Vote for me!

Steve Stenzel is running a contest for the best virgin race story, and I was selected as a finalist!!! There were 34 entries, and I am incredibly proud to have been selected as one of the Top 10. The post with all 10 stories is up now, and voting is open. So vote for me and I might win some drymax socks. How cool!

All of the top 10 stories are very inspirational. If you've been reading for a while, you might remember that I come in last at everything running related. I'm ok with it, but the consistency is quite humorous. So after day 1, I'm currently last in the voting. Let's change that up some. Of course, the other folks are nuts too. I'm up against a former heroin addict, a 10 year old triathlete that runs to support cancer research, and a guy who (combined with his wife) lost 365 lbs. Oh, and one chick with bad fashion sense. What kind of crap is that? I just stopped smoking. Still, it's very inspirational. I had to take my entire welcome post here and pare it down to under 300 words. kind of tough for us long-winded folks. But if Glaven can write shorter posts, I can slim down my story to 300 words and still insult him.

My weekend in Charleston was awesome. Michael lives in a great neighborhood with a really cute little house. The crawl space underneath only gave me about 18" of clearance to run cable, but we got his antenna mounted on the roof, and coax was run to all the tv's. Then everything freaking worked! On the first try! I can't believe it. he's picking up 12 digital channels and 7 analog channels including HD broadcast free through the air thanks to an $80 antenna. No more cable bill. nice. We did some landscaping too, Morgan (through bad-ass fencing) removed a huge chunk of the existing fence around the backyard, and we sank 11 posts for a new wooden fence. And mom and Summer (Michael's wife) did a ton of gardening. Great times.

I also got in a 10 mile run on saturday. I never left his neighborhood. Every time I saw a traffic light or the road ended I would just turn onto another one. I never really got lost, and never went same road, same direction more than a couple of times. There was no traffic, and being on an island at the coast, it was completely pancake flat. They live at the end of a dead end road, so when I stepped onto their front yard at the end of the run the Garmin said 10.00 miles exactly. Of course, I had no plan so that was really cool. I did the run in 1:52, and have no idea what average pace that is. I haven't even unpacked the van yet.

I really wanted to get in a bike ride sunday morning, but the body did not agree with me. I woke up sunday in tons of pain. Hips, knees, quads, feet, ankles, lower back, you name it. I'm sure it was all thanks to the run, house repairs, landscaping, and sleeping in a foreign bed. I feel great today. But that bike ride just wasn't going to happen. We did more landscaping instead.

So vote for me over at steve's blog and have a great day! I'm going to be programming like crazy to get ready for a trade show on wednesday, so everything is going to be hectic around here.