I have done so many running-related things this month and I have kept almost all of them a secret from you. Let me quickly fix that.
July 6th – 8th: Revolution3 Portland Triathlon
This was the first triathlon I’ve ever been to. I thought it would be a good idea to be partially responsible for a big triathlon going well, when I’ve never even seen one happen before. The good news is that I was basically handed over to a very experienced triathlete/triathlete worker named Sonja, who told me what to do and helped me be useful. Without her, I imagine I would have stood around a ton and wondered what was going on (instead of only doing that a small to moderate amount). It turns out that triathlons are a ton of work. Here’s a couple of pictures from a few of my more laid back moments that make it look like nobody else was involved in this event:
They have a bunch of fancy mile-markers, but a few were missing so I got to hand-craft some new ones. |
Of course you’ll recognize this one from my Instagram. Why are Instagram pictures so square? |
I also got a good opportunity to use the 360 cam that I got for my birthday. Unfortunately I was too busy to set it up when there were many bikers going by, so the video is not the most exciting, but you can get a glimpse of how my 6 hours on the highway were spent!
July 14th: Bowerman 5k
I was going to do a fancy entry about this one, because the Bowerman 5k marked the one-year anniversary of my return to 5k’s, but I got lazy. I ran this year’s faster than last year’s, but not by a ton (this year I ran 22:04 versus last year’s 22:36). At least I made it into the top 200 this year (full results here)! I guess I was just disappointed that I haven’t progressed much in my 5k time over the last year. I did do a 21:44 5k last year, but haven’t really even gotten back into the 21s other than that. Un-exciting time aside, it’s always fun to run at Nike, so this was a pretty nice race.
The Bowerman 5k always do a pretty good job with the t-shirt. As they should. |
July 17th: Team Athena Workout
After my disappointing 5k time, I decided to Google Portland female running coach, just to investigate. The first thing that came up was this Team Athena, an all-female running group coached by Nikki Rafie, an amazing local runner/marathoner. They meet every week to do a track workout, so I went to check it out. I instantly loved it, met a few really friendly women and potential running partners, and got a really good workout in. I’m going to keep trying to go to these, and also generally run more consistently, to see if I can actually get any improvement in my times. Maybe I’ll eventually go for some personal coaching, but I need to see if I can really get committed before I start throwing money around.
July 21st: Mt. Tabor Doggie Dash
I’ve volunteered for a lot of races, mostly when I was younger, and they were definitely never as fun as this. Probably because I was never old enough to feed people beer, and now I am. My friend Vincent already gave a pretty good run-down of our volunteering experience, so I won’t go into too much detail. Basically I cut up fruit, poured a ton of pilsner, and got a free race entry for a Terrapin Events race. What I didn’t do, was watch a single person run. For all I know, all the beer-grabbers were just pretending to be all tired and sweaty from running a doggie race. I guess this just shows how focused and dedicated I was to the beer-pouring.
I believe those are the most important events that I’ve been keeping a secret from you. My general project for the month has been trying to collect new running partners, because as I’ve mentioned before, I’m bored of running alone. I’ve been successful in making general plans, but so far haven’t gone on any runs (long or short) with any of them. Mostly because it’s hard to coordinate meeting times around work and race schedules. But if I’ve promised to try to plan a run with you, don’t worry, I will continue thinking about it and hopefully soon even do it! Then I’ll blog all about you and you’ll be famous.
Remember when I was posting about my mileage? I stopped because it’s embarrassingly low compared to what I resolved it to be, but in the spirit of getting back into training, here it is:
Miles run in 2012: 294
2 Comments
I’ve never volunteered for a race at all, so that sounds really fun and a good way to get to know triathlons!
My mileage is pretty low too, but it has gotten a lot better since I started running more seriously again. Good luck!!
Almost every time I was required to do community service in high school I would just volunteer at a race. It’s kind of cool to see what it’s like to be on the other side of things, you should try it!
I’ve been watching the mileage you’ve been posting, you’re almost 100 ahead of me for the year! You’re making it hard for me to catch up with all your long runs 🙂