The Time Has Come

This summer I've run over 370 miles. It's been hot, long, sweaty, painful, beautiful, fun and tiring. And it's all been in preparation for this Saturday. 370 miles down. 26.2 miles to go.

Crazy Lives -- Crazy Phones

We're moving. Which means we have 8 million things to do. I'm falling behind on about 2 million of those things right now just by writing this blog post.

One of the results of our move is that my phone number will change. (My work pays for the phone, and something tells me that once I no longer work there, they won't want to pay the cell phone bill anymore.) While my phone won't work anymore (or might possibly be given to someone else at work), Shannon's still will. My number is a 435 number, so don't try and use that one after Oct 7th. Keep using Shannon's 801 number. If you have any more questions, send an email or leave a comment and we'll make sure you know how to contact us.

Onward and Eastward

Shannon broke the news on Facebook already, but if you haven't heard yet:

WE ARE MOVING! TO MICHIGAN!!!!!

I have a new job out there, and it is time for us to say farewell to St. George. We'll miss a lot of things here, but we're excited for a new adventure, a new job and everything else that goes along with it.

We'll be heading out there in late October, and I'll start work on Nov 1st.

To help get everyone excited, we've got this musical selection:

BYU's football team is not very good. This much is obvious.

There are a few reasons for optimism:

Our 3 losses are all to teams that are fringe top-25 teams. Nevada, FSU and AF have all been ranked, or were within a few votes of being ranked this year. AF gave OU everything they could handle. Nevada is 4-0 for the first time as a FBS team. Sagarin has BYU's schedule as the 4th toughest in the nation thus far.

The schedule gets much easier from here. Utah State is improved, but still beatable. Then SDSU at home, TCU (who we never had a shot at beating anyway), and then Wyoming, UNLV, CSU and UNM (3 of which are at home). So that's 6 winnable games out of the next 7. We picked the right year to travel to TCU and Utah, because the home field advantage probably wouldn't have been enough to matter anyway.

With Heaps getting all the practice snaps, and all the game time snaps, maybe the team can improve over time.

But here is the thing that worries me:

Against Nevada, BYU was +2 on turnovers committing none themselves. BYU had only 1 penalty for 5 yards. No missed field goals. And yet, BYU was never in danger to win the game. This wasn't a game where you could sit back afterwards and point to a bad call, or a bad bounce, or bad luck as the turning point of the game. This is who they are. This is apparently the talent (or lack thereof) the team has. And there just isn't much there.

Fish Ponds

Its official. I am now a champion racer. I am the absolute fastest person in the whole world. Well, the fastest member of my stake. At the 5k distance. That wasn't out of town this weekend. That chose to get up and run the stake 5k this morning. That wasn't pushing a stroller with 2 kids in it.

But still, I WON!

I suppose it is just a trick to find a race with sufficiently few racers to increase the odds of winning.

The race was rather interesting for another reason, too. It was so short that I had to get in more running today, so it's the first time that I've ever gone running to the start line of a race. All told, I did about a mile to the start line, then the 5k, then back to the mid point with a friend to pick up his car there, and then another mile back home.

1 more week to the marathon. I'm getting pretty excited, and pretty anxious. Wish me luck.

Family Home Business

At our house, we don't have Family Home Evening, we have Family Home Business.  According to Julia, at least.  I guess she picked up on the fact that at the beginning we have announcements, and then we have business.  I suggested this once years ago, modeling the beginning of sacrament meeting where there are announcements before the opening prayer/hymn and then ward business afterward.  Just to clarify, no, I don't know what sort of Family Business one would expect to be coming up on a weekly basis.  Not a lot of sustainings and releases going on in our family.  But out of tradition, we call for family business every week, so Julia has renamed the whole evening.

Tonight, she picked up the FHE/FHB lesson manual (which is the nursery lesson manual) which was opened to the lesson on scriptures and said "Today, we're talking about candles and fire".  You see, up at the top there is a picture of scriptures open on a table which happens to have a candle on it.  So clearly, the lesson is about candles.  Any time she start into a lesson or presentation of any sort it begins with "Today we're talking about ________".  Not sure where she picked this up, but it sure is funny.

Baffling Conversations with a 2 Year-Old

Me: "Julia, do you want pizza for dinner?"  (Yeah, because we're awesome parents who feed their children only the most wholesome foods.)

Julia: "No, I don't like pizza."

Me: "What do you want for dinner then?"

Julia: "I want sweet potatoes."

Sweet potatoes?  Really!?!?  I mean, they're good and all, but since when does a kid turn down pizza and ask for sweet potatoes.  I think she's only had them once or twice in her life.  And she didn't seem to enjoy them all that much then.

Running is boring

to blog about.

No one wants to hear about work, which leaves me to blog about my spare time.  A lot of that gets taken up with running right now, and I'm just not sure how to write about it to make it interesting.  "Today I ran X miles in Y time.  It was tiring."  Rinse.  Repeat.  For the record, I don't find running itself boring.  I do the longer runs with a group of people, so there is generally someone to talk to (unless they ditch me for the last 4 miles like they did on Saturday).  And we tend to bump into someone new each week to provide a little variety.  On the last two long runs I've spent a mile or two with someone I've never met before until someone's pace finally separates us.  And for my regular running buddy, we talk about sports, politics, religion and the latest work gossip.  The scenery is nice, too.  Our runs start early in the morning and out in the middle of nowhere (Veyo) so there are plenty of stars to enjoy, and then we get sunrise and Snow Canyon.  After that I'm too tired to pay attention to anything but moving my feet forward.  Again, great to experience.  Boring to blog about.  So, you'll just have to take my word for it.

26.2 to go (er, 23 that is)

If I were on top of things, I would have written this blog post about 5 days ago. You know, when it really was 26.2 days before the marathon. But, maybe it's fitting, since this probably describes my whole marathon training process: almost what it should be.

In the last 4 months, I've run about 315 miles, which sounds really impressive, but is probably about 2/3 of what it should be. I'll be relying on my dormant Kenyan genes to pull me through. My longest run thus far is 20 miles, and I'll be doing something around that distance this Saturday. It could be as many as 21, which would then be the longest before actually doing the marathon. I keep trying to remind myself that the whole point of the first marathon is just to finish. And the slower you go, the easier it will be to put up a new PR the next time! (If there is a next time. I'm not completely convinced there will be.)