Even though I have fell way behind in keeping my running blog up-to-date, I am in fact still running. As of yesterday, I've run about 240+ miles year-to-date. I've also recently competed in my first two races of the year.

Two weeks ago, I headed down to Columbus, OH to run the Columbus Half Marathon for the second straight year. Even though it was a good two hours south of Cleveland, it seems that none of Ohio recognizes that it is spring until later in May, because the temperature was only in the upper 30s. It started off pretty well, maintaining a sub-8:00 pace for each of the first 8 miles before my legs started to tire and my pace slipped a bit. But I was still holding up fairly well until the mini-cramps in my calves turned into a serious cramp in my right calf, with just about a half mile to go, which forced me to hobble over to the side of the road and attempt to stretch out my leg. It seemed like an eternity before I could get it straightened out and get going again and try to finish. I'm sure I looked as awkward as I felt, but I was determined to keep running and not have to walk the rest of the race. I finally managed to cross the finish line, though my time suffered as I finished in 1:45:44, which is almost 2 minutes slower than my time in last year's race, and 5 minutes off my personal best for a half marathon. My time put me at 48th out of 209 in my division (Men, 25-29) and 368th overall out of 3,106 participants.

Yesterday, I hit the pavement again for my second race of the year as I competed in the Hermes Cleveland 10 Miler for the second time. Even though the weather was great yesterday, that was not the case at 8:30am, when it was mid 40s and rainy from start to finish. But the weather didn't dampen my performance, as I broke my streak of sub-par performances by besting my time from last year by nearly 3 minutes, finishing in 1:16:09, for an average pace of 7:37 per mile. This put me 12th out of 52 in my age group (Men, 25-29), and 146th overall out of 780.

I might sign up for another race in May, but right now my next scheduled race is the Ohio City Run & Crawl 5K on June 16th, an event I really enjoyed last year which is also the last time I ran a 5K race.

Labels: running

The old saying is that good news comes in threes. And for once it finally proved true for me. This past Friday, I proposed to my girlfriend of nearly four years, who accepted. I proposed at Brandywine Falls, a waterfall located in Sagamore Hills, Ohio, which is part of the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area. We then capped off the evening with a great meal, a bottle of wine and some complimentary champagne at Light Bistro in Ohio City. So now I'm officially engaged, though I'm still getting used to saying "fiancee" instead of just "girlfriend". I feel kind of awkward going around and telling everyone I know (like most people do), so the news has been slowly trickling out. So I apologize to anyone who finds out from reading this that I didn't get to tell you in person, but I'm not good with that stuff.

Anyways, that was obviously the big news. But a couple of good things have also happened in the past few days that I think I can lump together into a trio of goodness. The second item is that we also found out Friday that our obnoxious and threatening neighbors did not have their lease renewed and are scheduled to vacate the premises by the end of April. Obviously not as soon as we would have liked, but better than nothing. We were pretty much to the point where we hoped the apartment managers did nothing so we'd have grounds to break our lease and move, but ultimately this seems like a good resolution. The third and final piece is that I received a promotion at work. I had been a little bummed that I didn't get one at the end of year review time, but this worked out better because just three months later I'm getting another raise on top of that one.

So obviously I'm very happy at the moment. I'm a constant worrier, and to have 3 pretty major concerns in my life get a sort of resolution in the same week is huge. I just hope that I didn't use up all of my good luck at one time, because it doesn't seem to come around that often.