I Live in Iowa: Week 27

I worked 42 hours including spending three hours on the phone and instant messaging my coworkers in India on Friday. I had one of those great moments where I said something, and I was right. It is still unusual for this to happen to me, so I'm going to toot my own horn. My coworker in India desired to do some finite element analysis, even though it was not his job. He was using ANSYS, which I used at Kohler and have not used in six months. Yet I spent enough time with the software I was able to give him enough advice and suggestions that after 20 minutes of trouble shooting, the model solved on the first try. This is important because I feel that he put in several hours working with the software prior to asking for my advice. In other words, I was teaching, and I taught well enough to get a model to solve. There were a number of differences between his model and mine, but there was still information to be learned from his simulation. Simply developing autonomy...

I managed to run 100 miles including my personal record half marathon and my second best long run. The half marathon was run in Des Moines. I ran a 1:11:48 for 17th place out of about 4000 people. I was pretty even paced for the whole race with a few faster miles and some slower ones but an average of 5:29 and many miles within a few seconds of that. Since I have obviously been training to run 5:18 pace for a full marathon I feel nowhere close to the goal, even though a 1:11 half marathon is my best race ever according to purdy points and vo2max charts. So there is a mental low associated with running half of a 2:23 marathon when I am training for 2:18:58. I know I am a long shot, but I was hoping to be a little faster. I know, I'm so demanding.  I finished the week off with a 20 miler run in 1:59:26. It was the first training run that I decided with about 12 miles left that I wanted to run 20 faster than 6 minutes per mile pace. The best part is that the first mile was in 6:50 so I spent the next 14 miles trying to get rid of those spare 50 seconds. Overall a very good week in running that was at the time, a little depressing.

Coaching continues to go well. I give some of the runners extra exercises to do for soreness, and it works! It is amazing for me because I know what works to help most of my recurring aliments but when the same things work for others, it is continually surprising.

Other than that, my grandparents came to town and we had an afternoon and two nice evenings with each other. I am always happy to hear the stories and advice they have to give. There is so much attained wisdom stored in our octogenarians and septuagenarians that we ignore. We are not smarter than those that came before us, more often than not it seems we just repeat the mistakes of the past. Getting into debt is good? Seriously? Who came up with that idea? History is littered with examples of societies that went into debt and struggled or failed to get out of it. So why did we go into debt once again? Wasn't the economy going well enough the last 30 years? The wisdom of our elders is valuable. I plan to listen and avoid the mistakes they lived through.