Operation Jack

Fighting autism, one mile at a time.

Archives for 2010

Chase Recap: THANK YOU!

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Well, now that we’re about 1 1/2 days removed from the Chase Community Giving contest, I figured I’d write a post-mortem recap about it. It was an amazing experience and I think the whole process we went through is worthy of a blog.

Just as a real quick intro in case you’ve never been here before, I’m a father of three and a marathon runner and my middle child, 6 1/2-year-old Jack, is severely autistic. I came up with an idea to try to maximize my ability to recover well from marathons and make a purpose out of his autism by running 60 marathons this year to raise money and awareness for a charity I’m a part of called Train 4 Autism.

So far, it hasn’t been exactly what I expected, but I’ve been putting in my best effort and I know I’m reaching people, bringing people into Train 4 Autism, and, of course, raising money. I’m 33 marathons down, 27 to go.

That being said, we did it! We just finished this Chase Community Giving contest on Facebook and finished in the top 200, netting the Operation Jack Autism Foundation $20,000! That will end up being an extra $20,000 that we give to Train 4 Autism at the end of the year. AWESOME!

I want to start off by thanking a few people real quick. First, Operation Jack supporter Laura Sullivan alerted me about a week before this contest was going to begin, so I definitely owe her a huge thank you. I also want to give a big thank you to Sarah Stanley. Sarah also uses her running to push philanthropic efforts and she used her large reach to give us a big boost on Sunday afternoon when we were in danger of slipping out of the top 200. We needed some momentum badly and we got it at a critical time when social media is typically very quiet.

And of course, I have to thank Tiffany. It was awesome going through the highs and lows of this contest together. We make a great team and it was such a great experience to go through this with her.

I’m calling them out specifically, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t notice the efforts of a ton of other people. I saw it all go down on Facebook and Twitter and it just about overwhelmed me emotionally. I don’t know why, but I felt unworthy of the incredible outpouring of support. But I felt very appreciative. VERY appreciative.

I’m doing what I’m doing and a lot of times, I wonder if I’m reaching anybody or if anybody even cares. It’s tough to labor on through this for an entire year. Over the final week of this contest, though, I could tell that I have backing from people all over the country, many of whom I’ve never met, and it was amazing.

I’d scroll down my Facebook and see people posting and re-posting. I saw a lot of people pounding away on Twitter. The e-mail tool I built was used well. I’d beg for a push and people responded. For a while I felt like I was bugging people, but then it seemed like people were truly on the bandwagon and excited about it. I was watching hour by hour Monday early into the evening, and I finally just let go about 50 minutes before the voting closed. There was nothing left I could do to change anything. I felt like I was a lawyer waiting on a deliberating jury, but at the same time, I was pretty confident I had it locked up and I felt like the quarterback of the winning football team kneeling down to run out the clock. Watching the totals refresh on Monday night 30 minutes after voting closed was like watching election returns.

Knowing that I was able to rally 1,583 votes for this cause (that was the official final total) means a whole lot more to me than running 33 marathons between January 1 and July 11. It tells me that as I go alone to my trips and sit here alone behind my computer, I’m not really alone. I’m so grateful for all of your efforts. Actions speak so much louder than words and while people tell me they support what I’m doing, y’all showed it with your relentless push.

I believe in my cause, which is fighting autism. I keep things on the positive and I crack jokes here all the time, because that’s just the way I approach things. Deep down inside, I’m so upset about what Jack’s going through, I don’t really know how to deal publicly with it or talk about it. Tiff did a much better job of that writing a guest blog here on Monday. I’m numb from the pain and I don’t do a very good job of being open about it all. I keep it to myself and inside for the most part. But just to be clear, I absolutely hate what he’s going through and I hate what it’s done to our family. This has turned our world upside down and it has a big impact on Ben and Ava. I hate autism. I hate it. I’m going to do whatever I can to fight it for the rest of my life.

So anyways, I’m doing Operation Jack, trying to make a difference, even if it’s a small difference. Train 4 Autism might break through and become like Team In Training. Or, somehow, my efforts might be able to indirectly make life better for five children with autism. Either way, it’s all worth it.

The contest win was great. Getting the confirmation that I’m not alone and I have the support of people all over the nation was even better.

But the biggest thing is $20,000 for Train 4 Autism. Don’t forget that this contest was very, very real. That’s real money that’s going to have a real impact. I’m really excited and proud to be a part of Train 4 Autism. That’s my team, and I feel like I was able to help bring home a win for the team. We won and we’re going to be better off for it. As the verse at the bottom of my site says, let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. We did not give up in this contest. And while this contest is over, I’m not giving up in the bigger mission. I will continue to fight autism and Train 4 Autism gives me a weapon.

Yesterday, Ben Fesagaiga, the founder of Train 4 Autism, included the following in an email to me:

The money is great — it can definitely be put to good use. As you know we direct just about everything that comes in back out to organizations that out athletes choose. This is what makes us different and, well, us. As proud as I am about supporting other organizations, the reality is we have very little resources to promote T4A. We rely mainly on the organizations that we support to in turn promote T4A. Most of them have done an outstanding job.

I recently did the SD R&R Half you remember me saying “Sam!!” as you shot past me on your way to finishing the full. That day I saw a sea of purple, as thousands upon thousands of TNT athletes from all over the country competed, and their supporters lining just about ll 26.2 miles, plus the finish area. I had a lot of thoughts go through my mind. Wouldn’t it be awesome if T4A had this kind of mass involvement and support? It’s inspiring, and at the same time intimidating as I finish the race and walk back to my car alone.

Also, Molly Rearick, the Director of Communications for Train 4 Autism, wrote:

We run on a tiny operating budget (9.5% of all funds we take in), so we are exited to be able to support more families affected by Autism with the money earned from the Chase contest. Because of the Felsenfelds’ passion for and dedication to raising Autism awareness, we will be able to reach more families and make a difference in more lives. I was touched to watch votes come in from around the world – from friends, family members, and complete strangers who believe in what Operation Jack and Train 4 Autism are doing. Thank you to everyone who realizes what a worthy cause this is!

This wasn’t just a vote contest. This was real and it’s going to make a difference. So thank you, all of you, for making this happen. None of us could have made this happen on our own, but we did it as a team and it’s going to make a real difference.

Weekend Recap: I Was Bound To Miss A Flight, Right?

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Normally, I run a weekend recap on Mondays and move into 10 random things on Tuesdays. But my wife, Tiffany, wanted to write a guest blog for yesterday, so I ran that instead. Plus, my weekend was inadvertently extended a day, so I’m just going to go ahead and run my weekend recap today. I have a tiny bit of information about the Chase Community Giving contest we’ve been involved in, but for the most part, I’m going to cover that in-depth tomorrow.

Just in case this is your first time being here, I’m a father of three and a marathon runner. My middle child, 6 1/2-year-old Jack, is severely autistic. Fighting autism is my cause and I’m trying to run 60 marathons this year to raise money and awareness for a charity called Train 4 Autism. It’s a great charity headed by great parents and I’m proud to be a part of it.

So far, I’m through 33 of the 60 races. It seems like I’m reaching people and raising money and getting people involved, so it’s worth the pain I’m feeling in my lower back.

If you’ve been following along at all, you know we’ve been in this Chase Community Giving contest, with an opportunity to win $20,000. The voting ended last night and it went down to the wire, but unofficially, we did it! Results will be official sometime around noon Eastern today and I’ll update this blog with a confirmation.

This was an amazing contest, though. Everybody came out of the woodwork and pushed so hard to make this happen. It was incredible, and the net result is going to be that Train 4 Autism will gain an additional $20,000 at the end of the year. This is one of those “this is why I do this” moments for me. And for all of you, who pushed so hard, that should be a “this is why I did that” moment, too. Y’all are the ones who made it happen.


Awesome!

Real quick, two TV stations up in Missoula did pieces on me this weekend. Here’s one of them. I’ll get the other one posted as soon as I get the link.

Bound To Happen?
If you would have asked me at the beginning of the year whether or not I thought I would miss a flight, I would have probably guessed yes. With tight schedules and about 45 or so weekends flying somewhere, chances are it would happen once.

Well, that once came this weekend. I flew through Spokane to get to Missoula, Montana, and it’s about a three-hour drive. I ran tight on time after the race and when I got into the car, I plugged in the airport in Spokane to get an estimated arrival time. I had enough time to eat lunch, so I quickly did that. I only had 9 1/2 hours of sleep the prior two nights and I had just run a marathon, so I wanted to load up on Diet Pepsi at Taco Bell and get some caffeine into my system for the drive.

Lunch took about 15 minutes and I got rolling on the drive. The GPS system said I’d be in about 40 minutes before the flight, but as is always the case, I made up some time on the drive. Unfortunately, my fat fingers hit the wrong airport and I ended up at some commuter airport, easily costing myself about 20 minutes.

I got to the airport 35 minutes before my flight. The rental return guy was going in slow-mo and took a good 6 or 7 minutes to get me taken care of. I made a mad dash to get my boarding pass, but it was about 2:51 and my flight was at 3:05 and the woman at the counter told me I was too late. And with my luck, it was the last flight out for the day.

Southwest had an option to get me home for $382, but that was way too much. So, I got to spend Sunday night in Spokane. The bummer of it all is that Tiff went out to see one of her best friends in Arizona who just had a baby and left yesterday morning. So, I didn’t get to see her and I won’t see her until Wednesday night. We had to make some adjustments with our arrangements for the kids, because we were both out of town between yesterday morning at 5 a.m. and yesterday afternoon at 3:30 p.m.

Plus, I have to miss work on Friday to go to Iowa and I didn’t want to miss two days this week. I was able to work a little bit while traveling on Monday, but I couldn’t get a good, full day in.

In hindsight, I would have certainly hit the right button on the GPS and just driven through someplace and probably gotten to the airport more than hour before my flight. I probably would have been fine eating at Taco Bell and getting to the airport 55 minutes or so in advance — Spokane is a pretty easy airport to get through, nice and small.

US Airways was really nice about it and hooked me up at a hotel with a “distressed traveler” rate that was walking distance from the terminal. The hotel confirmed the rate and tried to overcharge me $30 when I got there, but I negotiated them down to “only” a $12 overcharge. The folks at US Airways were gone for the day since my flight was the last one of the day, so I was out of luck and stuck. I’ll be taking that up with the hotel’s corporate headquarters this week.

So I just stayed in the hotel, plowing away on my race report and my vote-getting campaign for Chase. At least the complimentary breakfast was good in the morning. I love those waffle machines that you pour the batter into. And I love me some four cups of coffee.

So yeah, it was bound to happen. I just wish it would have happened on a) a Saturday when b) there was another flight out that day and c) my wife wasn’t going out of town for three days before I could get in and d) it wasn’t causing me to miss a day of work in an already-short week.

Life. Gotta love it!

I Admit It, I’m A Dork
I went to Missoula, Mont. over the weekend, flying through Spokane, Wash. From there, I drove 200 miles, cutting through the top of Idaho. In case you haven’t noticed (60 marathons in a year, 163 consecutive days eating ice cream at this point), I like doing odd things. So, for a couple of weeks, I planned on running a mile in California before I left for the airport, then a mile in Washington, a mile in Idaho and a mile in Montana.

I did, because … why not?

Here they are:
– California
– Washington
– Idaho
– Montana

Not A Lot Of Excitement This Weekend
There’s really not a whole lot to report about from this weekend other than the missed flight. I got up, went to the airport, flew to Washington, drove to Missoula and had a TV reporter waiting for me at my motel when I got there (after I drove through Taco Bell). I got to my room after finishing the interview at about 9:30 p.m.

After running the race, I talked to a couple of friends in the finish area, did two interviews, went and visited a couple of friends at a bar for about 15 minutes before going back to my hotel to get cleaned up. Then it was the lunch/drive/missed flight. Life on the road isn’t too glamorous. EXCEPT when you drive from Spokane to Missoula.

I highly recommend the Missoula Marathon. It’s put on well, there were no logistical challenges and the course was absolutely beautiful. When you do it, do yourself a favor and fly through Spokane, not Missoula. That drive is absolutely amazing. Sure, I missed my flight because of it, but it was worth it. I took some pictures, but they don’t do that area justice. I want to go back next year just to bring my wife and show her the drive.

Anyways, here are some pics:


It’s nice out there.

It’s still nice out there.

Yep, it’s still nice.

Nice.

There were more tall trees lining those mountains than I could have imagined. There were some nice parts of the drive in Idaho where the water, but I guess I didn’t get any pictures. I guess you’ll just have to trust me when I say it was the nicest 200-mile drive I’ve ever taken.

By the way, speaking of my friends I talked to at the bar after the race, here’s a picture I took with Operation Jack supporter Chris Stores, a runner I’ve communicated with for several years.


One of these guys is me.

Pray For Me
I’m Mr. Mom until tomorrow night. I’m outnumbered, 3 to 1. We all do certain things well. I run marathons, my wife is Supermom. Actually, pray for my kids!

OK, That’s All For Today
I’ll be back here tomorrow with some thoughts about this Chase Community Giving contest. It’s done now, but still, to be in my shoes and experience what I experienced going through this was amazing and it deserves a blog. You guys are AWESOME. Period.

Guest Blog: Tiff Speaks Out About Jack

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Tiff told me last week she wanted to write a guest blog for today, so I said no problem. These blogs take time to write, so I’ll gladly take a break! Plus, I missed my flight home yesterday and got stuck in Spokane, Wash., so I guess that as of posting this, my weekend isn’t over so I can’t really post a weekend recap, right?

First real quick, just in case this is your first time here, I’m a father of three and a marathon runner and my middle child, 6 1/2-year-old Jack, is severely autistic. This year, I’m trying to run 60 marathons to raise money and awareness for a charity called Train for Autism. So far, I’m through 33 of the 60. I ran yesterday in Missoula, Montana. You can read my recap here.

And real quick, most of you are very aware of the Chase Community Giving contest we’re in the middle of. If you weren’t, the banner that loaded when you hit the site probably made it pretty clear. Well, today is the last day of voting. And we have a fighting good chance at winning $20,000 if we stay in the top 200. But by no means do we have this in the bag. Lots of groups are making last-minute pushes and I’m worried about what’s going to happen today.

So please, one last time, if you haven’t voted, PLEASE VOTE TODAY! And please share this on your Facebook wall or share it on Twitter. If you want bonus points, copy and paste this into your Facebook status for today:

———-
Today is the last day to vote for Operation Jack in the Chase Community Giving contest. Help this great cause secure the $20,000 it stands to win by voting once at http://operationjack.org/chase if you haven’t already. Every vote is CRITICAL and yours is needed! Please copy this and use it as your status, just for today!
———-

We’re all done with this after today. This is like mile 26 of a marathon, and I always turn it on and power through the finish. Join me and help us make it happen today!

Oh, one last thing — Tiff took this video of Jack. When she says, “say ‘for’,” he heard “four” and said “three” instead. Cute little guy!

OK, on with what Tiff wrote.
——————————–
What does your child call you? Well, most times I’m called “Daddy”, “Miss Ann”, “Miss Doreen” (Miss Ann and Miss Doreen are two of his teachers), or nothing at all. If I prompt him with the “m” sound, then I will hear the music to my ears, “Mommy.”

Nearly seven years ago, Sam and I thought I gave birth to a healthy baby boy and a brother for Ben to play with. And for 18 months we continued to think that. After we were told to seek help for Jack at his 18-month well check up, our lives changed forever and everything has seemed to go by like a flash of light since a fall day back in November of 2006, when we heard the words “moderate to severe autism.” The neurologist told us that if we were to leave the room for two days, Jack wouldn’t even notice. I couldn’t fight back my tears.

Flash forward to 2010 now. I’m changing my 6 1/2-year-old’s diapers, buying him toys in the 18-24 month old toy aisle of Target and most of the time, putting him in a stroller every time we go out. I also wake up for him in the middle of the night a couple times a week to calm him down and to keep him from punching himself in the head from what I think is frequently stomach pain. Other times, I don’t know why he screams and cries. Imagine your child going through some type of pain, and then putting a big piece of duct tape over their mouth. That’s how I feel because he can’t tell me what’s causing him to cry. I’ll lay there next to him wondering, is he crying because he feels like he doesn’t have a voice? Does he feel like he’s trapped inside of his body and no one under stands him?


Tiff wanted me to embed this video for you to play while you read what she wrote. She’s the boss!

At night when I tuck him in, I lay there next to him and look into his eyes. I’ll talk to him and tell him that I love him and am proud of him and sometimes I’ll even say, ”Jack, I know you hear me right now, I know you know I love you and I’m so proud of you.” He’ll just lay there with an empty glare on his face and I get no response. But you never know, maybe he does understand me. And if he does, maybe in the future, he’ll be able to tell me how he remembered me always saying those things to him when I tucked him into bed at night.

I know or at least I think he understands I’m his mother. But what he doesn’t know is that I just took on the new role of becoming his “at-home doctor”. The “doctor” who’s going to fight through any fire, who’s willing to take on the new responsibility of this new DAN protocol. A protocol that involves giving him around 15 different supplements on a weekly basis, from creams, to drink mixes, to B-12 injections. I want to know at the end of all of this, at the end of my life, that I did everything that was realistically possible to save my son from this sad, sick and mysterious disorder.

With autism you don’t know for sure what the cause of it is. There are a lot of theories out there, some even backed by science, but it’s still a mystery. With other genetic disorders such as Downs Syndrome, you know what happened in the body. With autism, you don’t know for sure. Because of that, I feel like pulling Jack out of this is all on my shoulders. The thought that I have a chance to help him “recover” from this is, to say the least, very stressful and very pressuring. It’s all worth it to me though.

I have a magnet on my fridge that reads,”You can’t scare me, I have children.” And that’s exactly how I feel about fighting Jack’s autism. When you’re a mother willing to do anything for your child, NOTHING scares you.

Everyday brings a new challenge for you when you are a mother. My challenges with Jack at times seem to never go away. It would make my day if he would let me read him a book for longer than one minute. Pointing to pictures and getting him to label is how we read books together. Most of the time, all Jack wants to do is look at baby numbers books, often times carrying it around for days at a time.

Another challenge is getting him to eat more food. Jack has yet to eat a PB&J sandwich, or any sandwich at all for that matter. He won’t eat anything he hasn’t eaten before. Well, maybe once or twice a year he’ll try something new. I see kids enjoying watermelons in the summer time or enjoying a piece of their birthday cake and I want so badly for my Jack to be able to enjoy the same thing. Right now, I’m rotating about 10-12 different types of foods.

Just last month I was sound asleep at seven in the morning and was woken up by the sound of my door bell ringing. Jack had figured out how to get out the front door by opening up the top latch with a kitchen chair and a book. I quickly had a dead bolt requiring a key installed on the inside of the door. Now, whenever I need to do something as small as getting the mail, I unlock myself out of the house, making sure I bring the house key with me on the way out. If Jack ever were to get out, he would walk to the next city if he could and he wouldn’t respond to his name nor know how to look both ways when crossing the streets. Letting him out is a risk I can’t take.

I can go on and on about the challenges I face with Jack on a day to day basis. But my biggest challenge I have is getting through the pain everyday. If I really wanted to, if I let myself, I could stay in my house all day and cry my eyes out until I couldn’t cry anymore. In fact, when I do allow myself to let it all out, to let out everything I bottle up inside of me day after day, I lay on my bed usually when the kids are in bed for the night, and I cry. I cry really hard into my pillow and I ask God, “Why? Why my baby boy? Please, please God, wake him up.” I ask God to wake him up because I’ve always looked at him as being partially in a coma. I lay there thinking, is this really happening? It seems like one big nightmare. I know that God blessed us with Jack for a reason and that he’s a blessing. But I HATE the autism. I look at it as an evil monster that I need to fight away.

Looking at baby pictures and watching old videos of your child would make any mom happy, but not for me. When I look at his pictures from birth up to two years old, I think to myself that those pictures were taken before the accident. But there wasn’t even an accident.

Before Jack came into my life, I never had a problem seeing “special needs” adults walking together in their groups with each other. Now, seeing a person sitting at a bus stop talking to himself is almost like looking through a crystal ball at a 50-year-old Jack. On the verge of tears when I see that, most of the time, I quickly snap myself out of it. I get this feeling that comes over me. Some would say it’s denial, but the feeling I get is a feeling of “fight.” And I think to myself, no, that’s not going to be my Jack. To me, one of the worst feelings is the feeling of regret. I don’t want to be a 70-year-old woman one day, looking at my 42-year-old son, thinking, “what if?” What if I’d done everything I was capable of doing to help him recover from his autism?

I realize that opening myself up this way, is also setting myself up for criticism. There will always be people out there who think I’m not doing everything I could be doing for Jack. Or maybe, I’m not doing something the right way. I’m not sure if there is one particular right way to “fix”, “cure”, or “take away” your child’s autism. But I know that I’m doing everything I can for Jack and that my will to try and pull him out of this will never die.

I wanted to write this for one reason — I want everyone to understand WHY they cast their vote for Operation Jack. I wanted it to be more than a popularity contest with the charities getting the most votes winning. All people hear when they support others’ charities is, “It’s for a great cause!” Well, this is for a great cause. I always dream of the day I wake up, and hear on the news that doctors finally found what really is causing autism and that finally, a cure has been found.

Jack has had behavorial services six nights a week, two hours each session since he was 2 years old. We’ve seen amazing progress from it but I’m starting a new journey with Jack now — the biomedical journey. I pray to God that we will see a different, less severely autistic person in the future. I know that constant prayer can be powerful. And I know that the day I’ve been waiting for will come. The day when he comes up to me and says, ”Hi, Mommy. I love you.”

Race Report: Missoula Marathon

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I was nervous heading into Sunday’s Missoula Marathon with my assignment of pacing the first half of the 3:10 group. I don’t doubt my ability to hit 13.1 in 1:35, but it’s not easy work and I put a lot of pressure on myself when it comes to pacing for other runners. I found out a little more than seven hours before the start of the race that my assignment was switched to pacing the 3:50 group for the entire race. Believe it or not, that made me even more nervous!

A 3:50 marathon is an 8:46 pace, definitely not too fast for me to do. However, I was concerned that it was actually too slow. I run my recovery runs quicker than that, so when I’m fresh, which I was, it would be very easy for me to accidentally bump the pace 30 seconds faster and not even realize it. I was concerned that I would wear out my group if I didn’t pay very close attention to my pace.

When I pace, which I had done three times prior to Missoula, I keep an eye on the tangents I’m running an try to keep my pace locked on to what I’ll need based on what how far I think my Garmin will end up reading. I can tell how I’m doing as I go along. If I though I was going to run 26.3 with the tangents, I needed to run 8:44s. For 26.4, 8:42s. 26.5, 8:40s.

I wanted to start off taking it slightly easy early and run the first half about a minute fast, because there was a decent hill early in the second half that would take back time. Negative splits are one thing, but you also need to run the course correctly.

I started off well, running a pair of 8:48s to open, but right away, I could tell the mile markers were off and I was concerned that I was running bad tangents. There was a lot more traffic than I’m normally used to. I stepped it up a tiny bit, because one thing I definitely didn’t want to do was get my group there late. I took several miles to drop the average pace from 8:46 to 8:39, which is where I thought I needed to be.

Then, all of a sudden, the mile markers were right on track and I realized I was a bit fast. I hit the half in 1:53:57 on my Garmin when 1:55:00 is exactly half of 3:50, so that actually worked out perfectly. I gave some time back up the hill and locked into a groove the rest of the way.

I thought I was maybe 30 seconds fast for the race with about 9 to go, so I tried to slow down about 3 seconds a mile to let people reel me in. I tried my best to motivate those who needed motivating and I kept on moving to the finish.

At mile marker 24, I was only four seconds fast for the race, which I was happy about. I came up on a woman who had a friend pacing her. She really wanted that sub-3:50, but she was falling apart. They kept looking back at me as I approached and I felt bad, because I was the bad guy and I couldn’t slow down. But I tried to motivate her. She said she’d been training for six months for the race, and I told her to give me just one mile and she’d have it made. I didn’t tell her what I was going to tell her at 25, but I wanted to keep her moving.

I pushed a tiny bit that mile and she stayed with me and we were seven seconds fast for the race at 25. At that point, I told her that all she had was one lousy mile to go, and that she couldn’t let 25 awesome miles go down the drain with one mile. She was really pushing herself and didn’t have a lot left. I pushed a little bit that mile, dropping the pace to about 8:30 to build her a cushion as we chipped away at that final 1.2.

She fell about a half-step behind me, but I told her to just stay on my shoulder and run me down with .3 to go — she had the luxury of kicking. I can’t do that as a pacer. And that’s exactly what she did. She pulled ahead and got it done, finishing about 20 seconds ahead of me. She was exhausted and needed assistance, but she was fine and she got her time. It was a pretty cool experience.

There was another woman who ran the race on a whim and I kept her going with the “don’t let 24 good miles go to waste” line, and she took off at 24 and finished in 3:48, a 10-minute PR.

I got a lot of thank yous from my group afterwards. That’s probably the most rewarding part. It’s fun to really push in a race, but it’s fun to help others, too. So the run was a lot of fun.

Oh, and the course … the course is absolutely beautiful. You run a point-to-point course from Frenchtown, Montana to Missoula, Montana. There’s a lot of farms, trees, a river and eventually you end up right in the heart of town. It ranks way up there for scenic courses I’ve run this year. I really liked Catalina, Charlottesville (Va.) and Portland/Suavie Island (Oreg.), and I think this one is right up there with those.

Aside from the fact that I went to the wrong airport in Spokane and missed my flight, getting me stuck away from home an extra night, it was a great day.

33 down, 27 to go!


I gave those balloons to a little kid who asked me for them. But I made his dad take a picture of me first.

Weekend Preview: Missoula Marathon

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I normally post my weekend previews on Thursday, but I didn’t get done with everything I was doing until close to midnight on Wednesday, so there was no time to write anything. Better late than never, right? I’ve got my weekend preview, contest information plus my take on LeBron James (as if my opinion on this matters).

Just in case this your first time here, I’m a father of there and a marathon runner. My middle child, 6 1/2-year-old Jack, is severely autistic. I’m trying to make a difference, to make a purpose out of what he goes through and have him make an impact on the world. So, I’m running 60 marathons to try to raise money and awareness for a charity called Train 4 Autism.

So far, I’m through 32 of the marathons. It’s a little tough physically, but very tough mentally. There’s a lot of work and a lot of struggling. Sometimes, I’m high as a kite and totally encouraged. Sometimes, I feel like I’m banging my head into a wall for no good reason.

But there’s no quit in me with this. I’ll keep on keeping on, following the path I’ve been led down, keeping my faith that everything will be okay.

Chase Contest: Down To The Wire!
We’re in the middle of this Chase Community Giving contest. Voting has been going on for close to a month and it ends on MONDAY! We’re in the top 200 right now, but voting is tight and we’ve been bouncing between the 150s and 200 all week.

I know you’re probably tired of me plugging it, but if we stay in the top 200, we’ll win $20,000, which would be HUGE! So, you’re here, and I’m begging. Three quick things that will take zero dollars and about one minute from you.

1. Think of three friends you can tell about this and CLICK HERE to enter their first name and e-mail address to send them an automated email. Easy stuff and we’re NOT storing any data.

2. Vote in the contest! If you’ve already voted, you can’t vote again. If you haven’t, this is critical and it’s a simple, one-time thing!

3. Share this through your social media outlets with these simple links: Facebook | Twitter

That’s it! Easy, right? That will make a difference. I know how many visitors we get here — if you each do step #1 once, we’re probably going to win this. If y’all do it twice and submit send to six people, I’d be pretty shocked if we don’t.

T-Shirts And Stuff
We just got a new shipment in, so we’re going to get stuff in the mail for a bunch of you that we owe. I’m so sorry that we’ve been slow on this.

Weekend Preview
I normally have a contest every week where you guys guess my time in the form of a small donation essentially equal to my time. This weekend, though, I want the focus to be on the Chase Contest.

That being said, I’m running the Missoula Marathon on Sunday. I’m going to be pacing the 3:10 group for the first half, then running my own race the rest of the way. The goal is going to be to hit 13.1 at about 1:34:30 and then run my own race from there. There’s a hill in the second half and my legs have been fairly sore this week. So, I’m guessing I’ll go 3:14 or so. I really want to get a BQ. I’ve only gotten one since Fargo on May 22, and that annoys me.

I don’t know what else to say about the race, other than I’m looking forward to seeing Montana. I just need to book a motel room, get a rental car and check my flight schedule. Details …

My Expert Insight Into The LeBron James Saga
I don’t know the first thing about basketball, and I’m really not a big fan of the NBA, but I really wanted to see him stay in Cleveland. Like just about everybody else in this country, I think the whole “The Decision” show was such a ridiculous ego thing. I don’t know who outside of Miami can possibly cheer for the guy after he went on TV and stabbed Cleveland in the back like that. Just my opinion.

Last night, I went to cleveland.com, the online home of Cleveland’s newspaper, to see the local take on everything. The lead story was an article about bedbugs. I have no idea why it was listed as the top story, but if they made an editorial decision to place bedbugs above James out of spite … well, that’s just awesome in my book.

And That’s It For Today
Tiff was going to write some things about what Jack likes to do, but she’s going to be a guest blogger on Monday so we’ll save it for then. Plus, as I write this, she’s relaxing and laughing at a TV show and I’d rather let her stay relaxed. Poor thing needs a break!

Please, please help us out in this Chase contest. It WILL make a difference. You’ll see when the votes are final that whether or not week make it, we’re only going to be a few votes away from spot #200! I’ll be back with a race report on Sunday. Have a great weekend!