Being a Dad


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Being Looked Up To

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Today I ran in the annual Jingle Bell Dash (formerly the Jingle Dash).  It's a community event that is a 5k course with two loops for people who want to do a 10k.  Typically there only a handful of 10k runners and a (relatively) large number of 5k runners.

I've done this race every year since 2013 and I've come in first place three out of those five times (I was second in 2015 and 18th in 2013.  It sounds more impressive than it is.  Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of my performance.  I broke 40 minutes in the 10k for the first time in this race.  However, with the field for the 10k only being about 30 deep, it is not exactly elite competition.

This year I went out a little harder than I expected to.  This is a tough race for constraining yourself because the course starts downhill and there are a lot of kids that like to go out really fast.  But after half a mile there were only two people ahead of me, and a mile after that it was me and one other kid who kept abou…
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Giant Acorn International Triathlon 2017

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My wife had the great news to share with my several months ago that one of her good high school friends got engaged to be married and was going to have a bachelorette party.  The only problem was that it was an out of town party and it was on the same day as the Giant Acorn triathlon that I had done the past two years.  I told her it wouldn't be an issue since I had apparently forgotten to sign up, or at least I couldn't find my registration confirmation for the race, and now that she had plans, I just wouldn't sign up.

On Wednesday I got an email from the event giving me the pre-race logistics.  "That's funny," I thought, "Did I actually sign up for this race?"  So I searched for myself on the event site and saw that I had a bib number assigned to me.  My first reaction was, "How can I get out of doing this race?"  I had just started a 10k training plan and had, as a matter of fact, done a my second hard workout of the week; an anti-tape…
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Breaking 2

Last year, Nike hosted a big publicity stunt to try to get the first human ever to run 26.2 miles in sub-2 hours.  It didn't work, despite all of the advantages given to the runner.  I'm sure that one day, somebody out there will break achieve that goal and a 2-hour marathon will be like a 4-minute mile - something extremely difficult to do, but doable.

That 2-hour number is completely arbitrary, but it sounds so good.  So good, in fact, that Strava hosted a competition (event? challenge? it's own publicity stunt?) to get people to do a half marathon in under 2-hours.  When this event kicked off, I was in the middle of my marathon training plan and I had a 16-mile run planned, which was at a pace that put me sub-2 for the first 13.1 miles of the run.  What I soon discovered was that the entire activity, regardless of how much longer it was than 13.1 miles, had to be sub-2 hours.  So my 2:02:49 16-mile run did not trigger the Strava badge for me.  Obviously the marathon I r…
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