I Live in Iowa: Chapter 3

In the working world I spent 42 chargeable hours at work. I finished my project Tuesday and spent most of the week learning how to use nCode. It's pretty awesome to get paid to learn yet another skill. We use nCode to do fatigue analysis so that we can estimate the lives and failure rates of future products. Basically we can tell after one test of less than a minute in length approximately how many hours a part will last. There is a lot more to it, but from my end that is almost what it boils down to.

I ran 62 miles in my taper to the Green Bay marathon. I ran a 10k and an 8k tempo this week. This is the last little bit of quality that I am doing. I am going to do one more little workout this week but more or less all my preparation and workouts are done. I'm going to talk a lot about my marathon this week, and probably next that I will spare you the details, for today.

In other news I bicycled about 60 miles total. I totally wore myself out with a 37 mile bike ride with two more regular cyclists. May 16-20 is national bike to work week and I plan to take part. Dubuque is a perfect size city for bicycling everywhere. It is small enough to run errands and commute. I also bought a new (used) bicycle. It is supposed to arrive by the end of the day today so I'll write more and put up pictures once it gets here.

So, living alone without any sort of cable, satellite or Internet (besides my phone) I have started to put more effort into cooking. My best meal of the week was filet mignon with sweet potatoes and angle hair pasta with vodka sauce. For an appetizer I had pickles and organic milk. Pretty much the best post workout meal ever. My experience cooking steak is limited because I only cooked a few in high school and steak on the east coast is terrible so I cooked about three in college. Steak in Iowa is awesome! Corn fed beef! The seafood seems to be lacking though... Anyway I cooked steak way better than I expected. I thought for sure I would burn it or not cook it enough.

In other news, or rather in general, life is good. The trees are budding leaves. I am employed. I have a 54,000 word nonfiction book that I am pedaling. I am less than a week from running my debut marathon. I am in a nice apartment. Lest my life be perfect, my van needs a $1000 dollar axle repair and I still don't know many people in Dubuque. Overall though, I feel positive about the direction I am headed in. I hope you are experiencing even more fulfillment in your life than I am. Why do I say that? Because I always preferred being the 7th man on the team in cross country. I know how well I can run and if I have a team of guys ahead of me, I know we will do really well.

By the way, I turn 25 today.