Yes, Virginia, There is a Team AWESOME!

SO this past weekend the Traveling Running Shoes took their show on the road again.  I will provide two versions of this story.

Version One:  The abbreviated version of this story is as follows:

We drank beer. We flew to Virginia.  We drank beer.  We woke up and ran a race. We drank more beer.  We watched one of the most amazing MSU games of all time while drinking beer and then you guessed it, we drank more beer.   We ate an amazing dinner of Alaskan Salmon, Minnesota Wild Rice and roasted vegetables.  We drank more beer.  We slept.  We went for a recovery run.  We drank more beer.  We flew home.  THE END

Lessons learned on this trip.  Airport Beer is the absolute best; it enhances the flying experience by at least 33% although I believe more research needs to be done to support this theory.


Version Two:  The longer more exciting, less beer filled and more detailed version is as follows. 

For this one I am honing in on just the race experience so it doesn't get too long. We arrived at the race a few minutes later than planned because it was difficult to find the actual location of the start of the race.  Even with smart phones and GPS some remote places are still difficult to find and this was one of them!  So we arrived all jacked up from a somewhat stressful search for the trail.  Once we arrived, stress levels diminished and festive race mood filled our bodies and the surrounding air.  We quickly checked in, traded in our usual traveling shoes for a pair of test run Merrell shoes; At the Merrell table, they were giving out free sunglasses, if you were willing to run in their shoes and provide feedback about your experience in them.  We are suckers for free stuff so we totally signed up and we may have signed up for a raffle or two while we were at it!  Of course, we took a slew of pre-race pictures because we knew memories were being made and records broken.  In the span of about twenty minutes, we got ourselves completely prepared for the adventure...

The Substitute Traveling Running Shoes: faster than the average substitute teacher!

Pre race photo session!

Team Awesome Sally is taking the picture so she is not represented.
Left to right Miranda Daniels, Ivar Van Koten, Dominica Van Koten, Veronica Constantine.

OCtober 17, 2015  Willowsford, VA
State Number 4

After all that prep work we were exhausted possibly because of our prior day's beer consumption and lack of sleep, but we cared not.  We dragged our tired bodies to the starting line when we were directed to do so.  So the pre-race announcements were quite amazing.  The best pre-race announcements I have ever heard and I have stood through many a race day announcement so this is a HUGE compliment.  Generally I pay no attention to these announcements.  They tend to be boring and don't generally add much value to a race.  I generally zone out during such announcements and come to just in time to get trampled by a few people when the gun fires announcing the start of the race! However, this announcer was Australian. Man I am a sucker for an authentic accent so I was listening quite mesmerized actually as he said, "at about mile 4 you will travel through an active construction site so watch out for the bulldozer".

I totally thought he was joking until I got to mile four and saw for myself that he wasn't.  He followed up the construction site news with a safety warning to, "watch out for the low power lines shortly after the construction site".  He wasn't kidding about that one either.  The guy has a great accent, but he doesn't joke around!  Anyhow, the trail was a lot more challenging than we had anticipated which meant we were all slower than usual (except for the first mile when I tried to set a new trail record and ran an 8:04 mile!), but we still had three out of the five members on our team place in their respective ages groups and we were the first place overall team.  The Merrell shoes were quite comfortable and I think they may be magical. They singlehandedly (or double-footedly actually) saved me from biffing it at one point.  I had tripped over a rock and nearly went down, but then mysteriously I recovered before the anticipated impact of the ground.  It can only be explained by magic.  The shoes definitely were magical in that instance and somehow stuck to the trail. Mird wasn't so lucky she wiped out (twice) but she was okay just a little beat up and she said it had nothing to do with the shoes and everything to do with the "bloody hard trail full of rocks, dirt and roots".  We are hoping to find the Merrell shoes at a retailer near us so we can buy a pair.   The 10K was actually 6.82 miles so we got a little extra distance for our entry fee! And Merrell may come out to do the same shoe testing offer at Brainy Day next year which would be EPIC!


PS I also won a children's bike from one of the raffles I entered! And I never win anything.  Just goes to show you should never say never!
Vern Out

Porta....

I know they are called Portajohns and we've all frequented them at races from Maine to Alaska, Hawaii to Puerto Rico and presumably everywhere in between. Although we haven't run a race in any of those places yet, we know when we get there, the races will certainly provide portajohns!  The point is, I know their real name, porta-john, or outhouse, for the redneck or country folk like myself. Nonetheless, I have gone and renamed them porta"God"s and it is meant as a compliment, not as an inappropriate use of the Lord's name.  Here is how this came to be and I by no stretch of the imagination expect my other half (Mird) to support this! Today is all crazy Vern!   Mird is innocent and sane!


A couple weeks ago I was waiting in the frigid, windy, cold for the start of the  231 Race.  Dressed in nothing more than a tank top and shorts, I was possibly inappropriately dressed for the day's breezy, brisk, autumn weather. Many people expressed concern for the combination of my outfit and the ambient air temperature. They were concerned of the possibility of frost bite on my extremities on this particular outing. However, I felt pretty good about my attire because it was 44 degrees out and I always dress tank top and shorts for any temperatures above 40;  The way I figured it, I had 4 degrees to spare!

Anyhow given that I was dressed so scantily and the weather was so very bitter cold, I of course needed to go to the bathroom, pre-race style, so I waited in "the line" anxiously bouncing around until it was my turn.  When I was finally up, I sat there on a very unsanitary space, in a very unsanitary place, praying to God to help me get through my latest running commitment (23.1 Kilometers in cold, windy weather possibly inappropriately dressed) both alive and relatively unharmed.  And in that moment I had an epiphany.  Portajohns are my God place. I know it sounds crazy, but to me they are like Church.  I talk to God A LOT in portajohns oftentimes at races, but occasionally at other places as well. I TALK TO HIM A LOT PEOPLE. I probably pray more in portajohns than I do anywhere else on earth to be completely honest. And in these moments of prayer in disgusting portajohns across the great country, I do in fact feel supported and a sense of peace and tranquility come over me.  God shows up-- even in portajohns!  He shows up! And that is why I am going to start calling them PortaGods.  They are essentially gross little portals providing access to His great power and wisdom. It is AWESOME!  For me, PortaGods are the next best thing to dressing up and heading to church on Sunday.

After writing this I feel I should possibly do this...

throw on a portajohn and run a race. I'd be chasing down God in my God place!

PS I was totally warm enough so all you skeptics were wrong, Wrong,WRONG!

That is all,
Vern out