El Scorcho Report

It has been about a month since El Scorcho and looking back it seems that the race was a big success in the eyes of the participants who have written reviews and given us verbal feedback. It is always great to hear that people enjoyed the race and are looking forward to next year. It takes a lot of hard work and hours and hours of meeting to put this race together and usually a lot of last minute details to be worked out.

I won't go into details about the race since my fellow race director Ryan Valdez has already done a great job at that in a blog post last month. Ryan is a great writer which serves him well in his profession and also allows him to a great job writing most of the information that you read on the website.

Instead I am going to write to thank and highlight some of the people who made the race possible and let you guys in on some of the crazy last days before El Scorcho Dos. On second thought I think I will stretch this over several blog posts since this is already turning into a lengthy one.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks and you can get an insiders look at how this year's El Scorcho came together and some of the more "risky" moments that made us sweat a little.

El Scorcho Finally

After 400 runners, 500 spectators, 200 burritos, over 100 pounds of pasta, 80 degree weather, 12 hours in the park preparing the course, 1000's of gallons of water, hundreds of Nuun caplets, oppressive humidity, a hike from the parking lot to the race start, tons of incredible volunteers, gallons of coffee, some great off duty police officers, great medical staff, and the parks department going above and beyond...........El Scorcho Dos is done!! I will write a more detailed summary once I recover from being up and running around Trinity Park for the past 36 hours. Let's just say El Scorcho Dos was a great time!

El Scorcho approaching

So only 13 days until El Scorcho. This is going to be a crazy few weeks. We are as prepared as we can be, but there are always a ton of little things that have to get done.

Anyone know of a good place to find some glow in the dark spray paint? I figure it would be fun to have the course marked that way.

Garage Cleanup

So today I finally had the opportunity to tackle the mess that my garage is. When we moved in to the house I found that the garage was pretty much untouched from the past few owners of the house. They guy we bought it from said he didn't really touch it other than to park the lawnmower in there and I told him to leave it alone in case there was anything useful in there.

Six hours later and I am almost done. I just have to go through and finish cleaning up after the mice who were obviously previous tenants of the garage. Here is a short list of some of the items I found.

• About 40 cans of different color paints. No joke this house must be like a rainbow underneath the paint coat that is currently showing.
  
• A computer racing wheel from 1995
• Several Marilyn Monroe Books
• A set of Law Directories for all 50 states from 1994
• About 8 paint roller and 15 paint brushes
• An old typewriter
• 14 bags of assorted fertilizer, grass seed, mulch, and dirt

I kept a lot of the stuff that is useful, but had to toss out a ton of junk. Now I just have to figure out how I am going to get a truck to haul all of this stuff away.

The Roof is on Fire!!

Today is the last day I will have to get things done around the house for awhile. D's Dad and his family of six are coming in from Louisiana to pay us a visit for about three days. Should be a tiring and fun three days.

On another note, we had a few hours of downtime at work today when the computer room fire alarm went haywire. I took the time to go and workout with GandaMan after which we had lunch at his house. A pretty relaxing and enjoyable afternoon. Food and working out, two of my favorite things!

Blackberry Pearl

Back in April I switched from the Palm Treo 650 to the Blackberry Pearl. My main reason for this was comfort while I am running. The Treo felt like a brick in my belt pack so oftentimes I would switch the SIM card to an old Motorola Razr anytime I was doing serious mileage (16+ miles).

After seeing a great deal for the Pearl (I actually got $100 out of the deal) on Amazon.com I made the change and ordered the phone online.

So far the phone is awesome for my running. I fit it into my pocket and hardly even notice it is there. The call quality is great and I like the easy to use Standby button which helps to keep the phone from getting turned on accidentally when I am running. It can also be set loud enough for me to hear under pretty much any conditions.

The only drawbacks are that it doesn't display PDF's as well as my Palm did. In fact I have yet to find a free program that offers this functionality. Secondly I wish it had a better built in Media Device so I could do away with my separate MP3 player altogether. I guess that is what the i phone does, but how many people do you see running with that thing. While the Iphone is amazingly small for everything it does, it is still almost double the size of the Pearl.

If you are looking for a smartphone to easily carry with you on long runs then the Blackberry Pearl is a good option. They have even upgraded the model line since I purchased and now offer GPS in a lot of the models. Maybe that will allow some people to leave the Garmin 405 at home.

Attack!?

Wow, it looks like Ganda Man is smarting off about my running regime. Apparently I don't have as much free time to go out and run as many official ultras as he does. Oh well, I got nothing to prove to him. I know I can go out and run an ultra right now if I wanted to. You up still Ganda Man? You want to go crank out a quick 31 miles before work tomorrow? Call me.

Snow???

I forgot to mention what happened on my way back to the Airport from Farmington. We were about 15 minutes into our 3 hour trip when suddenly the temperature started dropping about 5 degrees a minute. We ended up dropping from 67 degrees to 33 degrees in a matter of minutes. Kinda of interesting, but to top it off I see some dense fog up ahead, but when I get to it I see it is actually some super heavy snowfall.

I pulled over and grabbed a quick picture on my phone:

Farmington, NM

So I spent the good part of last week in Farmington, NM on a work trip. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but it turns out Farmington is a pretty cool town. It is only 45 minutes from Durango, CO and a 3 hour drive from Albuquerque.

The best part of the trip was finding some great hiking and running trails directly behind my hotel along the San Juan River. What these trails lacked in distance (only about 6 miles) they made up for in quality. Wish I would have taken some pictures on the blackberry, but I was to into the moment to think about that.

I managed to get 14 miles in on Tuesday by doing a couple of loops on the trails and then following an old back road for a few miles. Altogether I ended up with 23 miles for the three days I was there. I did a 18 mile run on Saturday to finish up the week with 49 miles.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I was one of the lucky passengers to get stranded on American Airlines. Luckily Southwest Airlines has a big presence in Albuquerque and was able to me and all my fellow American Airlines customers.

Office Move

Well it finally happened. Ever since I joined Company X I knew my office space was temporary. My office was located on a floor that was due to be demolished and renovated just like all the floors below it had been. Every day I could hear and feel the hammers and drills getting closer and closer. It was getting so bad that the constructions crew was having to come up to our office and drill holes in the floor in order to be able to finish out the spaces below.

This past Monday our group moved into our new offices a few floors below the old space. I can still hear the drills and hammers, but they are headed up away from me instead of coming for me. The view is not quite as nice as the old office, but the office itself is a lot nicer. I have way to much empty wall space now so I think I will bring all of my old marathon medals up here and decorate the wall. Right now they are just hanging on a clothes hanger in my closet so this is probably a good place to store them.

Cowtown Casualty

You might be wondering why I haven't updated the blog with any word about the Cowtown Ultramarathon. Well that is because I didn't get to run it. The night before the big race I gouged my hell while playing around with my little brother. I instantly knew I was in trouble, but was hoping that it would heal enough over night to allow me to run.

Well when I woke up Saturday morning and tried to put some pressure on the heel it instantly started to bleed. Yes, Curt Schilling had a legendary performance in the World Series where his foot bled through his sock and shoe. The thing is I don't get paid to run (quite the opposite actually) and Curt didn't have to run 31 miles with his jacked up foot.

So I spent the day watching the marathon as a spectator and running some errands around town. I took a picture of the injury, but for the sake of taste I will leave it off the blog. I am afraid some of my readers may have queasy stomachs.

Cowtown Coming Up

The Cowtown Ultra is in a couple of days. I haven't trained much at all since White Rock so the 1/2 marathon would probably be a better idea for me. The problem is I would regret not doing the Ultra.

On top of the running the race I think I will add some distance by running to and from the start instead of driving. Hopefully no one who reads this blog will actually know the distance from my house to the race start.

Crossfit Workouts

I am currently in the process of totally revamping my gym workouts by adopting the Crossfit workout strategy. If you haven't heard about Crossfit then you should really research it. I first came across it in an old Men's Journal from 2006. The workouts intrigued me because it promised great results in a short period of time. I thought yeah right every magazine makes these outrageous claims for every article which ultimately turns out to be quite gimmicky.

The reason Crossfit can actual follow through on these claims can be summed up in one word.....Intense!! If you do this workout at the tempo and effort it is intended then you will get the workout of your life. Check out this Youtube video and also this direct link to a video.

I did a really hard Crossfit workout the other day before heading to the office and almost threw up my protein shake. It was awesome. It was the normal after workout high times 10!! I felt great all day and I was sore all over the next day.

You will quickly notice how you stand out from all of the other people at the gym who are worried about looking pretty while they workout. You will get an endless number of incredulous looks and stares as you quickly rotate between your exercises. Most people just can't handle this level of intensity.

The thing I have to be careful about is balancing Crossfit with my long distance running because this workout can really wipe you out. I have to be sure that I give my body enough time to build back up between all of these challenges I am throwing at it.

Running Goal

A few weeks ago I finished up what is so far my craziest running streak. I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, DC the last Sunday in October, followed it up with the Ultracentric 6 hr race in middle of November, and then completed White Rock Marathon in Dallas in early December.

Now I am left with the decision of how to proceed from here. Do I go for distance or do I go for speed. Going for distance would mean training for a 50 miler sometime later this year while going for speed would mean shooting for a 3 1/2 hr marathon or faster.

In the meantime I have the Austin Marathon and Cowtown Ultra on my running calendar. These are on back to back weekends in February. The only problem I have is the entry fee for Austin which is $110. This is pretty steep compared to most of the local marathons in Texas. Considering I can and sometimes will run almost an entire marathon during a training run, it makes it hard to fork over $110 for the privilege of doing it in Austin. I can do the Cowtown Ultra for just $85. What a deal.

It is funny how when marathons were a new thing for me I really wouldn't pay attention to the price. I was too caught up in wondering whether I could finish, or about the aid stations, or how course conditions would affect me. Now I can just grab a hydration pack or fuel belt and go knock out 26 miles in pretty much any type of weather conditions on any day.

Currently I am leaning toward a focus on speed since I am still young and realize that as I age my speed will probably slow down while my endurance will pick up. If I could run like Scott Jurek or David Goggins it would take care of my problems since those guys run a 100+ miles at my 10k my pace.

Solo Night

As I type this the dog and I are chilling in bed. My WW (Wonderful Wife) is in Houston tonight shooting a wedding. Unfortunately military drill today prevented me from joining her. Bedtime is relatively early tonight because of a scheduled run with Ganda at 6:30am in the morning. I am hoping to get in around 15 miles, but we will see what happens.

Burrito Run

My morning run began and ended with a stop at the Tres Jose's Breakfast Burrito Express. If you haven't tried these things then you don't know what you are missing. The breakfast burritos are awesome and only $1 each. I am sure they are extremely unhealthy, but a lot of the reason I work out is so that I can eat and not feel guilty.

The reason I began my run at the Burrito Express was the fact that they usually sell out early. So I ran up to the guy, handed over my $3 (the wife wanted one), and told him to hold them until I got done with my run. Three miles later I finish my run at the burrito stand, retrieve my workout reward, and head home to enjoy my breakfast. All mornings should be that good.

Treadmill Test

Well the weather around DFW this weekend is pretty lousy. It has been drizzling/raining off and on for the past two days with temperatures flirting with the freezing mark. The wind is not bad, but the cold and damp don't mix well when you are training for the Cowtown Marathon coming up next month. Ryan and I had a 14.5 mile training run planned for Saturday morning, but plans quickly changed when I got soaked just walking to my car that morning. I convinced him that we should just do some mileage on the treadmill and save ourselves the misery of getting soaked the first mile of our run and then being miserable the rest of the time.

Well the treadmill was about what we expected, boring. It just doesn't feel the same when you are running and not making any forward progress at all. One of the best things about running is the little adventure you have each run. I love to just take out of the door and see where things lead me. You never know what you might find or where you might end up. A lot of the times I will end up running farther than anticipated because I just want to keep going and see what is around the corner.

The treadmill while great for a short little workout is quite monotonous for those of us who run long distances. I put around 11 miles on the treadmill on Saturday and another 5 today, but I am hoping the weather clears up and I can hit the roads again on Monday.

Lesson Learned

So today I learned a lesson in record keeping. Normally I am pretty good about keeping track of receipts and documents, but lately I have been slacking off. Maybe it has something to do with the 100+ things I have going on or maybe I just haven’t made it a high enough priority. Either way there is a huge stack of documents that I have to go through and organize soon before I get caught unprepared again. Ok, here is the story

I sold my textbooks from last semester on Amazon Marketplace this year. Overall it was a great experience and I sold all of the books within four days. When mailing the books I always buy the insurance even though I think it is overpriced. I really didn’t feel like taking the hit if the books never arrived. Well guess what. I get an email from a guy today claiming he never got his book that I mailed on December 10. First of all I don’t believe that the guy never received the book. As bad as the post office is, they usually get the packages to their destination at some point or another. The real problem though lies in the fact that I can’t locate my insurance receipt from the post office, and the postal system is so archaic that you are SOL if you lose the piece of paper. There is no such thing as looking it up electronically.

So it looks like I will be taking a $50 hit just because of some lousy record management on my part. While this does suck, it is at least motivating me to take better care of everything in the future. Lesson learned.

Final Test Schedule From Hell.

So around the middle of October I check the final exam schedule to see what my last week of school is going to look like since all of my professor's stated that the final is mandatory. I am taking 6 classes so that meant 6 tests. No big deal I thought until I realized that all 6 of them were in a 24 hr time period. One on Monday night and five on Tuesday.

I knew that every University has a policy that allows you to reschedule your tests if you have so many within in a certain time period. So I go and look online and can't find anything. I call the department office, they can't find it. They refer me to the business school office, they can't find it either. Next is the student services office.................! I end up talking to the President's office who took my name and number and told me they would call me back. About an hour later I get a phone call from the Senior Provost for Academic Affairs. The conversation as I remember it goes like this.

Me-Hello
Provost- Hello this is Dr. so and so. Sorry.
Me- For what?
Provost- It appears we don't have a policy limiting how many finals you can take in a day.
Me- Your kidding
Provost- We thought we had one, but apparently we never "Put it on the books".
Me- Then I am supposed to do what?
Provost- Don't worry we will take care of it for next year.
Me- How does that help me this year.?
Provost- Uh......it doesn't. Try asking your professor's to let you switch
Me- I already tried that. I wouldn't be calling you if I had worked it out.
Provost- Then good luck!
Me- Wow

Apparently I attend the only University in the state that will allow you to be schedule for 6 tests in 24 hrs that each count for at least 40% of you overall grade. Hey at least I got a policy change out of the deal. Maybe I should cut out that section of the 2007-2008 catalog and put it next to my diploma.

White Rock Surprise!

So in my last post I stated that I would not be able to attend the White Rock Marathon this year. Well things can change quickly. On Saturday the day before the race Dori calls around 2pm and informs me that the WONDERFUL bride had chosen not to require me until around 3pm on Sunday. That meant I had all morning to run the race!

The only problem was that I had not gotten my bib number because I figured I wouldn't need it. I had to work until 7pm that night so I could not make the 6pm cutoff time. Well my awesome Dad drove out to Dallas and got it for me. FYI I have a great family.

The morning of the race GandaMan and Nell rode with me out to the race so it was an enjoyable ride plus we got a great parking spot thanks to my tiny car. I was so excited to be at the marathon because I really didn't think I was going to be able to participate. Nell stuck with GandaMan and myself until about mile 6 when she had to duck into the relay exchange zone to pass of the baton to Donaldo, GandaMan's Dad who was the next person in her relay team.

GandaMan and I had an understanding that neither one of us would feel an obligation to stay with the other. That being said, neither one of us really pulled away from the other for most of the race. We train together so we naturally run at about the same pace. Around mile 8 we started to enter the White Rock Lake area. This is the longest part of the course where you are basically running around the lake for about 10 miles. The great part about this is that there isn't very much traffic. The bad part is that the lake can get a little old after about 5 miles.

We made it around the lake feeling pretty good. GandaMan had just finished running a sub 4hr marathon at Marine Core about a month ago so he was still in great shape. He had flamed out at White Rock the year earlier around mile 17 so he enjoyed flying by the 17 mark still feeling great. I on the other hand had fizzled around mile 14 of the White Rock the year prior and ran a 5hr+ time. Needless to say I was just happy when I hit mile 14 with no pain or major fatigue.

I have started to figure out something about my body on these long runs and marathons. I don't like gel shots or sugary sports drinks after a certain point. It seems as though my body can only take the sugary intake for so long before it begins to tire of it and I actually begin to feel sick at the though of taking another one. Well this happened to me around mile 16 of the race and by mile 21 I was beginning to feel the consequences. I was afraid if I actually had a gel or more than a sip of Gatorade that I would throw up and really lose all my "fuel".

To make a long story short, I told GandaMan goodbye around mile 22 and watched him dash of for the finish for what would be his new PR. I then reduced my pace to stave off any cramps that might cause me to miss my goal of 4:15. Miles 22-25 were really slow, probably around 13-15 minutes each. I hit mile 25 at around 3:57 and realized I better pick up the pace to give myself some breathing room in case my watch was off from chip time. I ended up cruising across the finish line at 4:05:12. Well below my goal of 4:15 and light years ahead of last year's time of 5:05:53. Wow if I keep that up then I should run a 3:05 next year and qualify for Boston..........yea right!

At the end I caught up with GandaMan who looked incredible. The guy acted like he was ready to run another marathon. I on the other hand was suffering because of my lack of calories. My brother has diabetes so over the years I have spent many days checking my blood sugar with him. If I had checked it at that moment it probably would have been below 25. For those of you who don't know, that is incredibly low and actually borderline dangerous. I really didn't care at the moment though because I was just glad to be done and pleased with my results. Nell gave me a yogurt smoothie which tided me over until we stopped and got Braums on the way home. I was on a time crunch because I had to be at the chapel by 3 to shoot the wedding with Dori. For the sake of time I decided to eat lunch while I was taking my post race bath. As strange as it may be, that was a great experience. Feeding my completely empty stomach while relaxing my overworked muscles.......I can't wait till Cowtown so I can repeat the experience. Maybe I should find a hot tub.

FYI: My goal at Cowtown is going to be sub a 4hr.