Marathon selected; training plan in place

I had not planned an official marathon for the fall since we had planned to move to Argentina about the time I wanted to run a race. A couple of weeks ago it was decided that we would not be going to Argentina until early next year. That left the fall open to scheduling a race.

Mississippi Coast Marathon
I looked through Marathon Guide to help me pick a race. My requirements were that it be a Saturday race and that it be within a couple of hours of some place I am going to be in my travels for the fall. I also needed a race late enough in the year to get a full 16 week training plan going. In the past I might have been able to shave a couple of weeks off a plan and not be too set back, but this year my running has been less than stellar. I have been running enough to stay in shape, but not enough to say that I am ready to consider a marathon a few weeks out.

The Mississippi Coast Marathon fits everything I needed. In fact, a full training plan allows me to start today and finish 16 weeks from now running the race. It is run on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I have not made my travel schedule that far out (boy am I behind), but I do know the plans are to spend Thanksgiving with my parents and some friends in Pensacola, FL. This marathon is about 2 hours from Pensacola.

Training Schedule
I chose the same training plan I had last year. It is a computer generated plan from Runner’s World. I will be running 3 days a week and cross training the rest. The mileage is a bit higher than the plan I chose last year, by just a couple of miles a week.

Last year I did not have any time goals since I had never run a marathon before. My only goal was to have fun. Now that I have a time to beat, 4:32:10, I have specific training pace goals for each of my runs. These should be reachable goals. May be too easy right now. Today I ran 1:50 per mile faster than the training plan called for.

Pre-race Plans
I am thinking of going over on Friday afternoon so that I can get a good night’s rest going into the race. Then if any family wants to come over and see the race on Saturday, they can get up and just drive over for the finish. Not sure if any are interested in that.

What to expect?
As a way to get myself back into blogging and keep myself motivated with the running, I will try to give you a weekly re-cap on my running like I did last year heading into the big weekend.

Packing up

We are still in Mexico packing up our things and getting ready for the big move. Fortunately we are doing this in stages. If you don’t already know, we are moving to Argentina. The plan was to be there in October, but it works out that January will be a better time for us to make the move.

When we left Mexico back in August of last year, we packed up most of our stuff and put it in a storage room. We did not know where we were going next at that time. There was a possibility that we would be staying in Mexico, but not in this area. It made sense to not sell all our furniture until we knew what part of the country, or world, we were going to next. Now that we know where we are going, we need to get rid of this stuff. Most of it is impersonal household items like couches, fans, trash cans and office supplies. Having been apart from these items over the last year, it seems to be a bit easier to put a price on something and watch it walk away.

Currently we are just selling to our friends. Later this week we open the floodgates to the general public. There is still a lot of processing to do to get ready for the opening of the garage sell on Friday. Coupled with that, we are preparing for a camp next week. There is a lot to fill our time with this week that could throw us off our goal of being packed up before camp starts on Tuesday.

As I said, this move is in stages. After this packing up time we will be taking what is left back to the US and putting it in storage there. We will continue to travel throughout the fall and then figure out how to get the necessary items into a few suitcases and start flapping our wings towards Argentina.

Among the things I have enjoyed doing while back in town is running on some of the same roads and paths that have become so familiar in my running career. I have not logged a lot of miles since being back, but I have enjoyed them.

Northern Deaf Camp

Yesterday was the end of the camp in Mexico that I have helped direct the last few years. This is also an end of an era. Today we said our goodbyes to the Deaf from the churches in the main part of the Mexican Republic. We are now headed to the Yucatan peninsula to spend a week of camp with them.

We started the week with about 80 campers. This grew all week with our final count up to 95. That is a good number landing right in our average range of campers. I am always amazed as to how many people come to camp based on how poorly we advertise. Out of the group of missionaries that have mostly been there the last 5 years, only 4 of the group of 10 were able to be there. We had plenty of help and teachers though since we mostly have the pastors and their wives do the teaching.

Camp groupWe probably had 15 people who had never been to camp before. One man from the state of Hidalgo (a new group this year) accepted the Lord as his savior. There were also 2 hearing men who surrendered to service.

Wednesday was our “battle day.” We had a dog bite, a lady step on a nail, a man get stomach cramps bad enough to justify an emergency room visit. There were three trips to the doctor for various reasons. Dissension in the camp among 2 groups grew to a head, however, as camp director I did not know anything about it until late that night. I was able to resolve it, in a way, on Thursday morning. While it seemed everything might fall apart on Wednesday, that was the day that the one man was saved. Everything worked out fine by Friday. I think we were all friends again by the time we parted ways.

Friday I was asked if I could take 3 people to the bus station. This is the first year that I have not been in a hurry to get away from camp. I got everyone off and started the trip to the bus station. My 3 had grown to 10. I took them and they said that there were still 7 more that needed a ride. I returned for the next group to find out that there were 9 more after that. On three trips to the buses I hauled 26 people in my van with only 3 seats. The back end was full of luggage. Only in Mexico can you pack 9 people at a time in 3 seats.

We took our time getting away from camp since we have no particular time schedule to get anywhere. The only town on our route that was of any size was only 1 hour away. We got into town in search of a hotel that had certain amenities. I turned down one hotel because of not having all we wanted. Every other hotel we found was full to capacity. I finally returned to the first place (almost 2 hours later) and they only had one room left, but their Internet connection was out. I have already been a week without Internet and if I am taking the next few days like they were a vacation, I really want some communication abilities.

The reason all the hotels are full has to do with this being the weekend between the 2 big summer vacation weeks in Mexico. We are also in La Huasteca region. It would be like Yellowstone NP to US citizens.

We finally found a hotel that had a room available. Our casual evening in town to relax and eat at a fancy restaurant and get some reading done ended up with us grabbing a greasy chicken from a grocery store and eating it in our room at 9:30 at night. Rarely is anything as easy as it seems it should be.

Back in Mexico

What a wild whirlwind tour that is life over the last few weeks. (I have to go back and check to see where I left off). Oh, yes, Gettysburg.

After Gettysburg we spend a few days in Syracuse, New York with some dear friends. He is the pastor of a deaf church and president of a mission board. I was privileged to preach for him on the Wednesday night that we were there. We have always loved his church people and the fellowship we have with them. Bro. Steve took us to a science museum one day while we were there. Steve is a geek from the 50s. As a child he attended a special session for electronic engineers on transistors when they first came out. He has been a hardware hacker ever since. The science museum turned him into a kid with the rest of us.

Made from toothpicksAfter NY we were back in PA for the camp that I was speaking at. It is a camp for children (hearing) ages 7 to 12. Not my favorite group to work with. But the beauty of this camp was that I was just the speaker. I only had to show up for my sessions and was not expected to entertain the children the whole time. Thank the Lord.

It was a wonderful week. There were at least 7 who accepted the Lord as their Savior.

From Sunday to Sunday that week I spoke in 13 different services at 7 different venues! Busy. I also coordinated getting some body work done on our van after our neighbor in Florida backed into it. How many weeks ago were we in Florida? Well, it didn’t get fixed immediately after the crash, but we got it fixed that week in PA.

We made the long trip from northern PA to Pensacola, FL in a day and a half. This allowed us to be home 3 full days and a partial day to get ready for the next month long trip. During that week we put 2 new tires on the van, installed a transmission cooler and air bags for our rear springs. The cooler and air bags are to help with having to tow a trailer out of Mexico with the things we are bringing home.

Friday afternoon we left FL and bedded down in LA. Saturday from Baton Rouge to McAllen (border town) TX. Sunday I preached in a church in McAllen and then prepared the final things we needed to cross the border into Mexico. The crossing went very well and now we are in a hotel a couple of hours south of the border. We are only about 3 hours away from our destination tomorrow which is the start of our northern Mexico deaf camp.

We will be at camp for a week and then drive to Merida (where we lived the last 4 years). In Merida we will be selling/packing/giving away stuff that we had stored there. Then we have another week of deaf camp in the Yucatan area of Mexico. It will be tough saying good-bye to everyone this time. We know we are not going to be coming back any time soon. Last year when we left we knew we would be back this summer. But now that time is upon us and we will say our “farewells” this time around.

In some ways it seems we are coming home. In 16 years of marriage we have never spent so much time in one place as we have the city of Merida. Even though we were at the Bill Rice Ranch for 6 years, we traveled 9 months of the year. With the exception of a couple of weeks each summer, we have lived in Merida year round for 4 years. It is certainly home for our children and home for us. Will be fun being back there, but tough to leave this time around.

I better be careful or I will get all drippy eyed.

Gettysburg

Never plays with cannons kids!Amazingly, today was the first time in all of our traveling in Pennsylvania that we were able to visit the Gettysburg National Military Park. We were scheduled to be in New York today, but when I found out that we were less than 2 hours from Gettysburg, and we had no meeting for tonight, we adjusted our travel schedule to keep us in southern PA  one more day so we could visit Gettysburg.

Monument at the Gettysburg National CemetaryWhen we got to Gettysburg the rain was torrential. We made it to the new visitor’s center, but because of the rain, I dropped the family off close to the building. They ended up totally soaked walking in while I was parking the car. By the time I got parked the rain had stopped. We had rain off and on most of the day.

We bought a CD set with audio that takes you through the Auto Tour of the park. This is a tour with 16 stops. These stops are explained in the main park brochure. However, this audio tour went into much more detail of what took place at each location. It was about 1.5 hours of audio on a 2 CD set. Since there is no charge for entering this park, we thought the $20 CD was worth it. I am glad we bought it. It really was pretty good at giving an overview of the park and the events of the 3 day battle.

I took a few pictures today, but the camera is out in the car. I am not sure if and when I will get some pictures uploaded.

If you get a chance to visit the park, it really is worth the trip. We intentionally did not try to see everything today. We did the overview tour today with plans to return in the future to study out some of the monuments and sections that would give more detail about the battle.