the break in review

Six weeks off, well sorta. I still managed to work under 20 hours per week so it wasn't complete off time, if you know what I mean. The spirits are high and the future looks good, despite continued possible world financial melt down and eminent government bail out. The break started out...

with a day trip to the coast. It was one of those 100 degree days inland, where it's about 60 at the coast. Pretty special for the dogs who pretty much

The macbook just crashed a while ago (and the blogger autosaved the above, so I'm just leaving it), and now I'm on the PC. Sux for me. Hopefully the macbook comes back to life tomorrow, but it's not looking good right now.

Anyway, the dogs loved the beach. Then it was on to Minnesota for Labor day weekend! It was some great weather (in the 90s), and we got to spend some time at the lake with family. Too bad we couldn't stay longer, but we both left with a little bit of a chest cold.

Then I planned to do some 10ks and a half marathon (Laurie did the 1/2 marathon along w/ Kelli and Kyle above!), to get back into shape. I did the first 10k, and it was pretty good. On the Tuesday after the P2P 10k, I sprained my ankle ending all hope of running any other races during the break. Oh well. I've been getting some rides in at least, and the ankle is finally feeling better.

I got to go sailing w/ a friend from school in his catamaran and after several hours of fun sailing we were nearing the end of the day, and caught an unusually strong gust of wind and flipped the thing. I ended up sitting on the top cat up in the air, and he was in the drink with his son. So we did manage to get it upright, but it wasn't easy. All in all, it was fun.

Then last week, we went to Bend for the weekend, after not being there much at all for the last year (and then some). The whole weekend, we hardly went anywhere without running into someone we knew, which felt kinda good, (but admittedly was a little weird), but just reinforces the small town-ness of Bend (that we miss) and that we don't get much of here in Portland.

So school starts on Monday, so it will be good to get back in the mix with the other clowns /er students again, we have a pretty good group. I'm looking forward to new classes this term. It's like a chance at a new start. Also, Laurie is going to be in Thailand (w/ OpSmile) in November for 3 weeks so send care packages around halloween. :D

And I watched the debate the other night, and I found it real interesting how Mc-Cane (sic), basically ignored Obama when Obama said we have to restore America's reputation in the world, because the world view of the USA is basically pretty shitty. McCane (sic) is an old timer that has all this 'experience', but I'm saying that all that experience he's got, is just what got us into this mess (or all of these messes) and we need some new life running the show up there. holla if you hear me! WORD.

Now lets just hope the bail out works.

P2P

Battled through a strong chest cold for days, I didn't know how I would feel, but I felt good enough to run the pints to pasta 10k. The name implies there's pints at the start and pasta at the finish, but that's not quite accurate. Both are at the end of the race, but it goes from (near) the widmer brewery to the old spaghetti factory in portland. A more accurate name would be strips to pints and pasta, because the actual start is at the North American Adidas headquarters (Adidas = 3 stripes) and there's free beer and pasta at the end (at 9am!).

Since it was point to point, and I didn't want to ride the school bus to the start, I decided I needed another training run to prepare, so I ran to the start (a tradition at bigfoot 10k in bend). The race is downhill for the first mile and then mostly really flat after that. I took that as a free fast mile, just was going to pace it easy down the hill to 1M and then start to race. With that tactic, I essentailly turned the 6.2 mile race into a 5.2. mile race.

It was a really hot day, and I felt slow, but hit three miles in just under 18 minutes. I just tried to hold on, and amazingly the miles just clicked by, but I still felt slow. The final time: 37:34! 6:03 pace. woo hoo.

Race 1 of 3 is complete in my 'fall weekend footrace before school starts' season. Next up Timberline half marathon next sunday. Sean says I should run the marathon the day before, but it's filled up! So there that's my excuse. The next weekend is bend bigfoot 10k.

Time to get in shape