I signed up for races.

On 1/20 I'm running the Frostbite 15k in Richmond. I ran it in 2017 and set PRs in the 8k and 10k. The weather, despite the name, was very pleasant. No telling what it could be like this year but if conditions are good I'd like to go under 50 minutes. In 2017 I ran it in 50:28 with some pretty uneven splits. This year I'll try to stay more consistently around 5:20 miles.

On 2/16 I'm running the Colonial Half Marathon in Williamsburg. In 2017 I ran it in 71:35, also in perfect conditions. Based on how the 15k goes I'll be shooting for under 71 or 70 minutes.

If you compare Fall 2016 and Fall 2018, I did fairly similar training and ran comparable end of season times: 2016- 20:31 4 mile vs 2018 25:40 8k. I'm just finishing up 7 weeks of high mileage running that I based off the running I did in winter 2016/17. Overall I did MORE volume this time and felt equally good.

The big surprise of early 2017 was how well I was able to race off this training and so my hope is that I'll be able to get similar results this time and also be a little savvier and not surprised as much by the times which I think initially freaked me out and caused me to do not smart things in races.

Then the big goal of course is the 10 miler. I ran the course today and practiced doing some 10 minute sections at a faster pace. It's definitely a challenging course so I'm going to make knowing it well one of my advantages.

PosterNutBag

Prolicking along quite glandually, Midder Tibbers went to the store to pork up some shozehossen. By my take a surprise, the entire store front was kerflatzed by a transtepital grusty floosh of wind. Oh my roses, there were shoes, shows, shosses, and flosses every which way and in between.

Midder Tibbers is gasp-making man! He will never find a popper prair of shurzashazzams in this flimmity flam. The owner, Kronst Beside Lightly, was buried under a gerble of merbles and some shmerble-flerble. Beside Lightly said this is terble for sherble!

To wake watters murse, Kronst Beside Lightly was behind on his payments! He'd have to close down shop and take up a life of crime like every other citizen who didn't own a shoe store.

But then Kronst Beside Lightly had a great idea. He said,  "Tibbers, I'll give you any shoes you want for free if you help me commit insurance fraud."

And so Midder Tibbers and the shoe guy dumped all of his inventory in the harbor and blamed it on a natural disaster and Kronst received a handsome payment from his insurance company and ditched town the next day.

The End.

Preliminary Framing

For the Stick Super Structure

Work Today

The kids were in relatively high spirits today. I think they were excited to see their friends and I can definitely see improvement in the kids who had a harder time at the start of the year.

I let the kids go down into "the woods" today by the soccer field and they pulled up some dead trees and branches. I think it's one of the coolest places for kids to play. They find cool stuff. They work together to move big sticks. You can just see their imaginations start to go crazy. They came up with plans for a fort and started collecting building materials.

One girl had a stick she called her katana and I left her bring it inside and we shaved off the bark with scissors and then she water colored it with a friend and wrapped some yarn around the end for a grip.

Most of the boys played football outside and then played on their laptops inside.

I also have some helpers that I get to do cleaning and tidying tasks in exchange for starbursts. One of them said "let's pay,  get andy to give us starbursts"

At the end of the day we went to the gym and i played some basketball and helped kids set up their mat forts they build and get things out of the gym closets. At the end of the day these 6 kids had made this sprawling labyrinth of mats and they got a 1st grader to go through it, haunted house style.

Really good day. I have great kids and work at a great school.

bird hunting

tonight I got dinner with my roommates and as we were driving back I asked "how do those electric scooters get charged?"

That lead to reading an article from the Atlantic, some scheming, and then my roommate signed up to become a scooter charger bounty hunter

which, in case you were still wondering, is how the scooters get charged.

So, in the near future, i think he and I, using my truck, are gonna try our hand at collecting scooters ans charging them here at camp.

Could be fun! Could be terrible. We'll see!

Turly

you're interesting to the extent that you're interested.

I'm interested in low blood sugar. Low blood sugar that dominates the morning mood and makes the day seem insurmountable.

It makes my hands and nose cold and feet sweaty. Low blood makes me grumpy and irritable and reactive. So you learn to monitor. And keep a voice hovering near that speaks up when something seems amiss- chemically and in perceptions.

Geez louise, napoleon. Make yourself a dang quesadilla.

Me at the Start of This Year