who have donated thus far, and post it on here; but for those interested you can go to the link above to my TNT website and look at the sidebar.
It was a good week, thank you. Enjoy the start of the baseball season! Go Crew!
Fundraising update: $3,024 of $3,900 raised. 77.5% raised.
Training update: 75 of 127 days complete. 59.1% complete.
