I got lucky though and am working the desk this week. I also took all my daytime hours (which means outside hours) off this week so it’s Ed who is having his nuts retract into his body cavity instead of me. Screw -25 wind chill.
Duncan is paying a profit sharing bonus for the second half of 2008 in a couple weeks. Not a pissant one either, that sucker is maxed out at 7% of what I earned in the second half of 08. Very surprising indeed considering the way the economy is. I’m just having them put it all in my 401k instead of taking it in cash though or they will just take half of it in taxes. I’ve got enough money anyway, I don’t really need more. I mean I wouldn’t turn down a winning lottery ticket of course but I’m starting to have the problem of too much cash building up and nothing to spend it on. I don’t need any more stuff at this point, and I don’t have anyone special to piss it away on either. I guess the only thing I would like right now is to own my own house but that is kind of ruled out until mid 2012 when that damn foreclosure finally goes off my credit report. Damn ex wives. I don’t know that I have enough laying around to really pull that off right now anyway. By that I mean a nice place in a nice neighborhood and not a ghetto shithole. I guess I could get a nicer vehicle but to be honest I really don’t care much about that either. What I have now costs me nothing and gets me from place to place just fine and I guess that’s all I see a vehicle as being, a tool used to move me from here to there and then be forgotten about until I need it again, not a status symbol to impress people. All this good money management will do me no good anyway once the revolution starts. For that I’ll need my guerrilla warfare skills and catlike reflexes. That my friend is something money can’t buy.
The marathon training is going very well. I simply can’t believe that at this point I could complete a half marathon without all that much trouble after a little over 5 weeks of serious training when it felt almost impossible after 12 weeks of training a year or so ago. The miles are going by faster and easier and instead of feeling intense pain afterward I honestly feel really great. Each week that goes by there is less and less lingering soreness and it just feels easier overall. I’ve been reading that long distance running is mostly mental and it seems to be true because the barriers that were there before don’t seem as impossible now that I’ve really applied myself and stopped half assing it. I might even try an ultramarathon that is coming up in Ames in May. It’s not the 100 miler that my friend Dave did a couple months ago or anything, it’s a 50k (31 miles) which is the shortest of the ultramarathons but the idea of pushing the limits of what was previously impossible to me doesn’t sound like a terrible idea. I suppose I should finish the regular marathon though before I start talking about ultras huh? Hopefully I keep feeling as good. One thing that I wasn’t expecting though was that I haven’t lost any weight at all since I’ve started training hard like I did before. I’ve gained 7 pounds in fact and now weigh more than I did when I started running at all. I don’t see all the flab that I did before though. Maybe it’s because I stopped eating fast food or something. I don’t know… It’s a mystery.
Ho ho! … just saw your marathon route. Looks like you start and finish at the Garmin Headquarters a few blocks away from where John (your cousin!) lives. There’s about eight miles on asphalt trails along Indian Creek where I’ve riden my bike dozens of times. There’s a short killer hill at about mile 16 where I was harrased by some large woman for blowing past her on my bike. Then a real hill for about a mile from 18 to 19. Hope for a tailwind.
All your stories involve large women in one place or another don’t they Mike? Either they are passing you or harassing you! Yea I looked at the elevation profile and the mile 18 to 19 hill is the one I’m worried about. The race designers made the course well and added a nice climb right about the point where someone hits the wall. 1000 foot climb in a mile span and 7 out of the last 10 miles are uphill. I really hope for no wind at all. I ran a 5k last year on the same date but it was below freezing and very windy and was quite the miserable experience. 45 degrees and no wind would be great for me. Who knows though since March 28th is just a few weeks into spring. I plan to run a pretty conservative race since I don’t know how my body will respond. I just want to finish so I don’t end up training for 18 weeks and have people come down there to watch and hang out only to end up bonking on mile 22 and not finishing.
How will you get from mile 22 back to the finish line? .. Oh yeah, guess you’ll have to walk which in my way of thinking is just a slower run without all the elbow action.
Oh I don’t know. Something else could happen which would prevent me from walking it out. It happens all the time. I’m still going to play it conservative since it’s my first one. If I have to walk some of it then that’s the way it will be. I’ll finish though, it may not be the absolute fastest I possibly could have gone had I gone all out balls to the wall but I don’t want to be stupid about it. I’m not fast, never have been fast so there’s no point trying to be fast at this point. I suppose that’s why I’m more drawn to going far instead. Maybe in the future I can work on fast. I’ll run my own race. Plenty of time for you guys and my parents to go do whatever I guess.
Ya know you could share the wealth Steve!! JK…hope everything is going ok with ya. Good luck in the marathon.
I knew someone would say that, I figured it would be my mom though.
I was thinking it, but someone else beat me to it…I didn’t want to jinx you. I thought about saying “break a leg”, but if you do that, you’d have to rent a motorized wheel chair to be in the race.