The Long Run Book Review

I just finished up "The Long Run" by Matt Long. This is the story of an endurance athlete and FDNY Firefighter who got hit by a bus. The book chronicles his amazing recovery, the very emotional feelings that he went through, and his triumphant return of running the New York Marathon, and then finishing an Ironman Triathlon. He should have died from all the injuries that he sustained in the accident, but he worked through all of those things and ended up doing something after his accident that most people don't ever do with a completely 100% healthy body. It is a great story and at the same time tragic. The suffering and trials that we face are overwhelming sometimes, but the ability to overcome those is even more astounding than the horrible things that can happen to us. The fact that God has given us a soul that longs to overcome the fallenness of the world is an incredible thing. We are clearly created for another place, a place that even if we aren't concious of it drives us to amazing feats.

Hale Freezes Over 10k & Birthday Celebration This Weekend!

 

I get to run a race as part of my birthday celebration! Audrey and I are heading to Orem, UT on Saturday to take part in our 2nd running of the "Hale Freezes Over" 10k. We ran this race last year, and we had a lot of fun doing it. The race is the first item on the agenda for my birthday day. We are also going to go to a running store and I'm going to get a new pair of trail running shoes. My very first pair actually. I plan on running quite a few trail races this Spring, Summer, and Fall. Even a few ultras hopefully. I've got a few shoes that I'm looking at getting Brooks Cascadia, New Balance MT101, are a couple. It's going to be a fun day, the weather is mostly sunny and a high of 43 degrees! Should make for perfect race weather.

Birthday Run

I ran 9 miles this morning. The morning of my 28th birthday. All before 7 a.m. and all on a treadmill.

My 1st Professional Massage

Thanks to an early birthday present from my wife I received my very first professional massage yesterday. It was perfectly timed too. I subbed at the Middle School in the morning, and I was completely ready to be done dealing with hormonal students. Audrey has received a massage from the woman who did mine, so she gave me the heads up on what to do when I got there.
If you have never had a massage it can be a little bit nerve racking when you first walk into the room because you get down to your unders. But you are under a blanket the entire time and as soon as the massage starts you completely forget about everything else and enter into this parallel universe where you are not yet asleep but you are not awake either.
Since I've been running inside more I noticed that my feet were hurting quite a bit and my hips have had some soreness in them. So those were the 2 areas that I said were the worst. The massage was an hour long and it went by so fast. When I turned over on my back she could instanly tell why my hips had been hurting. My right side was about 1/2 an inch higher than my left. All the muscles were tightening up on that side pulling it higher. So she went to work on loosening those (which was painful by the way) but when she was done my hips were aligned evenly again and I could totally feel it.
Today though my lower back is sore from all the manuevering she had to do. I'm hoping that when I go for my run today I can tell the difference in my stride. For a while I felt like my left foot just wasn't really coming down in the right place.
Anyway, go out and get a massage, say it's for your birthday.

Pinedale Indoor Triathlon Report

Well, it appears that I do know what I'm talking about. The swim portion of the Triathlon was a total bomb! I got beat by a man in his late 60's possibly 70's. But we will get to that humiliating portion of the report later.
Audrey and I left for Pinedale around 10:30 a.m. planning to stop at the health foods store and the Wind River Brewing Company, a great place to get some food and a cool atmosphere. The Triathlon started at 12:00 with different groups beginning at half hour intervals. Our start time wasn't scheduled until 2:30.
The roads were great and we arrived in plenty of time to get everything done before we checked in. The Pinedale Aquatic Center sponsored the Triathlon. They have a very nice facility. In our 2:30 group there were 7 people participating at the same time. The swim portion was first and I knew that I wasn't going to fair very well. We had 15 minutes to swim as many laps as possible. The horn blew and everyone took off, and I tried to keep up for about the 1st half of a lap and quickly realized that wasn't going to work. The rest of the time I spent switching from breast stroke, doggy paddle, backstroke, you name it I tried it. I am not a swimmer. I finished 8 laps in the 15 minutes. One guy finished 32 laps in the same time period. He is a fish.
I was glad that the swim portion was over, now I had to try and make up a little ground on the bike and the run. We had to be transported to another facility to use the bikes (I think they should move the bikes so you do all the events in one area). The bikes were supposed to be calibrated at the same resistance, but they weren't and the odometers were off, not giving an accurate reading of how far everyone went. That was a little bit frustrating. The bike part went decent; not that exciting to sit on a stationary bike and pedal as hard as you can for 20 minutes.
Finally we got to the run. I pretty much knew that there was no way I could make up enough ground that I lost on my swim, so my goal was to run the farthest out of anyone for the whole day. We ran inside on a track that is basically like the one at the Kemmerer Rec. Center. For my description of the Kemmerer Track and it being crowded link back to this blog post. Back to the race: The track is 1/15 of a mile, meaning you have to run 15 laps to equal a mile. We had a 15 minute time limit for this section as well.
I took off at a pretty fast pace and started lapping people after about the first 2 laps and that continued the entire time. There was one other guy there who I thought might be my competition, and he ran in an earlier heat. So I was cruising around by myself. Audrey was doing great as well, staying pretty close behind me. At one point I couldn't see her and thought that something happened, like she hurt her knee or something running on the curved track. When the end gun went off I had run 35 laps total - over 2.25 miles and I accomplished my goal of winning that portion. No one ran as far as I did.
Overall Audrey got 3rd in the 20-29 division - the swim really was the killer part. And I have no idea where I placed. But it was a lot of fun. Gave us a reason to get out of town on a Saturday and it was a great workout. We also got to talk to a few other people about the "Burn Your Lungs Run" on July 30th in Kemmerer.
Here are the official results with explanations as to how the points were given out. They didn't record the bike section of the race becuase the odometers were messed up.
http://www.pinedaleaquatic.com/thepac/Home_files/2011%20TRIATHLON%20RESULTS.pdf

Pinedale Indoor Triathlon

I

I'm participating in the Pinedale Indoor Triathlon tomorrow. It should be interesting to see how it goes. There are around 30 people doing the individual portion and a number of others who are doing either the relay or a pair team. Each segment (swimming, biking, running) is split up into time segments. So you go as fast and as hard as you can for that amount of time and when it is all over they add up your total distance to see who wins. 

The part that has me the most concerned is the swim. I'm not a great swimmer, and since it is the first event I really don't want to get exhausted from it for the bike and especially the run. So I plan on taking my time on the swim and not killing myself. Then trying to make up time on the bike & run. We'll see how well my plan holds up against the rest of the competition.

Race Report of Park City 5k Snow Stomp

Official Jadon Ross Report of the Park City 5k Snow Stomp:
I've been in the process of reporting on this race for the past few days and it seems like every time I sit down to finish something else comes up. But not today!
This was the first race for Audrey and I for the 2011 season and we were so ready to go. The night before Audrey ended up talking to some of our friends here in Kemmerer at the Rec. Center, Tim & Sandy (also runners), and said we were running a race the next morning. Well, as it turns out they decided to register and run the race too! Not much is better than running a race and having friends do it with you. So we met up the next morning and headed to Park City, UT, about an hour and a half from Kemmerer. We arrived in plenty of time and got registered and warmed up.
The race had two divisions: snowshoe or running shoe. We chose running shoe since we have never ran in snowshoes. Turned out to be a good idea. I would say there were probably about 100 people participating. The course started out on the Rail Trail, a good packed trail that was pretty easy to run on. It was an out and back with a section that went to single track off in some deep snow. This part of the course was supposed to be the "snowshoe" section, giving the advantage to those who had on snowshoes so they didn't sink knee deep into the snow with every step.
When they marked the course they went over this section with snowshoes so there was one skinny path where if you stayed on top of it you wouldn't crash through. Audrey and I started the race towards the front and after only a couple of minutes we were in 3rd and 4th place with only 2 guys in front of us with snowshoes. We kept a pretty good pace going for the first mile and we passed both guys before the 1.5 mile turnaround. After the turnaround was where the course veered up and into the single track. I went first and Audrey followed. I moved pretty good through the stuff, every once in a while halfway losing my balance and then losing half of my leg in a pile of snow. If you weren't paying attention you could easily misstep and be off the section that was packed down.
Being in first place overall I didn't want to look back through this section of the course, but as it came to an end and spit us back out onto the well groomed Rail Trail I turned around just to see where everyone was. Audrey was still in 2nd and she was a little ways behind me and that's all I cared about. I cruised into the finish with a time of 26:20, first place overall, and Audrey came in behind me in 2nd place with a time of 26:49. Here's a link to the official race results. RESULTS
Not a bad race day for the Ross's. We got medals for our placements. Tim and Sandy also placed in their age divisions; 1st for Tim and 3rd for Sandy. Pretty good for them too considering they ran 11 miles the day before! After we received our awards we headed over to Red Rock Brewing Co. for a celebratory lunch. A perfect ending to a great race!
Below are some pictures from the day in no particular order.

Audrey leading the pack.



Posing before the race start.

Our friends Tim and Sandy who decided last minute to run the race!

Looking back from the starting line.

We ran along the Rail Trail in Park City, UT.

The winning bib number!

Self portrait while running, not always the easiest thing to do.

It was a beautiful day to run: 40 degrees and sunshine.

Audrey receiving her 1st place female award

Audrey got 1st overall female and Sandy placed 3rd in her age division!

Me getting my 1st place medal.

The race was organized by Sports-Am, and their sweet red van.

Tim won 1st place in his age division!

1st place overall!

Telling the race director about how deep the snow was if you got off the track.

Park City, UT

First Race of 2011

Audrey and I are doing our first official race of the 2011 season this Saturday in Park City, UT. It's a short race (5k) but it's still a race!!! I am excited just to get to go out and compete. It has been quite a while since we've done our last "real" race. The race has 2 categories: snowshoe or regular shoe. We chose the regular shoe since we've yet to run in snowshoes, and we heard from a chiropractor that snowshoes can wreak havoc on your hips since your stride has to be wider apart.
The race starts at 10:00 a.m. which is nice. More time to drive down there and more time for the temps to rise. The weather report right now shows a high of 31 degrees on Saturday for Park City. That's about a 20-30 degree difference from what it has been here in Kemmerer lately. The venue for the race is the Prospector Square Lodge & Conference Center. It looks pretty nice!

Don't Expand Your Influence, Deepen It

I "stole" this from Don Miller. His blog is www.donmilleris.com

A long, long time ago I ran a very small publishing company here in Oregon. Part of my job was to create a database and sales system to chart our orders. I noticed that, while we had about a thousand customers, only a hundred or so of them were supporting our business. Initially, I wanted to expand the business, to grow our customer base even larger. We spent thousands of dollars in this attempt, visiting trade shows and printing expensive catalogs. But sooner or later I realized it wasn’t working. I mean we did see an increase in business, but it brought in about as much profit as our marketing efforts cost. So I changed our strategy.
We began to focus on the one-hundred customers who were already faithful and familiar with our products. I created a monthly newsletter that I printed right off my desktop and sent it to these hundred customers each month. I also made a call list and called as many as twenty or thirty, personally, every month. And I noticed our business increased, while our overhead stayed the same. These customers gave us more prominent positions in their catalogs and in their stores.
I’d say this general principal applies to much more than business. Perhaps those deep relationships you long for are all around you, they’ve just not been deepened yet. Perhaps the fulfilling, romantic amazement you’ve been reading romance novels to experience could actually come from that guy snoring in bed next to you each night.
This year, try focussing on what is already around you, try cultivating the seeds that have been planted, or the plants that are just producing a little bit of fruit. My guess is this will be easier than going out into the rocks to chip away at a brand new garden.

Christmas Came Late This Year

 

 I got one of my Christmas presents in the mail just the other day. A new pair of recovery tights from a company called SLS3. I did quite a bit of research into what I wanted, and these were the ones with the best reviews and a decent price. Since the science behind recovery tights deals with compression I wanted to make sure that I was getting my money's worth. 

The SLS3 Recovery Tights have graduated compression with it being tighter around the ankles and then working it's way up to not as snug. This is to allow the blood in your legs to be pushed along back up towards your heart so that recovery speeds up. Allowing you to run better and sooner after a hard workout. 

I ran 4 miles in the morning. Got the tights in the mail around noon, tried them on for a couple of hours, and went back to the Rec. Center in the evening to do some weight training and a Cardio Spin Class (Cycling). My legs felt good during the spin class, better than they have before after I have already done one workout. I also put them on for a couple hours in the evening when I got home before I went to bed. I haven't had the soreness and general tiredness in my legs since I've worn them. 

I am looking forward to wearing them on a regular basis after I've done my workouts to see how they keep working.

Rec. Is Crowded We Should Go

This winter one of Audrey's goals is to run outside as much as possible. Since running around our Rec. Center track (14 laps = 1 mile) can beat up ankles, knees, joints, hips, etc... pretty badly, and running on the 2 treadmills that are about 3 feet away from the white wall just doesn't make for that exciting of a workout. So we have been venturing out into the cold Wyoming mornings in the pre-dawn hours (average of 5 to -20 degrees).
Needless to say this has gotten a little bit tiresome, and when schedules change or other things occur that are out of our control we visit the Rec. Center to get our workout in. Now, most of the time the Rec. Center isn't too busy. Between 4:00-7:00 p.m. I would say is the busiest time normally and you can usually use the piece of equipment that you want. But this is not the case come January in Kemmerer.
It seems like everyone makes the same New Year's Resolution. "I'm going to go to the Rec. Center and workout!" The other night we were there and I was running on the track. Occasionally there are a few walkers, and by few I mean 2 and by occasionally I mean once a week, when I run up there. On this night you would have thought that the Rec. Center Track was the hottest spot to be in Kemmerer.
It felt like every lap I made there would be two more people waiting to start walking on the track. And walk they did, very widely, and didn't especially want to move for someone who was lapping them twice for every lap they made. That makes for a lot of "Excuse me's" while you are trying to run, and trying to make yourself as skinny as possible to squeeze up next to the wall so you don't have to slow down too much.
At one point during my run there were at least 15 other people on the track. Remember 14 laps = 1 mile, and the track is basically three people wide. It felt like I was running through a L.A. traffic jam, only it was a human jam. I even had to run in the middle of these three ladies because they wouldn't move over. That's a fun experience...
Well that's my rant and rave over people and their New Year's Resolutions. Good thing that I won't have to worry about most of those people come February.

Just Bragging...

 

This post is dedicated to my wife. I realized that I have written posts on just about everything else in life, and I have left out one of the most important things in my life, Audrey Joy Ross. So I'm going to take a little time and brag on her, just to let everyone out there know how amazing she really is. 

First on the list is that Audrey is hilarious. Some of the things that she comes up with catch me so off guard that I am laughing for a long time after she says it. I think one of the funniest things that she does is when she makes analogies. Just the other day she said that our dog's breath smelled like a concession stand. I thought it was pretty funny. 

Second on the list is that Audrey has deep convictions. When there is something that she either believes in or she thinks is important it is rooted in her core. She doesn't just haphazardly come by her convictions either. They are born out of her life experience and they hold such deep meaning that it sometimes astounds me. There are times when I wonder if I could ever be as passionate about anything as she is about her core values. 

Third on the list is that Audrey is an athlete. Let me show you a little picture montage to prove my point. 

Enough said on that point.
Fourth on the list is that Audrey is famous in her own right...
Check out these links:
http://www.theaudreyrossway.blogspot.com/
http://www.kemmerergazette.com/v2_news_articles.php?heading=0&page=72&story_id=2074
Fifth on the list and definitely not last, but all that I have time for right now is that Audrey is a wonderful wife who takes incredible care of her husband. She is a personal trainer and has helped people realize that their healthy lifestyle goals are totally within reach (with her help of course!). She is beautiful. She has wonderful blue eyes that pierce in a good way (unless you are on her badside of course!).
So cheers to you Audrey, I'm so glad that we have been married for 5 years and I look forward to running numerous more with you. Best running partner ever (she got me started running).

The Locals

Just took these today, right outside our living room window.



Defended My Title

The 2nd Annual Kemmerer Winter Triathlon took place on Friday morning at 11:00 a.m. The temperatures started out that morning at -17 degrees, but by the time the Triathlon started it had warmed up to a whopping -10 degrees. The Triathlon was sponsored by the Kemmerer Main Street Program. Their goals include helping the downtown area of Kemmerer prosper.

Needless to say there weren't very many particpants just because of the frigid weather. There was one team that signed up and 4 individuals. The course was a 1.25 mile cross country ski around the golf course, a 2.5 mile modified bike route do to excessive amounts of snow and drifting that left us riding on the road, and a modified running route that was a little over 1.5 miles finishing at the main street area of Kemmerer.

During the cross country section I only had a few mishaps... The first one being that my boot came disconnected from my ski, so I had to stop and put it back on, and the second one was that towards the end I got my skis crossed and had to stop and untangle them before moving on.

The bike ride portion was by far the coldest. My lungs were starting to burn at this point and I had a chest cold that I had been trying to fight off for the past few days which didn't help at all. I was in third place when the bike section was over. The runner from the team and one other individual were ahead of me. I rode my bike into the transition area and launched it into the snow, threw off my helmet, and took off running to catch the only guy who was ahead of me that counted.

I got first place last year, and I wasn't about to let my title get snatched away from me. When I first started running it felt like my feet were blocks of cement that I was just pounding away on, but after a few minutes they started to warm up.
As it turns out I ended up passing the guy who was in front of me and cruised in to first place for the individuals. So I did defend my title for the 2nd year in a row. If the race gets any bigger though I'm guessing that I won't come in first.


heading to the race... 4 layers on top & 2 layers on the bottom.