Disc Golf and Shiner

Put another one in the books, fellas. This was my 8th trip in 10 years time. Pics to follow

Day 0
Neifert, Bej and I meet in Kansas City to spend the night prior to an early morning departure to AUS. Dinner at the Jumpin Catfish. Catfish, quail, cole slaw, hush puppies... yum-o.

Day 1
Checking out airport talent at the MCI and boarding non-stop flight to AUS. Flight time: 1:50... solid.
Jay drives down from Rockwall to pick us up at the airport and spirit us away to the first course of the trip: Cat Hollow Park in Round Rock. A new course for us and a nice choice for a starting round. Searight-esque in length and a few fewer cedar trees to lose our frisbees.
Drive to Williamson County Park which is also new to us. Unfortunately, the course was closed due to recent rains. Maybe next year. Jay also develops car trouble and we have to detour to a shop in Round Rock where we drop it off and rent a car to continue. A couple of hours wasted there.
Drive rental car to Pease Park and partake in the "Pay Toll by Mail" lanes on the Route 1 tollway. Apparently, they take a photo of your license plate and send you a bill later. It will be interesting to see if we see a bill from having been in a rental. Pease was fairly busy to start, as the weather was purt-near perfect. Traffic let up as we went along and we didn't have to play through or have anyone play through us after the first 6 holes.

To be continued...

or "Sorry Little Buddy".

We're all familiar with restroom urinal etiquette, right? Basically, if there is a row of urinals and there is a guy using one at the end, you go to the opposite end and like that. I think I might have breached protocol the other night when shopping at the mega-grocery. I had to go, so I ducked in to the men's room. This restroom is a two stall/two urinal arrangement and was vacant when I entered. No problem, I took the urinal closest to the door and proceeded with business. Then I heard the door slowly creak open, little footsteps pitter-pat closer, stop directly behind me and a little sigh. Out of the corner of my eye I could see it was a little kid with a pitiful look on his face. It was then I realized I had taken the "low" urinal and the other one was too high for him to reach.

I'm in a "Couch to 5k" unning program. It's designed to get the sedentary runner-wannabe off the couch and into running. I was a runner in high school but that was over 20 years ago. I scoffed at the plan and how seemingly easy it was going to be. I considered skipping a few weeks to really get a jump on things. I was scolded and told to do the program as written. It's not just that perhaps my cardio-vascular system could handle jumping ahead, it's that my long-intactive joints and muscles would pay a price for starting too fast. When I think back to previous attmepts at starting back running, I remember that that's what kept me from continuing. I was getting horrible shin splints and I'd stop running. I'm in Week 5 of the program and I've been injury-free so far. Maybe they had a point.

I've been running at the State Gym track (12 laps/mile) since it's winter where I am. I wouldn't mind running in the cold. It's the icy roads that are preventing me from getting out there. The problem with track running, especially on a short track, is that it's just so freaking tedious. Plus, since it's early January, we have every resolution maker in there trying to do the same thing I am. It's almost impossible to settle into a pace and just pound out the distance. I'm always getting passed by some octogenarian with a hairy back.

I'm not sure what brought this on, but I've made the decision I'm going to run a marathon. There are a lot of impressive, more atainable goals out there so I'm not sure what made me decide on this. Mind you, I'm not planning on doing it this minute or even this year. I haven't run seriously since high school and that was 20+ years ago. So, I'm starting out slow. I've set forth a bunch of intermediate goals to ramp up to the big race. First off, I'll train to run a 5k sometime this Spring. After that, there's a cool night 10k in July. After that, there is no firm timetable but I'll likely gradually increase my weekly mileage and hit some other longer races as they become doable: 15k, 20k, Half Marathon, then the big one. My plan is to do it sometime in 2009. They say you have to train 18 weeks to be ready for your first marathon and that's if you have a solid base of running already, so I'll have to choose a good one and count back 4 months before I get a serious bug in my butt for it. Maybe I'll do the Honolulu Marathon...

It's been how long since my last blog post? I guess it's about time I got back to it. Not that anybody really cares one way or the other.

Oh, I started a running program. A while back, I started being really conscious about my food intake. Not that I don't eat the same food any more. I just don't eat quite as much. Well, I ended up losing about 15 lbs. between August and now. Actually, I lost it between August and about 1 month ago and I've leveled off. I could stand to lose about 20 more, so I figured I'd work in some physical exertion and drop the rest.

I hate running. Oh, I did plenty of it in high school when I was on the cross-country team. I just thought the long distance was tedious. Now it's 20-some years later and I'm coming back to it. I found a good program designed to ease people like me back into it and I think it's working. I actually look forward to doing it and I feel guilty if I miss. I'd like to run a couple of 5k's this coming year and maybe move up to 10k in the future. We'll see. For the immediate future, I just want the cardio-vascular endurance to ride a couple days of RAGBRAI in July. I did a single day last summer (70 miles) and it almost did me in. We'll see how it goes.

I really should do it more often.