While ensuring we comply with the new FTC requirements this is also a friendly reminder to support Team Cross by starting all your Amazon shopping at http://www.teamcrossworld.com/amazon.

Up to this point Team Cross hasn’t received any free or reduced price products or race entries for reviewing on this blog. If that happens in the future I’ll be sure to mention it somewhere in the post and they aren’t guaranteed a good review!

Feel free to start shopping at our wish list!

Past Posts

Two years ago I ran the CdLS 5K. Someone stopped me recently when wearing the shirt and asked if I knew anyone with CdLS.  I said it was just a race I had run.  He had a son with CdLS and thanked me for helping raise money for the cause.  That was pretty cool.  I bought a pair of Pearl Izumi shorts to wear for my marathon and reviewed them.  I wrote about education in Africa as part of my World Vision fundraising.  I run a lot on the Midtown Greenway, it is a great place to run and bike.  Foto Friday was from the Outer Banks Killer Dunes 2 mile race.

Last Year’s Mileage

Run: 39.3 Miles
Bike: 30.3 Miles
Swim: 300 Yards

This Year’s Training

Last week I felt a little off one day, ran the next and felt great, then didn’t feel so well again.  On Friday I woke up with a pain in my neck and lower back (when I stretched).  I opted not to run and by the evening I was starting to feel achy and exhausted.

Saturday I woke up with a fever, achy, chills, and still with the 2 pains.  I convinced Christy to take me to Urgent Care and we arrived right before a big rush.  The doctor spent maybe 10 minutes with us – listening to my symptoms and quickly checking my body over.  She ordered a CBC to check my white blood count.  The lab tech had trouble drawing my blood because I was so cold, he managed to get enough to  test my blood.  We then met the doctor again and she said that things looked fine in my blood so I had some type of virus.  She indicated that she couldn’t test me for H1N1 aka Swine Flu.  She also said that she couldn’t prescribe the tamiflu to me anyway so there was no reason to test for it.  I was also missing 2 of the “indicating symptoms” of H1N1.

My symptoms don’t really match any specific virus that I can find online.  I don’t have enough for lyme disease or West Nile.  WebMD has lots of great diseases that I checked out over time, but none really matched my symptoms.

I mostly have a fever while I’m sleeping or napping.  Which is what I’m supposed to be doing.  My temps have ranged from 96.3 to 102.3 since Saturday.  Friday was the last time I slept through the night.  Every other I’ve been awoken by the fever.  When I haven’t had a fever I feel pretty good and life seems normal (except for the being cooped up at home part).  But once the fever hits I don’t feel so hot again.

Luckily, I’ve been able to eat full, regular meals without an stomach or intestinal distress.  That is the only upside of my being sick.

Over the last week I’ve had to miss work everyday, a board meeting for the YNPN in the Twin Cities, SALT (English tutoring), a race, 2 group runs, small group, and had to reschedule an appointment with a physical therapist for my running.  Not to mention that it has been an amazing week, weather wise.

I’m planning on going to a doctor today.  Hopefully they will be able to do something for me, besides just rest and drink lots of fluids.

I’ve been tweeting about my illness. Check out this link to see what I’ve said  #stupidvirus

By the weekend I was feeling a lot better, but not quite good enough to risk going for a run or bike.  Soon enough.

This Year’s Mileage

Nada.

As a treat I’ve picked 5 highlights/blog posts from the last two years (out of almost 500) to share with you as a special present.  This was no easy task so I hope you appreciate them!

1) Completing my first marathon and dedicating it to my African friends by raising money for World Vision. 

2) I also enjoyed reading and sharing thoughts from the Sacred Art of Running. 

3) Being in Minneapolis wouldn’t be complete without winter running (almost getting hypothermia) and running along the Minneapolis Riverfront. 

4) A delicious post about running strategies. 

5) Who doesnt like the idea of ruining their next race? 

Finally, a must read post that I stole from someone else talks about proper t-shirt etiquette.

Yes but that still isn’t a lot of time, true true.  Sleeping takes up over 17 weeks a year.  Work takes up another 12.  Both numbers assume you work and sleep on average 8 hours a day.  So that right there is 29/52 weeks of your year.

Other set things in my schedule include attending church which is about 1 week a year, teaching ESL which is also about 1 week.

I would project that blogging both here and on my personal blog consumes at least 2 weeks a year worth of time.  That includes research, writing, editing, commenting on other’s blogs and being involved in the online community of bloggers.  We are now up to 33 of my 52 weeks.  If you throw in e-mail, my blog reader, and other social networking I’d estimate that I up to 36 weeks.

What does all this mean? All of this means that I spend almost 3/4 of my time away from my beautiful wife doing things for me!  I would love to be able to blog and be engaged in the social networking as a full time job, but that isn’t really a reality for me.  It is hard to admit because I enjoy it so much.

Ok, so the point of this long post is to say that I’m adjusting my posting schedule.  Most of you know that I currently post 5 days a week.  I’m going to change that to 3 days a week, keeping the week in review on Mondays and Foto Friday.  This hopefully means you will get a high quality post on Wednesdays! I will have the freedom to post on Tuesday or Thursday if I so desire or if something timely comes up.

Thank you to my faithful readers for your support and feedback.  Please keep it coming and I look forward to a great 2009, in running and all the areas of our lives!

This is a good time to think about what is coming up and also to reflect on where your life is going.  I’ll be honest I haven’t thought too much about specifics for 2009 or really examined my goals from 2008.  I do know that I didn’t meet any of my time goals but I did PR in many races which is great.

What are your plans for 2009?

I’m currently planning on running both a spring and fall marathon although the details of both are still fuzzy. I would like to PR and break all of my time goals from 2008:

5K – sub 18:00

10K – sub 40:00

Half-Marathon – sub 1:30

Marathon – 3:10 (Boston Qualifying)

2008 Yearly Mileage

Running – 1374.2 miles or 177 hours or just over a week!

Biking – 1024.8 miles or 6 hours

Swimming – 2 miles

Have a wonderful new year!

From our family (and the Holidazzle light bulbs) to you and yours!

Merry Christmas,
Team Cross

With Twitter you are able to tag your tweets as part of a broader discussion using something called a hashtag. One of the popular uses of Twitter is during conferences or meetings to help broadcast what is going on or for possible meetups. To help facilitate this happening someone decided to start using hashtags to make searching for related tweets easier. A hastag is simply using the hashmark or pound symbol (#) before a series of letters. It was made really popular during the San Diego fire and was being used for the Iowa flooding. If you go to a Twitter search engine such as Summize (now Twitter Search) and searched for the hashtag #IowaFlood you’ll get hundreds of Tweets about the flooding.

Why is this important? Every major group, organization, conferences, etc has a hashtag. As of today I haven’t seen any for running. I think it would be nice to find other Twittering runners and see how their workout went. Most of the runners I follow on Twitter tweet a summary of their daily run or race report.

I was going to propose the already famous ORN be used for a hashtag, but a quick search pulled up some unsavory content – add a “p” to the beginning. So, let’s scratch that idea! Back to the drawing boards, I did some more research and found that some people had already started using #run, but that is a little simplistic and maybe boring! Then I came along a tweet from @runnershigh that #runlog is being used by Twemes to create Twitter Running Meme. Twemes also allows you to get an RSS feed of tweets posted with the hashtag.

Therefore, I propose that from here on out we all use #runlog to tag running posts.

Anyone else have thoughts on a better hashtag?

Used appropriately I think this would be a great addition to our running community.
Step One: For it to work properly you should follow @hashtags on your Twitter account. This will help facilitate the hashtags bot to find your tweet and index it in their service.
Step Two: Start using #runlog.
Step Three: Use the Twitter search engine of your choice to find out how other runners ran today. I recommend Summize (now Twitter Search) or Tweetscan. You can also use the RSS feed from Tweme.

Can you do it? I’ve been using it for awhile now and a few others have picked up on it. You can follow my Twitter Running Log here at Hashtags, or via Summize, or at Twemes.

Note: According to hashtags.org their service has been broken since July 10, due to a Twitter-side error.  You can continue using the #runlog though and it will make it easier to search for.  And the service should resume normal processing eventually!

My “twitterverse” or my universe of Twitter has quickly grown with lots of running friends, most of whom I’ve never met except through blogging and e-mail. In the past month or so that I’ve been active in Twitter I’ve encouraged other runners and they have encouraged me. Especially after finding this blog post with a list of running tweeps.

So What is Twitter? Simply, Twitter is the most popular micro-blogging site on the web. The official definition is:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Twitter will help you fill in the gaps in-between blog posts about what is going on in your friend’s lives. Common Craft has a great video that might help you understand Twitter a little better.

Still not convinced you need Twitter? This article written by a CEO Twitterer is what convinced me to take the leap and now I’m hooked to this 140 character phenom. I say go on over and try it out today!

You can find my Tweets here.

I will say that initially I used Twitter every few hours, but now have gotten into a more realistic mode of posting every few hours and tend to post more highlights, while many people post lots of little details of their day.  I have also seen tons of encouraging tweets from runners to other runners who are struggling to get on the road or with other personal issues.  If you have 5 minutes a day and want to meet some other great runners and people -- Twitter is the way to go.  It might be a little over-hyped but it is a great tool.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Running Blog Family, Micro-Blogging

Seriously though…

Check out one of the newest sections at Alltop – running.alltop. Since June 1, 2008 Alltop.com has been collecting feeds from various running related blogs into their nicely laid out site.  You can go to the page and see the last 5 posts from 72 different running blogs.  That is a lot of blogs but it also a lot of good information!

Some of the blogs are personal training logs while others are great resources such as The Final Sprint, Runnerville, Team Cross Runs, Run to Win, Runner’s Lounge, Nike, Cool Running, and The Complete Running Network.

So you get the idea there is a plethora of information.  Overloaded? You can actually close out some of the feeds so it is less distracting.

Be sure to head on over and at least give it a look.  They are constantly adding new sites all the time.

Technorati Tags: Alltop, Blogs

I hope you have enjoyed how the blog has evolved. I started it last year after running the Anderson, IN White River Run as a race review and quickly came up with the idea of creating a resource for all of Central Indiana running, thus Run Central Indiana was created. Unfortunately, we decided to move away from Central Indiana, but I wanted to keep blogging. So I created Team Cross Runs.

You can read my very first welcome post here and then when I switched names here.

In the past year I have blogged 254 times! In the past year I logged 1,135.8 miles running and 230 miles on the bike. By a really long shot this was the most read article I’ve written with over 590 page views: Volunteering at a Record Setting Chicago Marathon.

It has been an exciting year and I look forward to another great year. Thanks for your support and friendship!