Marathon coming soon…

Well, a marathon is being run. But I am not running in it. Maratón de la Marina will be run June 18 from Mérida, México to Progreso. It seems like it will be an official distance (unlike any other race I have run here).

I will not be running in this marathon for three simple reasons, the first of which is the most frustrating. I did not know about this race until now. Just 2 weeks before it is to be run. Though, I have to say that I have gotten more warning on this race than any previous race. Normally I find out about a race 1 to 4 days before they run. Therefore, no training for specific races are done. I just hope to find a race and then jump in.

The second reason is that all races here are run on Sunday. This one will be no exception. Starts at 6:00 am. The best possible time I could hope for would be well over 5 hours. That means church would be over before I could get from Progreso back to Mérida. Out of the question.

Which brings me to the third reason. I am no where close to being trained for this. I am focusing my efforts right now on staying running and in a few short weeks I will start training for my next half marathon, the Phedippidations World Wide Half Marathon.

Sell me what I want, not what you want

We have some friends who have recently moved to town and were looking for a house to rent. We hooked up with a real estate agent one day. I told him exactly what we were looking for. It needed to be 4 bedroom and 2 1/2 bath. Bigger was fine, but it could not exceed a certain amount of money per month.

He had just the thing. Or, at least that is what he said. He described it on the phone. Well, except it was twice as much per month as what we said was possible. He just had to show it to us because my friends just might be willing to spend the extra money once they saw how beautiful it was. I don’t know about most people, but I do know me and my friend. If there is a budgeted amount for a project, especially something like rent that goes on forever, I am not willing to pay more than the amount set aside. But at his insistence, we went to see it.

It was awful. The house was not at all impressive. It did fit the bedroom/bathroom criteria, but was otherwise a mess on top of costing way too much. He had another house just down the street. Same issue. We live in a city that is 550 years old. I think these were probably not the first 2 houses built in town, but pretty close to it. I know many people move to town and want an old “colonial style” home. But that is not what we were looking for and I specifically told that to the agent.

Another house later, and we were ready to ditch the agent. It was a disaster. Our friends have moved to town to live and work, not to retire and fix up a house that is falling apart. Not to forget, all of these were out of their price range.

After going over again what we were and were not looking for, he thought of one more house. He described it and it sounded great. So we drove to the fourth house. It was exactly what they were looking for in the right price range. It was in a neighborhood that they did not like and therefore they ended up not renting that house, but it was what they had been requesting all along.

Why is it that some sales people feel compelled to sell you the product that they want you to have and not the product that you have requested? The first three houses were not only not what they wanted, but caused the agent to lose a sale. Even if they had really liked the fourth house, they were no longer interested in dealing with that agent.

New website

Welcome to the new “My Scattered Thought Spot.” The name has been changed because I got a great deal on this web address.

I am thinking about changing hosting providers for my main website, www.dpeach.com. In doing so, I thought I would give 1and1.com a try. They are currently the host for this blog and domain. I get 2 free URLs with the hosting package I chose. So I checked out www.thoughtspot.com. Already taken, so I added the “my” and got www.mythoughtspot.com. It is registered free as long as I keep them as my host.

I have had a little difficulty with the change over of the database to the new server, but have not lost anything yet. The comments are all gone from the site, but they are still in the database. I just have to figure out how to get them to show up.

Welcome to the new blog location. I will work on promoting it and seeing if we can get some readers. Of course I have to actually put something up of interest.

The Second Half

I have been very bummed about running since the half a couple of weeks ago. But the desire to run again has come back this week. I have been getting back into my other exercise programs since the half too. I had backed off of my main exercise (Tae-Bo) to dedicate to the running in preparation for the Indy Mini.

I now have my next half to train for. This will be the Phedippidations World Wide Half Marathon on the weekend of October 7 and 8. This will be a “virtual” race. We will all either run an official half during that weekend, or we will map out a course and run it on our own. Very much like I did the Indy event.

Join us for the race. You don’t have to be a listener to the Phedippidations Podcast to participate. One of the goals is to get new runners involved. As time goes on, the race directors will have training programs available. They will offer registration so you will be assigned a number, there are even plans for t-shirts for the event.