Bloody nipples, RIP, Mother’s Day

Ever since I did deep squats on Wednesday my legs were killing me.  I wanted to run with the Saturday morning group.  Friday night I got out the foam roller and tried to roll some of the soreness out of my legs.  I woke up Saturday at 4:45 am with legs that were still sore but I deemed them good enough to go run.

The group run was lightly attended because there was a triathlon in Fort Myers that many people were participating in.  I got there about 10 till 6 and there were only a few cars in the lot.

As I was outside stretching to get loose it started to rain, hard.  I figured I was going to be soaked with sweat anyway so I didn’t see any point in trying to escape the precipitation.  In a very short period of time I was thoroughly soaked.

Well I decided to just start running instead of standing there and getting soaked.  I didn’t see any of the people that run a pace similar to mine anyway.

I wound up running the entire 7 miles by myself, not exactly why a drug myself out of bed and drove 25 miles for.  When I reached the halfway water stop I noticed my nipples were hurting.  I looked down and saw the wet, bloody streaks on my chest.

I was just wearing a cotton t-shirt.  Evidently having it pre-soaked in the rain accelerated the raw nipple syndrome.  I pulled off my sopping wet shirt and ran with it in my hand for the trip back.

Despite running by myself and the bloody nipples, it felt good to get a longer run under my belt.  I think the last time I ran 7 was at least a month ago.

When I got home after a brief WoW session I began the weekend’s labor. In addition to weeding, feeding the birds, tending to the garden and cleaning the pond pump I also elected to do full lawn maintenance, mowing and weed whacking.

Ali and I went on a brief biking session Saturday afternoon on one of side streets near us.  It was literally the first time Ali has been on her tri bike since her crash.    Ali was quite tentative about riding the bike, she is basically scared of the bike now.  I understood her fear but also told her the only way to get past it is to just get on the bike and keep riding.

She took turns between the normal and tri bar position.  She was literally shaking when she would stop at the end of the street.  Ali isn’t much of a risk taker in everyday life, when you throw in a scare like she had on the bike, it is going to take awhile for her to overcome.

At some point during the weekend she was saying to someone how she absolutely does not want to take her new bike out in traffic and will just use it for races.  I immediately pointed out to her that that proclamation made no sense.  You are going to do all of your training on a different bike than you will use in a race?  I told her if that was her intention we should just return the tri bike.  She later revised her statement saying that for now, she doesn’t want to use the tri bike on a busy road.

I took her tri bike out on the road myself for a short test ride later in the weekend.  Ali said how it feels so much different than her battle tank Dawes road bike, so I wanted to see for myself if I noticed anything.  I must have looked ridiculous riding a bike that was a foot too short for me.  The bike is light and nimble but I didn’t notice anything overly sensitive compared to what I am used to.

Of course I have a lifetime of bike riding experience. Ali has a fraction of that.  Unfortunately it appears that my trepidation of her jumping to this sort of bike based on her experience level had some foundation.

Around 4pm we loaded the dogs in the van for one of their favorite things, a trip.  We had to go down to the running store to pick up the last minute paper entries for the race.  The excitement the simple question “Wanna go for a ride?” generates on the dog’s faces is hilarious.

Saturday night Ali made yet another bang up meal using many components from our garden.  This time she supplemented some left over ziti and tomato sauce we had with vegetables and turned it into a type of casserole.  It was really good.  She hit two dinner homeruns in one week.

Our Mother’s Day started incredibly early to get up for race timing.  In this race I proposed a change to the way we handle the sign in of pre-registered runners where we would break the runners into three different lines based on their last name.  The change seemed to work well as the normal mile long pre-registration line we see at most races never developed.  Everything went smoothly, until 32 minutes into the race.

I had walked away from the timing table to go post interim results.  When I got back to the finish line I noticed something looked different.  The window for the program that links to the timing box was not there, WTF????????  This program captures the times as they are posted real time, no program, no times.

I quickly fire the program back up but by that time there was a 5 minute window of times that I missed, great.  As I was scrambling for a game plan I theorized that somebody walked up while I was away and was hoping to get a peek at results.  They probably intended to minimize the program window, mis-clicked and closed it instead.

There are two issues there.  First, obviously nobody should be touching my f’ing timing laptop when I am not there. We didn’t have the timing equipment covered with a tent, it was just laid out on a table so maybe it didn’t look “official”  and “hands off” enough.  Second, a program as important as the timing interface shouldn’t be able to be closed so easily by a mis-click.  In the past, it used to pop an ARE YOU SURE? box before it actually closed which would save you if you didn’t actually mean to close the program.  Somewhere in recent version of the program, this function was removed.

We will be making an effort at future races to discourage touching of my stuff.  I also sent a request to the timing software author to reinstate the safety net in the program. Luckily I found another way to recover those 5 minutes of missing finish times.

There has been talk in the club of the need to have additional people trained to run the timing system.  I agree with the general premise, I can create a basic how to for the process that would allow someone to get through a race.  The issue is when something goes wrong.  If this issue popped up for someone else working off of written directions they had zero chance of figuring it out.

After we got home I hurriedly finished up my post race work so we could get ready to pick up mom for a Mother’s Day lunch date.  We decided to go to Carraba’s since they were open for lunch.  We were pleasantly surprised when we pulled up, the parking lot was not even a third full.  We sat right down in a nice booth.

We had a standard Carraba’s experience with really good food and a really nice waiter without breaking the bank.  Mom especially enjoyed her meal.

We gave Mom a Publix gift card along with her card, meal and plant.  It is a very practical gift for her to help with the slim budget she is living on.  When we dropped mom off back home she said now we didn’t have to be “bothered” with her for awhile.  The sad thing is I think she may actually believe I view it that way.  I think she transposes the way she feels about my grandmother onto me which is totally nuts.

When we got home I knocked out the remaining indoor chores.  Ali said she just wanted to chill to enjoy the rest of her Mother’s Day so after a couple hour nap she watched tv and read some of her mountains of reading material.

On Saturday night I saw some sobering news on Facebook.  A former classmate of mine was killed in a car accident.  He was a popular kid in school that played many sports.  He was actually a teammate of mine on the bowling team.

I am still young enough that it is a pretty shocking event when one of your peers dies.  From what I understand, Steve had 5 kids, adding to the tragedy.  Rest in peace buddy.