Life has been busy!!!! I am playing catch up on my blog posts, and because it seems like 3 months have been crammed into three weeks there is a lot that I want to post about. In my last "real" post, I was running on fumes... I was heading into Easter Sunday with no gas left in the tank; physically, emotionally, spiritually. I was done. Drained.
But Sunday went really well, and I had a couple of days to try and recuperate before the Intermountain West District Conference on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The IWD Conference was held in Sandy, UT at the Beacon Bible Church this year. They worked with the Hyatt Summerfield Suites and got us some sweet rooms at a great price.
This was the first Conference since the IWD was disenfranchised from the EFCA, so the banner that the IWD now flies under is the
Evangelical Fellowship of Free Churches or the EFFC. This is a brand new endeavor, and the basics are for any Church that agrees with the Statement of Faith they can be a part of the EFFC. This bigger gathering of Churches allows for relationships and helping one another out. More can be done with a bigger group, and if you are a small Church you don't feel like you are alone.
Cal Hanson was the speaker for the Conference (The first Evangelical Free Missionary to Japan). The rest of the Conference went well. We also got to do some thrift store shopping and came away with some great deals. Let me tell you, thrift stores in Utah are the way to go to buy any type of clothing. I would have never thought that I could have found good running clothes from a thrift store, but this trip proved me extremely wrong. You just have to know where to look. Everything from Under Armour to Ambercrombie and Fitch to Patagonia to The North Face to REI. It was the motherload of Thrift Store trips!
It has become a habit or tradition or maybe just something that we always do now; is to look for races wherever we travel. So we were in Sandy UT for the Conference and decided to see if there was a race down there. So we found the Cookie Chaser 2k and 5k in Riverton, UT about 10 minutes from our hotel. PERFECT! We signed up and were ready to run on Saturday morning. We would be done with the race just in time to get back to the motel to shower and pack up our stuff and then head to the final meeting of the Conference.
During the night it snowed about 1/2 inch on the Valley floor. But the sun was coming up and no snow had stuck to the roads. Looked like it was going to be a very picturesque morning to run. By the time we ran the sun was up and the temp. was about perfect. They had the option of running both the 2k and the 5k so we opted for both; why not race twice in one day??? The 2k was first with a lot of little kids running it, so I had to dodge all of them at the start line. Audrey and I ran it together taking it fairly easily. It was over pretty quick, in about 8:05 to be exact. Audrey came in 2nd female and I was 3rd male.
The 5k had more adults and more competition. I felt that I could set a PR for my 5k, so I took off and chased down a few of the leaders. I felt pretty good the entire race, and I was pushing it pretty good. After the halfway turnaround the few of us in the lead were pretty spread out and I guess that I was already in the place that I was going to finish. I ended up finishing 3rd overall with a new PR time of 19:29. Audrey was the first female and won a 75.00 dollar gift certificate to some fancy restaurant in SLC. All in all it ended up being just about perfect and we made it back in time for the end of the conference.
