I Live in Iowa: Week 74

I don't usually start with a video, but the song is quite good. I heard it on a movie I watched and it's been all the rage for me the last five days. I'm having an awful time finding similar music.

Let me tell you about the week.

Sunday I drove up to a surprise 40th wedding anniversary for my aunt and uncle. It is so great! Forty years is such an accomplishment. Seeing relatives is always nice too.

On the drive back I did stop and ride up two category 3 hills around Blue Mound State Park, WI. I finished 7th/198 on the steeper hill. Not bad for being extremely tired from a four mile race the day before and half marathon six days prior.

Work has it's busy, chicken-with-your-head-cut-off times, and it has the waiting-on-you times. We have been getting into a slower time because we were on schedule, but most others were not and recently the program was pushed back all of the sudden there was no rush. So I've been playing around (it is actually a project I am working on) with signal processing trying to better understand natural frequencies and relative motion of components on a structure due to different frequencies. It's interesting stuff.

Friday and Saturday I spent on a bus driving to and from St. Olaf up in Minnesota going to a cross country meet. The meet went really well! The men were 15th of 21 teams, and last year we probably would have been 20th or 21st. All of our top five ran under 30 minutes. It was the first 8k for all of them. Our women did well too. We had many of the women set personal records including our 4th runner who PR'd by five minutes in the 6k! She ran 299 miles during the summer, and it shows that she did more running this summer than any previous summer in her life. Plus, spending nine hours on the bus I was able to get so much done! I watched three lectures for my iPhone coding class and created my first meaningful working app from scratch. It's a collection of my sonnets. You might never see it, but it was/is a good learning experience for me.

My own running went well too. I scraped out a 71 mile week, my first week over 70 since in almost four months. Then I had one really good workout Saturday. It was 1k at marathon pace followed by 1k at 10k pace. Continue until tired. I did 9k total including a 3:17 and two 3:11 kilometers. That's quite good considering I ran it over the St. Olaf cross country course. It came easier than I was expecting. The plan is to run the Augustana cross country meet Friday night and better my official 8k PR from 2007 of 27:34. I should obliterate it.