run this amazing day

I'm not sure when I decided to fly home and do this race, but three of my closest friends and two of my athletes were running it, so it turned into a "must do" on the race schedule of my life.  And it stands alone as the single race I am signed up for before my next ironman (for now).   The best parts of the weekend weren't the race.  The best parts were catching up with the friends and family I wanted to see for the 24ish hours I was in DC and the 24ish hours I was in Philadelphia.  The race itself was more of an afterthought.   A couple days before the race, my friend Liz asked, as good friends do, if I wanted to run with her.  A few warm-up miles and then the rest of the race at (her) goal marathon pace.  I snorted in amusement of the crazy thought that I could possible run that fast and shipped the plan over to Sonja, expecting to get shut right down.  She surprised me, as she likes to do, by rubber-stamping the plan with a there's only one way to find ou

If you've been around for a while (sorry), you'll remember that I injured my back/butt/everything in the spring of 2011. It took several months of pretty intense physical therapy with a good solid dose of gait analysis and strength training to put me back together again.  In July of 2011, Amy and I made a trip out to Active Spine and Sport to see Dr. Kevin Maggs, touted by our running coach as being one of the smartest gait analysis docs around.  I posted about my visit , but it was some running on video, an exam, and then a few exercises to keep me growing stronger in the right places (some of which I still do today).  One of the biggest problems with my gait at that point was that I was leaving my leg too far out in front of me at footstrike - overstriding - landing with a straight leg and a locked knee, which was letting my heel absorb a lot of the ground impact and causing me to be crabby about not being able to run very much or often.  I did a lot of work that summer t

I actually have some posts in the pressure-cooker of my brain right now, but since Boulder has taken over the news in the past week, I feel like I'd be an enormous jackass to hit publish on a half marathon post without acknowledging what has been happening in my home. We've lived here less than a year, but I'm fairly confident that we will live here for the rest of our lives (and now that I've said it in print, I'm sure the universe will conk me on the head with change at some point).  We are in love with Boulder.  We are in love with Longmont, in love with our little house that we are gradually painting blue instead of the yellow walls it came with, in love with these mountains and these roads.  In love with our lives here, in a way that we never experienced in DC.  And I'm almost ashamed to say that, in this disaster, we got lucky.  Very lucky.  The neighborhood next to us is one that you see in some of the aerial pictures that are being passed around online

By a mean trick of the calendar, the poet ended up signed up for two races over Labor Day weekend, so I wasn't looking to add any to the schedule.  But on Thursday afternoon, Melissa mentioned to me that there was an open water swim race at the reservoir on Saturday morning, starting about two hours before the poet's sprint was starting in the same location.  So a quick email to Sonja, complete with begging Bambi eyes, and I was in.  I love swimming. It was lovely to roll out of bed about 15 minutes before I needed to show up to register, and there was a pretty short line so it didn't take long.  The website advertised chip timing but when we checked in, all the volunteers seemed mystified so no chip timing it was.   I shook all the remnants of Mirror Lake out of my wetsuit and climbed in.  OWS races at the reservoir have a small roped-off area for warm-ups in the shape of a circle, and I am amused every time I see it. Lots of athletes circle-swimming in a tiny whirlp