Hilly Goat 2024 Recap

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It’s been a very long time since I’ve written anything… I’ve successfully managed to keep up with my MBA coursework and am just 3 classes away from graduation in December. I also have been able to keep up with my running goals for the year completing a 10k in April, a 9-mile event in June (I actually did 12 miles), and now a half-marathon in August. I also did a 27-mile hike while we were in Washington in July. Past that… have not really kept up with my goals much, hence me not posting on here. But since I’m here today let’s talk about how my race went yesterday.

The Plan

In my 10k I felt like I pushed too hard on the first half and ran out of steam about 2/3rd of the way through. In my 12-mile event I had been more willing to walk in the early part of the race and felt that paid off with somewhat better endurance down the stretch. For this one I wanted to go out slower than my goal pace and then hopefully feel ready for the back half where I could pick up the pace more and finish strong. My goal was a 12-minute pace which seemed plausible. I had done a few 6ish mile runs near 11 minute paces and not felt like that was overly taxing. There was more elevation on this course (approx.. 1400 ft) but that’s still only about 100 ft/mile which is not unusual for some of my runs. I was concerned that what might happen is I execute my plan for the first half of the race but then why I need to turn the pace up feel a bit worn out and just can’t do it and end up being well behind my goal time since I did not bank any “good” times in the first half.

The Race

I started off a little too far back in the pack for the pace I wanted to go at to start. I was literally behind a couple that had their 10-year-old with them. Most of this race is on a single-track (think mountain bike path) so we’re running single file to start. I say running but I was really just walking quickly. There was another runner between me and them and it’s not like we were all falling a great distance behind the rest of the group so I just waited until he decided to pass them after a few minutes and went with him. I stayed with him for a while as we passed a few others before ultimately settling in behind a runner that was much closer to the pace I was trying to run for the first lap. I don’t mind getting paced like that because it keeps me from going out too hard. Eventually she decided to take a break to walk so I forged on ahead.

From even before the race had started I noticed my heart rate was reading quite high on my Garmin compared to my normal resting heart rate. This continued into the race with my watch repeatedly warning me that my heart rate was high (entering zone 5 – roughly 172) in this opening lap. I didn’t really hold back as I was trying to stick to my pace goals but even in the easier stretches I was barely back into the 160s. I knew this was going to be a real problem but figured I might as well just keep trying to stick with my pace for as long as possible.

The laps (3 laps of about 4.5 miles) end with a pretty brutal hill, 116 feet over 0.38 miles, the final 0.2 miles of which are a paved path at a 7.5% slope. I knew I was going to take that hill easier so I slowed to a speedy walk. I didn’t feel too bad and had gotten a lap in around the pace I wanted. Tried to walk a bit more as I went across the top back to the start line to let my heart rate drop and then picked up the running again. I reached the 6-mile mark in 1:13:24 which I was content with but it was becoming clear to me there was no way I was going to be able to push on the back half to reach my goal. At about 6.5 miles I stumbled on a root but managed to catch myself before falling. Since my goal time was out of reach I decided to be smart, slow down and walk a bit, and not be too unsafe.

The next 5.5 miles were a mix of walking and running with me struggling to focus on walking quickly when I slowed to a walk. I’d try and walk the uphills and run more on the downhills and level parts. Near the end of lap two the fact that I still had over 4 miles to go felt pretty daunting. My mile times pretty quickly started to drop off. 13:02, 14:10, 14:52, 14:58, 15:35, 15:29. My second 6 miles was 1:28:05, about 15 minutes slower than my first. Still I hit the 12-mile mark in 2:41:29 (about 17 minutes quicker than my event in June). The 13th mile was pretty hard and I could barely muster a jog for a few small stretches. Mostly just walking and feeling totally beat. And then I got to that hill.

The Finish

I had one guy pass me near the end as we were coming up to the last hill. He was moving a lot better than me at that point! When we got to the paved part I did not feel like I was capable of making it up without a break. So I stopped at the bottom and just tried to rest a bit and let my heart rate calm down. I was light-headed and probably as physically exhausted as I’ve ever been. My watch says I only waited about 3 minutes before managing to walk for 45 seconds and took another 90 second break. Either way 5 minutes after arriving at the hill I had barely budged. I felt like I might not be able to make it up the hill and if I did get up there I might cross the finish line, sit down, and never get back up.

Eventually I just started trying to take it 30 steps at a time. Mostly couldn’t even make it that many before I felt I needed a break. Bit by bit though I made my way up the hill and eventually the slope lessened a bit and I was walking to the finish line to receive my finisher’s medal. I made it back to the nearby shelter where the aid station was and got some Tailwind (electrolyte drink) and sat down and started to recover. I don’t believe I was the last finisher (33 of us did the half-marathon, they had a 5k and a 10k as well) but I wouldn’t be surprised if I was the most destroyed at the end. Below is my run/walk/idle chart for the final excruciating 12 minutes it took me to cover a quarter mile. No, I didn’t run at all it’s just categorizing the pace that way for some reason.

The Lessons Learned

As this is only my 3rd ever race and my longest so far I have a lot to learn and this race taught me a lot of valuable things. First of all I need to stop throwing unrealistic goals out in front of me for these races. Road/sidewalk pace does not translate very well to dirt trail pace. It’s a different kind of running and much less predictable. I’ve done some reading online and everyone says do not worry about pace. Worry about effort and take what the trails give you. If you’re doing the same race you’ve done before or a trail you’re familiar with you might be able to use previous results to see what a benchmark might be but you can’t just plop “12-minute miles” onto a race and know what that would mean out there. And when you’re talking about effort level it’s all about your heart rate and not over-exerting yourself and blowing up. For a textbook definition of that see my heart rate chart for this race…

Ugly for a race that ended with me struggling to keep going. So next time I need to pay more attention to my heart rate even in the first lap and if I’m struggling to keep it down I need to try walking even before I feel like it. It was possible in the 10k to blow up a bit and fight to the finish for a mile. It’s a whole nother story trying to fight to the finish for 4-5 miles. Also it may only be 100 feet/mile of vert but the total matters more than the amount in each mile, the accumulation does your legs in. Longer distances also mean you have to be that much more on your game or the punishment is much worse.

On that note too I badly screwed up my nutrition and hydration for this longer race. I have gained more weight than I wanted in the last 6 weeks so I had been trying to avoid snacking as the week came to a close and didn’t do any extra eating in preparation for the race. I think all I had between lunch Friday and the race on Saturday morning was an egg with some cheese and sandwich meat, a slice of bread, and some pudding. I was running on an empty stomach basically. If you’re going to stay in the lower heart rate zones that might not be the worst as your body is looking to fat reserves for fuel in those zones but as you get into zone 4 and 5 it wants glycogen carbohydrates to burn. This is why marathon runners are known to carbo load in the days before a race. Spending three hours out there means I probably would have benefited from taking in some calories during the race as well.

I also drank only about 1.5L of water between the time I woke up and the end of the race. Just based on how long I was out there that was probably not enough. I think next time I’d like to get up a little earlier on the morning of the race so I can get hydrated better. Then make sure I’m arriving there early enough to feel like I have plenty of time to get prepared and use the restroom before the race.

I think the half-marathon distance was a hard one for me to approach too. Clearly if I had been doing a 10k today and only running 6.2 miles I would have finished feeling good and without needing to walk much at all. That’s a race I can run at this point. A longer race like the 21-mile one I want to do in October is clearly too much for me to think about just running so I’m going to be inclined to walk plenty. The half-marathon sits there in the middle tempting me to try and run basically the whole thing but probably beyond my capabilities to do that at this point. Maybe on a fairly flat road course I could do it, but not on trails with 1400 feet of elevation.

Up Next

I’ve got about 6 weeks until our Market-to-Market relay where I will be running an unknown number of miles in at least 3 legs. I’m hopeful I can keep my heart rate down better because those should be fairly straight forward miles more comparable to my training runs. If so and knowing none of the legs will be longer than a 10k I’m hopeful I can avoid burning out so badly and put together a solid day. I think I can do a good number of miles in zones 1-3 at this point if I can just keep myself from over-exerting myself. Then in about 2 months I’ll have my 21-mile event at Lake Cunningham. Don’t believe that will have quite as much elevation as this one did and I’m committed at this point to approaching it with more focus on my heart rate and trying to put out consistent sustainable effort for 4-5 hours, whatever pace that may be at.

2024 Goals Update – February

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As school got up and running for the Spring semester it’s been a shaky time when it comes to my goals. I’d say it’s a combination of always trying to do too much and having some days lately where I just squandered time and didn’t apply great effort. Tomorrow is another day though!

One month goals – January: Begin blogging, February – Begin scheduling routine events in my week

Wrapping up my January goal… I added an RSS feed button and a subscription option to the right side of my site! I had assumed a subscription option would be as simple as people enter email address, people get emails. Ehh… not so much. The current setup works with with a site called EmailOctopus that manages the subscription list and allows me to send out emails manually to the list. I think it’s probably a fine option but certainly more and more I feel like this website thing is a little over my head!

For my February goal I had chose trying to work some regular “events” back onto my schedule. These are things I had done in the past and found were helpful in trying to balance out my weeks.

Here’s what I’m working with…
Zoo – We have a zoo membership and don’t live/work that far from there. Ideally I’d like to get some down there most weeks for an hour to get a short break to see some animals. I did make it down this week for… about 15 minutes before going to dinner with Chantelle. I saw a fish with a shellfish in its mouth!
Sunrise – This may be the most important thing I can schedule. I like to pick one day a week to spend outside at sunrise taking it all in. The way the sky changes from 30 minutes before sunrise to 30 minutes after is pretty remarkable. I enjoy just sitting there thinking about my life or walking as well. These times are great both out in nature or in city settings. This week I sat down by the Lake in Heartland of America Park, perhaps a bit chilly but a good time of reflection.
Night Hikes – This is more of a monthly thing. We haven’t gone on one since the bad one in August at Nebraska National Forest that had us hiking 1.5 miles down an abandoned grown over trail catching burrs all over our shoes and only staying remotely on track because of AllTrails on my cellphone. These are often best near a full moon when it’s easiest to see without artificial light so I’ll be looking to do one in a couple weeks.
No Screen Time – This is one of the easiest things for me to schedule but hardest to actually execute. Despite the title I’m not totally opposed to being on the computer during this time but would want to avoid social media, browsing the web, listening to podcasts, etc. Ideally there’s some non-computer things to work on during this time though. I would like to get a break an hour a day, and for a nice 4-hour stretch once a week. I got this on the schedule a few times this week but can’t say I executed it the best. I did listen to a few albums though yesterday while doing my best to avoid podcasts in the afternoon.
Chantelle Time – I see some value in trying to put a couple hours aside each week to do what my wife would like. This probably needs to be more formally communicated (i.e. Thurs night I’ll clear my schedule for whatever plans you want to make) to really work right. I also would like to spend more time each week prioritizing some things on my to do list that involve her but that’s been hard to make time for often in the past. We’ll see if I have any luck going forward.

While sitting at sunrise I found myself thinking it might be a boost to me to spend an hour a week reading a fiction book somewhere nice. I was picturing a warm sunny day in the park but theoretically this could be somewhere like a coffee shop or a library as well. I’m a bit of an entertainment snob who thinks books are probably a superior form of entertainment to movies/TV shows (and especially those terrible video games). But I don’t read much anymore and most reading I do is non-fiction. I haven’t gotten lost in a book nearly enough in the last 20 years. Making my self spend some time getting back into that habit might help balance out my productivity focus and make me a more well rounded person. Going to try to incorporate this into my weeks more going forward.

Three month goal – Prepare house for having regular visitors

Our house is generally more clean than in the past but still need to get together with Chantelle and discuss what we feel needs to be different before we’d feel ready to have people over regularly with less advanced notice. There have been some things that might have been good occasions to invite buddies over for (CFB Playoffs, Super Bowl) but I’ve had to work overnight after most of that stuff this year. I keep thinking next year I want to feel like I can invite people over without having to think twice about it.

Six month goals – Weight loss, disciplines, connecting with family

Have not made any good progress losing weight. Too much snacking around the house. My habit as of late is to do things like buy 5 pounds of chicken breast when I need 2 pounds for a recipe. Then proceed to eat half a chicken breast of the leftovers everyday when I come home from work as a snack. And a few handfuls of cheese and some crackers and maybe some pickles. I feel like this is holding me back from better exercise so it’s something I need to get serious about next week. Good thing there is some leftover breakfast casserole in the fridge and I’m sure to have leftovers from potluck tomorrow…

Have continued to struggle to find time to focus on my disciplines I found beneficial in 2023. I’ve done a good job of turning cleaning the cat littler into an easy habit everyday but less so doing the NYT crossword, reading a few pages of Pearls Before Swine comics, reading my Bible, and stretching. Still find time for Facebook videos though as a distraction…

Have been able to connect with family much more in the last couple weeks. We had a nice long lunch with Chantelle’s parents a few weeks ago and I was able to talk to my Grandma Green on the phone that week as well. Just over a week ago my mother’s aunt passed away and so there were a lot of chances to see family on that side with the funeral last week. Really enjoyed a nice dinner at my parents with my siblings and grandparents there. This is the time of year where it would be pretty easy to not see anyone again until Easter so might take some intention to keep this going.

Full year goals – Running events, MBA program

Got 3.75 mile runs in 10 times over the last 14 days. Some of them were really good – Monday I did 3.75 miles of hilly Hitchcock (with some muddy areas to slowly go around) in 51 minutes. Only would have to do that 27 times in 34 hours to complete the 100 mile race there… ha! Others were pretty poor – My 3.75 miles at totally flat Boyer Chute was nearly identical in time. Today my legs felt tired and I just didn’t feel any drive to try hard, just wasn’t interested in pushing. I tried some more motivational music and was still not going until the Rocky song (Gonna Fly Now) came on and it felt really wrong to not even try then. It wasn’t like I felt super up for it but I started focusing on my stride and the basics of what I was doing and I had my best quarter-mile of the day. A lot of my battle with running is a mental thing and about putting out a good effort even when I’m not really eager to.

I’ve been able to get my MBA assignments done on time so far this semester but haven’t gotten the reading done as early in the week as I would like. There will be some bigger assignments throughout the semester but a lot of it is 1) Do the reading 2) Post on discussion board. Ideally Mon/Tues I have the reading done so I am not scrambling to post to the discussion board at the last minute. That’s going to require having strong starts to the week and so far that’s not happened.

Couple of weeks ago… Water levels were low enough this offshoot of the Missouri River was pretty much dry other than the snow. I got to run a bit in the river bed!

Sunrise at the park!

Well thanks for reading. Hope you’re having a good February and finding some success in whatever you’re striving after this month! May you see the challenges flying at you and deftly avoid them to make the winning play like Nikola Jokic.

2024 Goals – January

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So one of the lessons I took from my 2023 goals project was that setting 23 year-long goals was tough stuff. I just couldn’t focus on all of these things at once and so somethings never became a priority. For goals that were about establishing habits sometimes I really didn’t need to track them for a full year, just trying to change my ways with intense focus for a month would have been a better course of action. So for 2024 I decided to vary my goals between ones that would last a month, 3 months, 6 months, and the full year. I tried to come up with goals that matched the timeframe they would fall in. So without further adieu here are my goals for January 2024.

One month goal – Begin blogging

Hey that one seems to have worked! I took steps beginning early in January to get this site up and running and while it took a couple weeks longer to actually get some posts published I did get that done by the end of the month. We’ll see if I can make it a regular habit going forward to get on here and share some updates and by the end of the year I’ll have a better feel for how important this is to me going forward.

Three month goal – Prepare house for having regular visitors

Made some progress in this one so far. The main floor is generally cleaner than it was when 2024 arrived. The important thing to work on in the next few weeks is getting together with Chantelle and discussing what we feel needs to be different before we’d feel ready to have people over regularly with less advanced notice. And then figuring out how to build those things into our lives as regular habits.

Six month goals – Weight loss, disciplines, connecting with family

I knew in December that when I reached 219.9 it was going to be followed by indulging in some holiday treats and putting on some weight. That definitely happened and I’ve weighed in over 230 a few times this year already. Managed to get back down to 223.4 this morning though. My goal is to reach 200 pounds by May and then decided from there how I would like to proceed. I haven’t been under 200 pounds since early in college so I really don’t know how I would feel at that point. I’m not going to hit my end-January goal of 215 but getting to 210 by the end of February is theoretically possible or at least being much closer to my target weight than I am today.

I wanted to focus on the same disciplines I found beneficial in 2023 but wasn’t able to keep up with as much as I’d like. That’s cleaning the cat litter, doing the NYT crossword, reading a few pages of Pearls Before Swine comics, reading my Bible, and stretching. So far…. much like last year. I do the cat litter pretty much everyday and wasn’t struggling with the others until things got really rocky at work almost two weeks ago. Since then I’ve really been out of rhythm in life and haven’t been prioritizing things so well. Cat litter is still getting done thankfully but I’ve been getting distracted by the Facebook deluge instead of investing my time in these disciplines.

Haven’t connected with family much so far this year. We spent New Year’s Eve into NYD at Chantelle’s parents which was nice but that’s been about it. We’re having lunch with them tomorrow so that is a good way to get back into this habit. Hoping that having this as a goal for the first half of the year and thinking about it fairly regularly will spur some habit building.

Full year goals – Running events, MBA program

Having established running as a regular habit I want to stretch myself in 2024 to attempting some running events of increasing distance and see how I hold up and enjoy the experience. My tentative schedule…
10k (6.2 mile) trail run – April 27th
9-mile trail run (3 hour limit) – June 22nd
Half marathon trail run (13.1 miles) – August TBD
Market to Market relay (likely 10-12 miles over 3 legs) – September 28th
21-mile trail run (9 hour limit) – October 20th
Half marathon trail run (13.1 miles) – November 28th (Thanksgiving)

I have no concerns about the 10k and the 9-mile event seems pretty doable. The half marathons are a little daunting to imagine but for Market-to-Market relay in 2022 I did almost 10 miles over 3 legs and I was a much less prepared runner than I am today. The 21-mile event is the one that gives me pause but to do it in 9 hours is averaging 25 minute miles so I feel like if I want to will myself to the finish line I will.

Much like with my weight, where I don’t really know how I’ll feel about where to go next once I hit 200 pounds, I need to learn more about what I think of these kind of events before seeing where I want to go next with running. There are two 100-mile races locally each year (that’s not a typo) along with 39-mile and 50-mile events. There are more options like that if you are willing to drive a few hours regionally and then there’s the insane Cowboy 200 – Yes 200 miles along the Cowboy Trail from Norfolk to Valentine. Even with 84 hours to accomplish it that’s just beyond my comprehension. Anyways not saying my future includes any of those longer distances but I am definitely interested in the idea of pushing myself past what most people would dare attempt and I’ll learn a lot from how I enjoy the events I want to do this year.

And then obviously completing the MBA program this year so I can move forward with my career is a major goal. It’s going to be a busy 10.5 months until my hopeful graduation with only small breaks around the summer semester. My real goal here is to stay on top of my classes better than I have previously. For a couple of my fall classes where I could get away with it I never even read much of the assigned material, stuff I’m actually interested in and would like to read at some point still. So I’m hoping this semester not to fall behind so much and to keep pace with the class schedule. If I’m going to read it eventually why put it off and be scrambling to catch up?

2023 Goals

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Heading into 2023 I’d become convinced that I was probably being held back a bit by not ever setting goals for myself and pushing to achieve them. So for 2023 I set 23 goals for myself and tracked my results. It was… revealing. I did manage to accomplish some things I might not have done without them but I also had a lot of things I didn’t even come close to.

Positives!

The best results for 2023 were probably that I managed to exercise 300 hours and lose enough weight to reach 220 pounds. I didn’t start prioritizing exercise until late June and barely made it to 300 hours in the final days of the year. That included some golfing (I usually walk) but I didn’t count stretching I was doing for much of the year so I definitely feel good about the work I put in. It’s probably not an accident that while I was prioritizing exercise I lost 40.8 pounds after July 2nd of last year. I also was more focused on my diet, reducing how much I ate overall rather than trying to “eat healthier”. Snacking probably holds me back from losing weight quicker but it’s still been a positive direction. I had originally wanted to reach 220 by August so technically I didn’t make that goal but I did get there by the end of the year at least.

The other goal I definitely hit was spending 500 hours outside in 2023. This goal led to me intentionally spending more time outside in the spring/early summer reading and I bought a hammock that led to some great outdoor naps. As the year got on it was pretty clear I was going to make this goal easily and I hit 520 hours before December and stopped tracking it. It helped that I did a decent amount of newspaper delivery last year. I didn’t count the entire time I was out there but when you’re driving around with the windows down constantly getting out to walk up to porches there is a good chunk of that which should count as being outside!

I wanted to spend more time with our parents in 2023 and had a goal of 12 occasions with each. We definitely hit that with Chantelle’s parents and I think we fell one short with my parents. I’m not sure we really went out of our way to get together much and it would probably be nice to do more intentional getting together outside of the obvious reasons on the calendar but this was a positive year in this area.

Not the worst…

There were some goals I wasn’t able to hit but had some results in. I wanted to run a mile in 8 minutes by the end of the year and in mid-November hadn’t even gotten under 10 minutes. One great run on Thanksgiving gave me an 8:25 mile that didn’t complete the goal but wasn’t bad at all. I also had a goal of going on 36 hikes with Chantelle. Hiking was sporadic and we made it to 24. We didn’t prioritize doing this enough throughout the year so it mostly occurred when we were out of town on vacations.

I wanted to play video games with my neighbor 50 times in 2023. He’s got some mental disabilities but playing video games has been a natural way for us to connect and he really enjoys bringing his PS5 over for us to play. We logged 34 times but that fell off significantly in the fall as I got busy with work and school and I wish I’d found a way to make more time for him. Kind of a similar story with reading – I had set a goal of 24 books and hit 15 before the end of August but only made it to 19.

I have a few things I’ve wanted to get more consistent at doing daily and so I tracked how often I accomplished them – Cleaning the cat’s litter boxes, doing a crossword puzzle, reading a few pages of comics from Pearls Before Swine, reading the Bible, and stretching. There were stretches of the year I was great at this and stretches where I was terrible. I’m more convinced than a year ago that these are all important things for me to be in the habit of. Also I got to the point where I can do the NYT crossword most days without feeling like I’m lost and need to google everything. That was a highlight of the year for sure, I’ve really enjoyed the feelings doing the crossword gives me.

Negatives

There were a lot of things that I didn’t even come close to and that feels kind of depressing. I enjoy playing board games/card games so I set a goal of just 24 times and ended up with… ZERO. I wanted to start having people over to our house regularly and the only occasion we did was when Chantelle’s sister’s family was in town over the summer. I wanted to start having potlucks regularly again with our church ministry group and we did have ones in October and November but that was much later in the year than I wanted to start.

I love naps but naps (30 minutes) often become fail-naps (think like 2 hours) with the way my life is structured. I hoped to limit that to 75 fail-naps and I didn’t even come close to that. I usually sleep 4.5 hours a night so I’m often up early and am home from work by the afternoon so nap time is easy to schedule and easy to just go back to sleep when a cat is being cuddly. I also wanted to limit my social media/useless internet usage and I don’t think that went very well. I watched way too many Facebook videos in 2023. It’s like they have an algorithm serving me up content they know I’ll find irresistible.

Lessons Learned

I definitely learned that focusing on and tracking 23 goals throughout the year is… a lot. There was a decent amount of documenting I needed to do on some of my hours goals so these were constantly top of mind. On the other hand I had a goal of putting up Christmas lights, something that only needed a few hours in November, but I never did it. It was just never something that needed to be done today and so it never became a priority. I came away from this overall thinking that setting a goal and tracking your progress isn’t a bad thing but it’s really about building habits that will last. I did that with my exercise goal and in 2024 I’m not tracking my hours anymore but I don’t anticipate that will cause me to stop exercising.

The other lesson I feel like I learned is that it’s going to be pretty common to look at your goals at the end of the year and have a lot of them you didn’t hit. The point of them is to push you to strive for more and so naturally you’re going to fail to check all the boxes. Technically I only hit 2 of 23 goals but I accomplished so much more in 2023 than I did in say 2018.

Welcome to 2024!

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Last year my cousin Leah and her husband Casey travelled to Togo for a missions trip and she posted a few updates about it on a WordPress blog. We don’t make as many trips to Colorado as we would like so I’m not sure we’ve seen them more than a couple times since they got married in 2016 but it was wonderful to read about what was going on in their life. I’ve often felt the best part of Facebook is the updates you get on your friends and family’s lives but it’s hard to sort those things out from the deluge of posts Facebook on everything else, not that I’m ignoring the deluge – I’m gladly drinking from that firehose too often.

So as I was considering what goals to set for 2024 I decided one of them would be to setup a blog where I could provide some updates on what is going on in my life for friends and family who would enjoy reading those. And thus we are here.

Sidenote – I’ve had domains and some web hosting for almost 20 years now. This isn’t totally new to me but it’s also not something I am an expert on or spend much time with. My recommendation for anyone else following this path would probably just be to create a blog on WordPress or a similar blogging site and not bother with creating your own website to start. I’ve spent entirely too much time just trying to get to the start of my first post. I personally covet the idea of having a personal domain I can use going forward for more than just blogging so that was some added reason to pursue my own site but for the average person just start a blog on a site and get to writing!

Life Update

So what am I up to as we begin 2024? Well I’ll throw a curveball and instead of talking about work or family I’ll start with saying I’m someone who has now been running regularly for about 7 months. I’ve run off-and-on since maybe 2017 but have started making that more of a priority in the last couple years. Chantelle and I ran in the Market to Market relay (a race from Omaha to Lincoln) in October 2022 with some friends and I was running regularly in training for that as well as running at the end of 2022/beginning of 2023 but got sidetracked after that and didn’t log a mile from February to the last week of June 2023. Spurred on by a goal to exercise 300 hours in 2023 I covered between 32 and 38 miles a month for the rest of 2023. Talking with some friends the night before Thanksgiving I realized I hadn’t really been pushing my limits much in the fall and decided to run a hard mile the next morning. I recorded a time of 8:25, probably my fastest mile since… high school if not before that. I started pushing myself to run longer distances and after running 3.5 miles in 33:18 in early January I’ve been going for 3.75 mile treks when I go out now. That does involve some warm-up and cool-down walking but a good 3 miles of running each time. The hills near where we live can be rough but I can tell they aren’t hitting quite as hard as they did in the past. I’ll talk more about this another time but I’m planning to do some trail running events in 2024 with escalating distances. They escalate from a 10k in April to possibly a 21-mile event in October. I don’t know if that’s realistic but I want to push myself this year to get some experience with these longer events and see if I enjoy them.

One obstacle to getting enough running in would be that I’m in my second year of the MBA (Master of Business Administration) at UNO. I decided in 2022 that this was something I wanted to pursue and started classes in January 2023. I think most people take at least 8 semesters to finish the program but I feel like I’m making up for lost time and would rather get it behind me as soon as possible so I’m trying to push through in 6 semesters. I’ve got 8 classes done out of 17 and am taking 3 classes this spring. One is a full semester elective (Organizational Theory and Design) while the other two are core 8-week classes (Organizational Behavior – which I’m taking now, and Business Analytics – which will be in the 2nd half of the semester). So far the program has definitely been a lot of work but most classes have not been overly rigorous and I feel like professors want to pass you with a good grade if you give the effort.

Work wise I’ve been involved in helping manage circulation at the Omaha World-Herald in various roles since 2019. That started off as a part-time Assistant District Manager role and I’m currently the Metro Operations Manager helping oversee our two metro offices and 6 district managers. It’s not been a smooth 5 years with challenges left and right and a little of what I wanted to see accomplished come to fruition. At one point from August 2021-May 2022 I was running the Northeast office and we cycled through 5 new-hire district mangers alongside me who all lasted no more than a few months (the shortest being 1.5 days!). I spent a couple months in there being the only manager at that location working 7-days a week keeping everything from falling apart and had an 10-week stretch where I averaged 101.3 hours of work a week. I learned a lot about what I’m capable of if I push myself and have a lot more management experience. Things are much better now, still not good but much better, and I don’t work nearly those hours anymore.

Chantelle and I bought a 100-year old house in North Omaha in 2019 and have been happily up here since then. It has the kind of issues that are common with older homes that haven’t had a lot of money invested in them but it’s been a great fit for us. We’ve got 3 cats and 2 snakes. Two of the cats are brother/sister that we got as kittens right after we got married while the other one showed up on the back porch in November 2021 and demanded to be allowed to move in with us. When we got him cleaned up at the vet we found out he was chipped and had a previous owner but they never were able to reach the previous owner so he stayed with us. We’re still at Omaha Bible Church where I’ve been going since summer 1998(!) and our main ministries at this point are running the activities side of the church picnic each fall and a group called 10:31 where we try to have fellowship opportunities like potlucks.

I think that’s a good enough update for now. I’m hoping to post regular updates on here and am going to try to keep this mostly about what’s going on in my life and not my predictions for the Super Bowl or anything.