On Losing and Losses

Something good happened on Monday. My MMNW came in at 174.8 lbs and 17.5% bodyfat. That's down nicely from last Mondays 175.4 and 19.3%. This means I didn't totally post-DNF eat my way into oblivion. This is also the first official MMNW under my typical plateau weight of 175. With all of the snow and the taper for the race on Saturday, the workouts were pretty slight last week. 4 snow days, the kids were only in school on Monday, it gets hectic, snowed in, and stir crazy.

So naturally, this week, the kids went to school on Monday. Then we got lots of snow and they have been home for the rest of the week. I'm again having really light workouts, going stir crazy. The weight has continued to drop, thursday was a low point at 171.8 lbs. I feel great, light and healthy.

Also something bad happened on Monday. Late last week we got word that Kelley's dad's oldest sister had passed away. He's got a huge family as the youngest of 8 kids. This sister was 21 when he was born, she was really a mother figure for him. Kelley and I are still very close with that entire side of the family, so while this was not really a surprise (she was 90), it is a very sad loss. This Monday the funeral was held in Biscoe NC. I'm getting very tired of putting on that black suit.

This makes three major losses for us recently; on different sides of the family. First it was Kelley's stepdad just before thanksgiving, our first parent to pass away. Then my grandmother passed away about two weeks ago, our last grandparent to pass away. Now out of 8 kids, Mickey and one sister are the only two that are left. They say these things come in threes, and I really hope this is the end of it. I really hadn't planned to miss any more work thanks to the other bereavement leaves, but Mickey asked me to sing at the funeral and I'm not going to pass up that chance. We ended up getting to see some people that couldn't make it to the big family Christmas last year so that was nice too.

Also on Monday night, Evil Genius and I had an Indian Princess meeting at BounceU, an inflatable fun house. We had a blast playing around on all of the fun games! And that's a better picture to end with than funeral news.

Those boxing gloves were huge!

The other thing that I've had plenty of time to do with all of this snow is register for races. Most of them were open - there was actually 1 marathon that was already sold out and 1 ultra that doesn't open registration until March 1st, but I went ahead and signed up for the rest of my year. I'm going back to Maryland to run the Potomac River Marathon in November. I'm also going back into the water. My swim season now has the Jordan Lake Open Water Challenge 2.4 mile race, and the Big Deuce 2 mile open water race for the 4th time. Every year on that one I say I'm going to drop back to the 1 mile race but still keep signing up for the 2. Those are both leading to the big dog, the 12 mile Swim Around Charleston! This is a bucket list kind of marathon swim that has a 6 hour cutoff. I am incredibly excited to step up to such a stiff challenge. My brother Michael is going to kayak for me, it's going to be amazing.