Dean

Last Wednesday a new family in town called us and asked if we were all going to die. I think we somewhat calmed them down. Being from Kansas City they were not familiar with the fact that hurricanes are not totally predictable. They have never been through the maddening F5 complex of refreshing the web browser every 5 minutes to see if NOAA has updated their 5 day forecast cone, only to see the path change drastically for the better or worse.Hurricane Dean Advisory 21

Yesterday I called this family and asked them if they wanted to go bowling with our church group today. “Bowling! Are you crazy? We are all going to die on Tuesday!”

More calming.

The hurricane may hit us Tuesday, something that I don’t want to be nonchalant about. It is a pretty major storm coming in. Currently 150 MPH winds and expected to strengthen before it hits us. But I also know that there is nothing we can do to change its path. We need to prepare the house as much as we can, but also know that Tuesday is a long way away in terms of what the storm could do.

Right now we are planning to ride it out here. Dean has to travel 200 miles across the peninsula to get to us. If we leave we will be faced with the possibility of not being able to get back for several days to start the clean up. By staying here though, we may be faced with several days/weeks without power.

We will see what happens. Right now I have to get ready to go bowling.

Mayapan

Today our main activity at camp was to go to the old Mayan city of Mayapan. This was inhabited between the years 1200 and 1440 AD.

This was the first Mayan ruins that my wife and I had ever seen back in 2001. Today was amazing to see the difference. When we were here in 2001, they had just started doing a rebuild of the city. Though I don’t remember everything that was there back then, I do remember that there was much more growth on many of the structures. Also, there were many foundations for buildings with piles of rocks beside them.Mayapan

Today it seemed like we did not walk in the jungle as much to see the place and there were many more structures. Where there were piles of rocks before, there were now buildings. In the piles of rocks previously, there were many rocks with numbers on them. That was to help when they finished repairing the inside of the structure, they would be able to place the outer rocks in the original place that they came from if they knew where they were before.

I think everyone had a great time at the ruins. Many of our church congregation has never been to this archaeological site. It is only about 45 minutes from town and is not overrun by tourists.

After the trip to the ruins, we went back to the campground and played there for the afternoon and had 2 great church services this evening. No rain today.

First day of camp…and the rains came

Today was our first full day of Deaf Camp in Yucatán. We had 14 people in our group.

We did the normal camp stuff of playing games and eating hot dogs. Since this is a day camp (we are not sleeping at the campground), we had to be up early to gather everyone and get started. We had a slow start this morning due to broken down buses and having to wake people up to come.Volleyball in the rain

When we arrived at the camp there was some work going on in the auditorium. There were electricians installing some lighting (for which we were thankful this evening when it got dark). That delayed us even more. The morning schedule was all a mess, but we managed to have time to get our services in. Then we had lunch and got ready for soccer in the hot weather.

After soccer we set up the volleyball net and were having a grand time when the rains came. All, except 2 girls, enjoyed the rain. We played volleyball longer in the rain than out.

Other difficulties kept us from doing all our activities this afternoon, but all had a good time. We just shifted things around and I don’t think anyone missed much.

Tonight in church while we were singing the last song before the preaching, a bat flew in and would not leave. With the Deaf, it is important to eliminate all the visual distractions that you can. When they are looking at a bat flying around, they are not paying attention to the speaker. Eventually the bat got tired of us trying to evict him and he flew into a cubby hole in the church. I think that was his home. I watched the rest of the evening and he never came out again.

Sometimes they are just hard runs

Yesterday morning I went out for a 3.5 mile tempo run. With a 1 mile warm up and a .5 mile cool down, it was going to be a nice 5 mile run. The plan was to take the first mile easy. Somewhere between 10:30 and 11:00 would have been fine. Then the next 3.5 at a pace between 9:07 and 9:30.

While the first mile was on the fast side of my range at 10:30, I felt like I was slogging to get that fast. It was difficult. I sped up the second mile to 10:00 minutes, but it was hard to get that fast. The third mile was 10:07 and I was spent. I ended up doing a walk/run for almost another mile just to get home. I was well off my desired pace and even at a much slower pace I did not feel at all capable.

Since I have only had a couple of truly horrible runs in my running career, I don’t feel too bad about this. I don’t want it to happen again any time soon, but I am not letting it get me down.

Today I was supposed to do a 4 mile recovery run. Being that this week is camp and I had to be meeting people earlier than I normally even run, I ended up cutting my run short to about 3 miles today. I am supposed to run my recovery runs at 11:30 / mile, but 10:30 is what I did today and it felt easy.

Why one day the pace feels hard and the next easy, I may never know.

Tomorrow is an off day and then I am supposed to run 5.5 miles Saturday. I probably won’t be able to run so will have to shift my training around next week to still get it in, but keep all the other runs as well.

Competitive Runner

I ran across a website today that has gear reviews for runners. I was particularly interested in the shoe reviews. I have written one review and will be working on another one later.

There are many other things the site offers, but the shoe reviews interested me the most. I thought I would just point it out to other runners who read here. It was new to me.

CompetitiveRunner.com