I Live in Iowa: Week 24

What a nice week! Like I've said, I have a great life. I worked 43 hours, mostly due to 9.5 on Friday. Work is going well. I am working on a project for one of the new forestry machines and due to the finite element analysis that I did, they will probably save 90kg (200 pounds)! This is important because this is a moving assembly on the working end of a machine. Which means that one pound from this assembly is worth perhaps five pounds from a less critical part of the assembly. It is an exciting prospect to be part of a team that is using the full range of tools available to us to make a product that will better fulfill the customer needs than what we currently make. Our current models are industry leaders by the way.

I ran 87 miles, after six consecutive weeks at 100 or more I needed some down time. I was tired. I did wrap up the month of September with 447 miles, one of my better months. I had three workouts this week. Monday I tried to solo a sub 16 5k on the indoor track at the University of Dubuque, but I was hitting 77s and a 78 and 79 so I stepped off after 2400 in 7:47, three seconds slow. Then I did some 800s and 400s and a hard hard 200 to get 5k of work in 15:53, which is okay. It's not what I wanted, but it's better than just 2400 of work. Thursday I did 10x2 minutes hard, 1 minute easy for a total of 29 minutes. I ran that with M my marathon training partner on Thursday afternoon at the Dubuque City high school meet. The former coach at Loras College (M's alma mater) is now the coach at Dubuque Senior High thus the connection. Plus I know a sophomore that runs for "Senior", as they call it around here. Then Friday, feeling good enough for another workout I did a seven mile progression on the heritage trail with the last three miles at 5:38, 5:25, and 5:19. So three workouts this week. That's a nice number and it is what I needed.

Coaching at UD is going really well. We had a hard workout Monday and a moderate workout Thursday. Saturday, nearly every runner on the team set a personal record. Plus, we are not even peaking yet. I am sure that we are going to have more breakthroughs the last three meets of the season over the next six weeks.

That was about my life.