Independence: Week 7

Man, I have gotten so lazy. After Everest blogging about my daily life has moved down on the priority list. That being said, living in a house with wifi and video streaming has been awesome! Do I want to watch Tour de France highlights tonight, Olympic preview coverage, Top Gear, The Walking Dead, or a movie?

Work is going well, I am learning so much. There is so much about detailed drivetrain design that I don't know and slowly I am learning it. This past week I drove up to Dubuque (9 hours from here) Wednesday and went to a two hour meeting on Thursday in person for a technical review with a diverse team of engineers. We had people from three locations in the meeting, and honestly, should have maybe invited a fourth factory to make sure we were all on the same page. Regardless, we cleared the air and decided on a direction to proceed. Engineering is so much about risk management, just like mountaineering. There is no perfect, there are simply different levels of "good enough". Which is to say, what NASA sends to the space station is held to a much higher level of "good enough" than a welded sheet of steel that digs in the dirt. The hard part is determining what is "good enough" in any specific situation, thus our meeting.

My running started the week poorly, but ended the week much better. I have been struggling with the heat. And yes, I do try and run in the mornings, but even then it is 74ºF and 80% humidity, and I'm half awake. I generally run slower in the mornings than the afternoons because I haven't had anything to eat or drink and it is typically dark out. Also I think the mentality in the morning is often 'get through it' and the mentality in the afternoon is 'enjoy it, see what I can do' probably having something to do with getting to work for the day versus being done with work for the day.

I took Tuesday off (from running), after taking the Thursday before off and it was depressing. I think the heat is taking more out of me than I care to admit, and the effects are lasting several days. A couple times I have come home from work, and taken a nap from 15 minutes up to 90 minutes, and it's hard mentally when I didn't run in the morning and I am so exhausted in the afternoon that I take an unplanned day off. The good news is my runs up in Dubuque went well because the weather was much cooler so I did an 18 miler at the Mines of Spain and a 28 miler on Heritage Trail. That 28 miler was way easier than the 21 miler I did the week before in the heat and sun here around Independence. Which means, I am in better shape than my pace is showing for my runs here. Also, Jeff Galloway had a nice article on page 44 of the August Runner's World about running in the heat and it made me feel better about how I am doing.

In other news we grilled out Friday night and climbed on my friend's bouldering wall in Dubuque. The Olympics are coming up and it will be interesting. I have been reading a lot about the recent drug/cheating/doping scandals and I have my own opinion to share here when I get around to writing it. Keep chugging on right?