An overview

With your help, donations were made to several charities this year.  I wish that I had kept better track, but I didn’t really, so here’s the best that I can offer.  I think the actual total is a little bit higher:

I covered about 420 miles this year:

several miles of which were Spartan Races:

And then, on January 1, 2020, I went out and ran my fastest 5K yet, so there’s that:

So thank you, thank you, thank you.  Thank you all for believing that I could achieve the goal and for going out and walking/running or hiking with me so that I didn’t have to do it alone!  If I have inspired you, please consider making your own donation to the charity of your choice.

Here’s to 2020, y’all!

So…..I DID it! WE did it!

The last 2 5Ks are complete and with your help and support, I have completed 100 in 2019!  I set out to complete 40, but when that goal seemed too easy, I upped my game to 100, which was barely achievable!  #99 was completed with George and the dogs.  He chose Planned Parenthood as the beneficiary.  I completed #100 in a very anticlimactic way at the gym, by myself!

Stay tuned for a summary of the year and THANK YOU ALL!!!

TWO

That’s how many I have left.  We are going to call this week’s 5Ks the fever 5Ks.  I have had some sort of respiratory, cough, fever, snot, headache, sore throat thing going on all week, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from reaching my goal.  Plus, I think at a slow pace, the fresh air is actually probably good for me and it has been REALLY nice outside.  George (and Sasha and Max) have done #96, 97 and 98 with me.  He chose Planned Parenthood to receive the donations.  They are loving me this December and I look forward to all of the junk mail that I will inevitably soon receive, said no one ever!  I support them as well, but I think it’s a waste of money to send out junk mail.  If I want to make a donation, I will go to your website and do it; otherwise, leave me alone!

Two more, y’all!!!!

I have 5 left….but also fevers and a sore throat

I have completed 5Ks 93, 94 and 95!!!  I completed #93 with George, who chose Planned Parenthood again for the charity.

I completed #94 with my karate classmate and friend, Sierra and my karate instructor, Mr. Driver.  We found an osage orange during our walk through the woods; part of the reason I like being out in nature is discovering interesting things like this:

They chose The American Red Cross.  I completed #95 with my friend Karen, who chose the SPCA for the donation.  #94 and #95 were done on the same day, back to back, AFTER having trained at IronWolf that morning!!!  WHEW!  #95 is the first one that I have done while drinking wine.  It makes a 5K interesting and considerably slower than a non-wine 5K.  But I’m on winter vacation and it was lovely outside and we had fun drinking wine and chatting while we walked.  I DID twist my ankle a few times, but I think that’s probably more due to the holes in the fields we were walking through than the wine…..at least that’s what I am telling myself.

So, I have 5 left to do and 7 days to do them.  And I currently have a fever and a sore throat.  The rest of the year should be interesting!

90, 91 and 92 are DONE!!!

So I have 11 days to do 8 more.  It’s cold today and I am lazy, so one won’t be done today!  I completed #90 with George and he chose Planned Parenthood again.  I’m in the HOME STRETCH!!!!!

So it’s going to be a struggle

to complete the 100 5Ks by the end of the year, but I’m gonna do it, even if I have to double up some days.  I have the last 10 days of the year off, so there’s that!!!  But, to motivate myself, I figured I would take a look at my medal haul this year from Spartan Races and 5Ks.  Keep in mind that I only run a few races a year that aren’t Spartans that give out medals.  But, here’s my haul!!!!!

11 and 11

It’s December 11th and I have 11 5Ks left to complete ONE HUNDRED this year!  Here’s what the last 3 looked like.  I completed #87 with George and he chose Planned Parenthood to receive the $20 donation.

I’m really tired of 5Ks, y’all, but I also don’t like to fail goals, so there WILL be 11 more completed by 31-Dec-2019!!!!

14 in 23

I think I can do that.  It’s like one every 1.6 days.  And I have several days off near the end of the year, so I can double up if I need to.  Here’s what happened this week, two lonely gym 5Ks and one with George.  He chose Planned Parenthood to receive the $20 donation:

Working towards goals, y’all!!!

A time crunch – 17 to go

Because I made my initial goal of hitting 40Ks long ago in 2019, I decided to up my game.  I am aiming for 100 5Ks in 2019.  Today is December 1st.  I have 30 days left to complete 17 5Ks.  It’s ambitious, but not unreasonable.  I’ve knocked several out in the last few days.

5K #79 was done on 26-Nov-2019 with my friend Karen on her farm.  We had a good time walking, drinking some wine and visiting her gaggle of animals (cows, mini horses, horses, dog and cats).  She chose the Charlottesville Albemarle SPCA as the beneficiary of the $20 donation.  Here’s the stats:

After eating a lovely Thanksgiving meal at The Bavarian Chef, which I highly recommend, George and I took the dogs for a 5K, #80.  They serve both their normal menu AND a full Thanksgiving spread on Thanksgiving.  He’s still recovering from hernia surgery, but it went really well.  He chose Planned Parenthood for the $20 donation.  Side note: I LOVE the new trails at Preddy Creek and the place is pretty dead on a Thanksgiving afternoon.

5Ks #81, #82, and #83 were lonely gym 5Ks that I did by myself.  I’m still pretty exhausted from the Spartan race last weekend, so I walked all of them.  I also learned that ACAC is pretty dead on a Friday evening at about 7PM and on a Saturday morning at like 10:30AM.

I’ve got 30 days to do 17 more, y’all!!!

78 was a doozy

I’ve had a week now to process “5K” number 78, which was actually close to 15 miles, as it was a Spartan Beast.  Even in the best conditions, the beast is not my favorite distance.  It’s hard to train for because it means spending a lot of time on your feet and a big time commitment, so I only do a couple a year and I am always undertrained for them.  Now, having said that, there was NO way to train for the conditions this race delivered to us.  Sure, I can spend 7 hours in 40 degree rain, but why would I?  No where can I find a place where I can climb up and down hills covered with 6-8 inch deep mud.

Seriously, the entire course was 6-8 inch deep mud.  There was really no way to even WALK fast on this course.  And, WOW, steady rain and about 40 degrees for the entire race.  To say that it was miserable was an understatement.  I generally love the Spartan racing atmosphere because there is such great camaraderie between racers and the open racers all help one another and cheer each other on.  Not to say it wasn’t happening at all, but this race was different.  The conditions were so miserable that everyone was just trying to survive and be as pleasant as possible in the given conditions.  It should have been a clue to me when the kids who were finishing their race as we were starting ours looked miserable and several of them were crying.

I almost always race with my race wife.  She knows how I like to be spotted on obstacles and how to motivate me and we compliment each other well out on the course.  She wanted to try the longest distance race, which was about 30 miles (the Ultra) and I was like, “well, don’t let me stop you.”  So, that basically meant I had to make new friends if I hoped to have someone to race with.  And I DID make new friends and I enjoyed racing with them, but this race was even harder for me without my race wife.

I was cold and the conditions were rough from the start of the race.  There was a hill we all had to go down in the first half mile or so that was so slick and muddy that 95% of the people went down on their butts and were totally out of control as they did.  And there were rocks and sticks and roots.  As we slowed to a crawl to try to get down this hill, I wondered if I could complete the race within the given time limit.  I hadn’t packed a head lamp because I figured that 8 hours was plenty of time, but now I wasn’t too sure.  I made the decision on this hill, which I later learned that someone broke their leg trying to traverse, that I wasn’t returning for a second day of racing.  I tore holes in the ass of my pants on this hill as the rocks, roots and sticks slammed into my butt.  After the first hill, though my butt was basically numb for the rest of the race.

Now, let’s talk about the obstacles.  I failed most of them.  Even in the best of race conditions, there are several that I failed, but I failed things that I have NEVER FAILED BEFORE.  For instance, the atlas stone was buried so deep in mud by the time that I got there and my hands were so numb and muscles functioning so poorly that when I bent over to try to roll the stone out of the deep hole it was in, my legs cramped up and I leaned forward a bit too much and face planted into the mud.

Because I want this blog to encourage people to get out and get healthy, and definitely to try out obstacle course races, I won’t be any more negative about this race.  But it did suck.  Most Spartan races do not suck, but there is no way around the fact that this one did.  And more than half of the people that attempted the race didn’t finish.  This is the kind of race that finds ALL of the nagging injuries and sorenesses you have and pounds, pulls and pushes on them.  I have a chronically sore/tight right hamstring and was nursing a REALLY sore right groin in this race.  In an ordinary Spartan race, I can modify my gait slightly when things start to fatigue and hurt (I know, I know…..it’s bad to modify your gait).  In the race, there was so much slipping and sliding and involuntary muscle contraction related to the terrain that everything that was sore or hurt was exacerbated.

But, I finished and earned my Spartan 2X Trifecta for the year:

And here’s my Spartan haul of the year:

My face in this photo, taken just before the finish line in the race, is a great illustration of how the entire race felt:

Yes, those just might be tears of mud running down my cheeks.

This is Rob (a new friend who I met and raced with……he kept me going because I didn’t want to let him down) and I at the “Victory Wall.”  We managed to smile after a grueling race:

And yes, he’s wearing a garment that started as a hazmat suit, but morphed into a lab coat/cape during the course of the race.  It was thin and he thought about shedding it when it started to shred, but it was providing warmth that he wasn’t willing to part with.

And, finally, we will call this race, nearly 15 miles of slop:

If you aren’t questioning your life decisions, at least a few times a year, are you really living, y’all?