I Live in Iowa: Week 72

Distilling my week down to a short summary is not always the greatest way to convey what is happening. I mean, I spend more time talking pensions on one run than I do everything I did in an entire weekly summary. The more of these I write and the higher the number gets the more they seem like the last one. Of course every week is different, but sometimes it's hard to tell.

This week at work I worked on a stop shipment. Basically someone screwed up, and it was up to me to figure out how bad the mistake was. Turns out the mistake was about 3% as good as the original design. Which in this instance was not terrible. Anyway, I worked on this project around 35 hours this week and then gave an eight minute presentation Friday afternoon. Then I gave another half hour presentation to a couple of involved people to further explain things. It is always interesting to quantify the time spent preparing and presenting. In other words, high school physics took a number of people more than a hundred years to come up with, and it's just one class. It was a nice experience to work on such a high profile project this week.

My own running went okay. I ran 55 miles and two workouts, on the same day. A 5k tempo in the morning and 2k and 1k intervals in the afternoon. Nothing really special about my running this week but I did run every day.

Coaching went really really well. We had a couple of good workouts and a race. Our first race of the year. The men ran three miles and the women ran two miles. We went 1, 2, 10 in the men's race and had four in the top 10 in the women's race. Unfortunately there were only three teams and the other two were not the fastest competition. So we still have a significant amount of work to do.

Friday after the meet I went home to Sheboygan Falls to visit my parents. I had not been home since May. Saturday was a nice leisurely day including a hike up a tower, walking around the garden and lots of talking. My sister even came home and there was more walking around and talking. Plus we had ribeye steak cooked by my sister, and it was fantastic!

I am of the opinion that spending time with others does not have to be about constantly doing things, but rather about enjoying another's company. That includes talking, but simply being in the presence of another is enough. In other words, I had a great weekend.

One last thing, I might be running a half marathon in Dubuque Monday morning. I'm not in great shape, and I don't want to pay $45 to run 1:17 and get beat by people. I can go out to Heritage Trail and do that. I will probably run, but there is hesitation in my mind that it's a lot of money for ultimately little reward.