Sunday, December 14, 2014

Superior Stocking Run and Christmas Tree Chopping


Today the boys and I went up my friend Tim Enwall's place (Tim is the CEO of Revolve, which got bought by Nest, which got bought by Google - congrats, Tim!) and chopped down one of his trees. Well, actually, two of them. Our first was a beauty - forty feet tall, but it fell badly and the top, which is the only part we want, was damaged. Bummer. We went to our second choice and made sure it had a clear path to fall and made sure it fell that way. This tree was at least 30-feet tall, maybe 40. We took the top 12-feet and dragged it down the hill to the truck. We should have brought a tape measure and cut it down to 9 feet, but we did that back at the house.


We put it up during halftime at the Bronco game (yeah! We won!) and Sheri is decorating it now. Sweet. We feel like such lumberjacks...

Thanks, Tim Enwall! We are loving this new family tradition. We've done at least the last four years, maybe more.

You can see all the photos here. Homie will be so proud of me running in shorts. Including are some photos of the 5K Sheri and I did this morning. And check out the Puffin (or whatever that is with the white head) trying to hang out with all the Canadian Geese. Thanks to Derek for the race photos. He came out in his pajamas and ran around to three different locations (others in the race commenting about how he seemed to be everywhere) and delivered our extra clothes to us at the finish. This 5K was in our neighborhood  and came within 100 yards of our house.

The race started with one mile completely downhill. I wanted to be conservative and run a 7-minute mile, but I found my heart rate was ridiculously low, so I just relaxed and didn't fight the 6:30 mile caused by gravity. The next mile and a half were all uphill and my pace soared to well over 7-minutes/mile. I probably ran a 7:30 second mile, but my watch reported 7:15, but it went off well before the 2-mile marker. I finished with a time of 21:56 - 7:04 pace. My goal was 7:15 because of the hilly course, so this was a success. I did win my age group, but that wasn't much of an accomplishment since I won by about 2 minutes! 

Sheri's goal was to run under 8 minutes/mile, since she hadn't even run three miles continuously in months (injuries, of course). She ran 24:12 for a pace of 7:47/mile. She won her age group as well. 

Darren Cahill and his team at Racing Underground Outstanding Job! The course, the volunteers, everything. Especially the incredible hot chocolate and soup after the race. On a cold day like this, that was awesome. Also the super fast and efficient distribution of the awards. The timing was unreal! So quick. So many informative screens. Then every racer gets an email with a link to their results and free photo downloads. Sweet. I'll be looking for more Underground events! 


My results are here. I was 30th overall (out of 404) and 21st male. Yes, nine chicks beat me. Crush me, actually. I'm so slow anyway that "getting chicked" isn't really a thing for me. I always get chicked. If I didn't it would be a shock. Except at the Tour de Flatirons. I've never been chicked there! :-)

Full results are here.

Oh, and here's a video of the tree falling.