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Good morning!

3:42am and the TNT group is on the bus to the start. It's cool, humidl with a chance of showers. Life is good!
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Rock n' Roll

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Everest!

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On safari!

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Cindy's Castle

Gorgeous day here in Florida.

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It's supposed to say...

712,000, give or take a few. That makes me a Space Hero!

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Small world

Bad picture, but whaddaya expect? :-)

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This is me on Sunday

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Here!

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Do what I say or the dog gets it!

Here's Sadie (being lovingly held hostage by Susie), the newest member of our household. She's a Border Collie / Black Lab mix, and she's a very different dog from Luna. She's way more low key, she *loves* the water, and she's still learning what it's like to live indoors with people (and cats.) She came from a working Border Collie farm near Asheboro, NC, where, to the best of our knowledge, she had never seen a cat (we have 3), had never been indoors (where she is now), and just wasn't used to living with people. She's come far in the 3 weeks since we got her.

-Bill

Goal Achieved!

Today I'm going to start with some news updates - some of them pretty major.

I've hit (and passed!) my Team In Training fundraising goal!! As of this evening, I'm officially at $4140!!! It's remarkable news and it's the part that I was the most worried about when I committed to this. If you haven't contributed, then by all means please do!!

Next up, I ran in the City of Oaks Half Marathon last weekend. Overall, I was pretty darn happy with my results.

Place    Chip Tm    Pace     Gun Time       Div Rank   Div        Gender Rank
1735    2:23:31    10:58    2:26:19.70     160/170    M40-44     908/1029

I could have probably finished a bit faster, but I did a couple times to walk with fellow TNT teammates. To me, the blue numbers are the most important - I ran just under an 11 minute pace for 13 miles! If this scales, and I'm optimistically assuming that (with training!) that it does, this puts me finishing the Disney full marathon at 4:46 (or thereabouts). That's completely in line with my goal of finishing in under 5 hours.

Finally, as a serious recommendation, if you're a runner and want good running fodder for your iPod (or any other politically correct mp3 player), go to podrunner. DJ Steve Boyett puts together hour-long, constant beat rate mixes. This means that you can get an entire hour at 160 bpm (or whatever pace the mix is). Using this, you can run at a constant pace for the length of the mix. This solves the main problem I always have with running with music - that my pace changes to match the piece of music I'm listening to. Podrunner used to have a bunch of mixes avaible - from 135 up to 170 bpm - but licensing changes required them to go away as of 11/1. Not to dispair, DJ SteveBoy is busy churning out a new batch of mixes - one every other day for the next week or so. Go check it out - 164 bpm is perfect for my training runs right now.

Go leave comments if you've read this. I'd love to hear from folks.

-Bill