My Awesome Weekend

Most of my followers, friends, and family members already know the news. As the information about my personal health slowly spreads, I’m beginning to get more open with simply telling people that I have follicular lymphoma.  I won’t bore you with details on what it is (hence the hyperlink), but I figured it would be interesting to reflect on my personal feelings and emotions both in my running shoes and out.

The actual diagnosis occurred on January 7, 2014. This was just a week after I decided to run 1,000 miles in the year and in my mind becoming a real runner. It took awhile for the news to set in, and even still I don’t think I have fully absorbed the diagnosis. I mean, heck I’m 28 years old and in the best shape of my life. In other words, I was completely blindsided.

From this day, my phone and newsfeed have been continuously buzzing with other people supporting my awesome family and me. It means so much, that I cannot even put it into words. With the wind slowly filling back into my sails, I need a BIG pick me up to get me back to the normal me.

Cue awesome weekend.

It started Friday night at the R-MA middle school gymnasium. The girls’ basketball team that I help coach has had a rough start, but we finally got our first home win of the season! Stoked, I celebrated by buying our book keeper (one of my students) a pizza and thanked him for continuously helping us out.

When I got home to share the good news, I am greeted by my wife frantically cleaning and asking if I would order a pizza and get some groceries real quick. Confused, I agreed. Upon my return and as soon as I put the pizza box on the counter, there is a knock on my door.

“Mike must be here!” I proclaimed as I opened the door. Mike and his family are our regular guests (and for the most part, the only people that come to our house). This explains the frantic cleaning. You can imagine my surprise when I saw Hogan when I opened the door.

You see, Hogan is probably tied for my second favorite kid in the world (just behind my daughter, and tied with my nephews and very few others) and lives about 300 miles north.

Trailing Hogan was the rest of his family, who I have been friends with since I was 13. This was going to be an awesome weekend!

CRAP! I HAVE A RACE TOMORROW!

They assured me they understood, and it didn’t bother them one bit.

The race itself was awesome. It was a “predict your time” 5 mile race. Race #4 of the SVR Winter Series. Being that it snowed and was rather cold, I predicted a modest time of 35:20 (7:05 pace). As I neared the first mile with ice on the roads, no watch to keep pace, and a stretch of rocky loose gravel (minimalist shoes) I thought I was going to be way slower. I stared ahead to see who was in front of me, and if I remembered their strides from the previous races. I knew I was doing decent because no one was passing me and I was slowly reeling in another runner who I usually pace with.

At mile 3, my shoe came untied. Now I have a partially frozen whip smacking my calf every stride. “Great…” I thought to myself [/sarcasm]. 

Amazingly this didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. And with the last two miles being mostly uphill, I knew I was going to close the gap on the people in front of me and hopefully have enough for a good finish.

Well, I finished strong with a time of 32:50 (6:34 pace)!

I also placed 15 overall out of 179 runners and 5^th in my age group. Not a bad race J

Next stop: Monkey Joes

Immediately after the race, we decided to take the kids to Monkey Joes. This is a building with multiple bounce houses, an arcade, and hundreds of kids running around. My daughter is only 2, so I was watching her like a hawk. Being the over protective dad, I also had the glorious task of entering each contraption making sure she could get up to the slides and didn’t die. We also got cool friendship bracelets, thanks to Hogan for setting the record on the basketball shot machine! I had fun, but that is enough said about Monkey Joes.

After the monkeys had enough, we ordered wings and subs. I also enjoyed some quality Xbox360 time with Hogan (he just bought a new basketball game and wanted to try it out). Other fun stuff happened like watching Toy Story twice in one night, but I will save you the details.

Finally, it was time for the S-family to head back north. My daughter, who was completely pooped from her 50+ hour play session, crashed while my wife went running. I was able to browse Facebook, type some other blog entries, and then went running myself once my wife returned.  I will type a reflection of this run later because of a few things - including a new 10k record, battling Richard (the name I gave to my follicular lymphoma), and my body’s reaction to rest days.

Now that I have bored you with over 800 words of rambling text, I’m going to end this post. If you read this far, thanks! If you simply skimmed, you probably made the better decision.

Final words for thought: Regardless of what's going on, stay positive. You never know who you are inspiring!