In late July, a media snowball was started by Marie Wilson of the Daily Herald, and has been continually pushed down the hill by many others, starting with the Bev Horne and Bob Susnjara, continuing with Kim Weeks of Naperville Running Company, and now this.
I will be having someone record my talk, and will share the video once I have it.
Earlier this month, I started looking at 2016 events and penciling things in. I’ll turn them from pencil to pen as soon as I have firm dates for things. While I had a solid base for 2016, I had to re-evaluate all of that after what happened last Monday.
As has been mentioned in previous posts (including the Daily Herald articles), I am legally blind. Not only was that confirmed on Monday, but also that the depredation rate over a five year period has doubled.
After having a week to digest all of that, I decided that I needed to try and accelerate a couple of projects before the sight gets worse. One of these is the Football project that I’ve mentioned before (http://www.jamesgilliard.com/the-dream.php). But since none of them are financially feasible in 2016, I have put together a GoFundMe page to try and attend at least 1. The goal would cover multiple camp experiences, and I’ve set that as a HUGE goal since I don’t know at what point it will get to the point I can’t play football any more.
You can view the GoFundMe page at http://www.gofundme.com/loveoffootball. If you can’t financially support the project, please at least share it with family and friends via e-mail, social media, etc. Thanks in advance for your help and support!
To celebrate Veteran’s Day, as well as help support Team RWB, I signed up to run two virtual 5Ks. The first one was for Team RWB San Diego, and the second was for Team RWB KC. As flag football playoffs were the same day, I knew I’d have to play Tetris with scheduling. I needed to get both 5Ks in before it got dark while not being tired for playoffs.
I had a chance to get the first 5K in (San Diego) before I left for the playoffs. I was tempted to try and get both in, but I realized there wasn’t enough time to do that, get a shower, and be ready by the time my ride came.
So instead I did just one (< 37m) and got ready. I got back from the playoffs (we started the day seeded 3rd and finished 3rd), and sat around for a few minutes to relax. As I looked at the clock, I had an 'oh ****' moment, as I saw it was 3:45 and it gets dark by 4:45 or so. I went and ran the 2nd 5K (KC), and it started to get dark as I was on the way back. I made it home safely, and the time was about 2 min slower because I had to walk more due to the dark. I had a great time doing these Virtual Veteran's Day runs, and look forward to doing them again in 2016. THANK YOU to ALL of the Verans and active duty personnel. And thank you to the San Diego and Kansas City chapters for putting these events together!
At some point after the Celebrate Differences 5K in April, I learned that they would be the charity partner for the 2015 FraidyCat series. So I signed up to run it and help support them. It also ended up being the Virtual Old Glory Relay run.
We had great weather for it, and it was great to see Rebecca and the rest of the Celebrate Differences people out there. However, I believe the on site staff could have done a better job with things. For one, even though I registered in plenty of time, they didn’t have a shirt for me — and I still don’t have it almost 3 weeks later. I’ll get it at some point once it’s printed. The other HUGE issue I had was with how they handled the 10K awards. This is the first race that I’ve ever been at where they didn’t do age group for both distances.
When I looked at the web site afterwards, I saw that they had a note that it had to get to 250 before they would do that. I understand it’s a for-profit race, but medals can’t be that expensive when I see all of these virtual ones that offer a medal for $12-$15 entry fee. And when you buy them in bulk, it can’t be more than say $5-7 per. So maybe $350 to cover the 10K side.
While I don’t run races or participate in events because of the finisher medals (or medals in general), this rubbed me the wrong way enough that I needed to say something about it. And for the record, even if they had done age awards, I wouldn’t have gotten one (4th in age group), so it’s really about how it was handled not that I didn’t get one when I should have.
While those were both issues, there were a couple of good learning lessons from the day —
1) That until I can control starts / keep an even pace, we need to go to tethered running. Consistently, I’m burning out the ‘first level’ by 2-3 miles in and have very little left for the second half / later parts of races. As an example of that, I was at a ~12min/mile pace through the 5K and that pace dropped by about 2 min /mile on the 2nd 5K.
2) That ‘disposable clothing’ (aka Goodwill sweatshirt purchases) are better options in races where it’s borderline (say 45-50) rather than UnderArmour suit. I ended up having to pull off layers (Terri carried the top for me) mid race. It would have been better if I could have just pulled off a $2 sweatshirt and dropped it.