If a blog falls in the woods and doesn’t get updated, does anybody notice? Yeah, it’s Wednesday and I’m just now posting my weekend recap. I was planning to post it yesterday instead of on Memorial Day, but when you see what I did on Monday, you’ll understand why I’m a day late.
First things first, I’m a father of three and a marathon runner. My middle child, 6 1/2-year-old Jack, is severely autistic. Long story short, I’m trying to run 60 marathons this year to raise money and awareness for a charity called Train 4 Autism. So far, so good. 27 down, 33 to go.
Well, except for this past weekend, when I ran what I consider to be my worst marathon ever. I’ve run slower twice in my 55 lifetime marathons. But this one was absolutely the worst. Read my recap here and see if you can sense how miserable the experience was.
Anyways, on with the weekend …
But First, A Jack Update
Jack continues to slowly progress. Last Thursday, Tiff took him to get his hair cut. We go to a place for kids, and normally sits in a fire engine chair designed to constrain children who are about 2. But he was willing to sit in the big-kid chair, which was awesome. And even awesomer than that (I know, not a word, but it’s my blog), he was willing to wear a smock. He’d never done that.
He’s doing little things spontaneously every here and there. On about Monday or so, Benjamin walked into a room that he was in and Jack waved and said “hi” to him. Things like that seem small, but they’re an indicator that he’s starting to come around. Last night when I put him to bed, he was going through a numbers book and saying the numbers. He was looking to me to hold up the number of fingers of the word he was saying. I did that for about 15 minutes. It’s a simple little numbers game for him, but we need to keep reinforcing that when he speaks, he gets the desired action he’s looking for. Someday it will all click.
Tomorrow, we have an appointment with a DAN doctor up in Los Angeles. It’s a doctor that comes very highly recommended from people who would know. We’ve been waiting months to get in, so we’re excited about this. DAN doctors focus on biomedical treatment for children with autism. We’re not discontinuing anything else we’re doing, but we’re going to add this to the equation. We had bad luck with a different DAN doctor in the past, so we’re happy to have a new one. We’re pretty convinced he needs this help.
Oh, and one last thing. Last year, the summer school program our school district offered was terrible for Jack. The staff was terrible and we pulled him after one day. I won’t get into a long explanation, but it was bad news. Well this year, the staff is going to be the same staff he’s had all year, so we’re excited that we’ll be able to put him in there. They’ve done a great job with him, plus he regresses a little in the summer without his school routine. We just found this out yesterday and we’re pretty excited about it.
OK, now on with the weekend. For reals.
Date Night!
I celebrated 11 years of marriage with my beautiful wife Tiffany on May 23 (the Sunday before last), but since we had a chaotic day, we took a rain check on babysitting and brought in Baja Fresh for dinner. But we cashed in our rain check last Friday night and used a gift card at PF Chang’s. It was a nice start to the weekend — nothing beats eating dinner without interruptions … for free! About 51 more weeks and we’ll get to do that again.
I’m Starting To Realize That All I Talk About Is Food
So the next thing I’m going to talk about is lunch on Saturday. It was with my ex-stepmom (or maybe I call her my second mom?) and her family. She was married to my dad from my fourth grade through eighth grade years. Her and my dad weren’t meant to be together, but they’re both great people and I’ll always love her and respect her for doing a great job raising me and my brother like her own during those critical years.
She lives in the Minneapolis area now, so when I get a chance to see her, I do. Rochester, Minn. is about 80 miles south of MSP airport, so I made sure to meet up with her. She has two children of her own, who are now 13 and almost 17. I got to eat with them and her husband and I had a great time. They’re wonderful kids, a reflection of the job she’s done. I’m going back up to Minneapolis in a couple of weeks to run Grandma’s in Duluth. Hopefully I have time to swing by on my way back to the airport.
More Hanging Out With Good People
I hung out with a real nice guy named Lonnie Butler on Saturday night in Rochester. We shared a hotel room to keep our costs down. Like me, he has an autistic son named Jack. Like me, he’s a former big-boy turned marathoner (he’s down to 210 from 300, I’m at 203 from 261). And like me, he had a rough go on Sunday.
But it was really nice to meet him. We’d chatted a fair amount over email and it was cool to finally meat him. I also got to meet his wife and his Jack, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
More Food Talk …
I had dinner Saturday night at a place I’d never heard of called Jimmy John’s. Apparently, it’s a sandwich shop chain in the Midwest and Lonnie gave it high marks. The thing about guys like me and Lonnie — we know good food when we eat it. I think I lived up to the California stereotype by ordering a turkey sandwich with avocado spread. But it was really good. He was right.
One Little Letter
I originally planned to run the Mad City Marathon in Madison, Wisc., on Sunday, but when I talked to Lonnie, and found out Rochester was his first marathon, I switched to run that one instead. The race I ran is called the Med City Marathon, so I went from Mad City to Med City. I had no idea why it was called Med City. Where do you get “Med City” from Rochester, Minn.?
When I stepped out the front door of my hotel, I found out:
I was totally excited to see THE Mayo Clinic! That’s big-time! And I kid you not, I took two steps out of the front of my hotel to take this picture.
More Food Talk …
After the race on Sunday, Lonnie and I went to Denny’s for all-you-can-eat pancakes. We’d been talking about this ever since I had 11 pancakes at IHOP after I ran the Country Music Marathon in Nashville on April 24. But those pancakes were a little smaller than the ones we ate on Sunday.
This is how big they were at Denny’s on Sunday. They were pretty good-sized, in my book.
We each ordered and knocked back the first three fairly quickly. With the all-you-can-eat deal, they bring you two at a time on the subsequent plates. I finished my second plate quicker than Lonnie, but was starting to feel fairly full. I could tell Lonnie was probably feeling the same way. I ordered my third plate fairly quickly. I made my move to put the hammer down.
Pancakes No. 6 and 7 came out and I worked on those while Lonnie was finishing up his fifth. I really hoped he stopped there, because I felt pretty full. With a two-pancake lead, though, I knew I could wear him down if I could just stick it out.
When our waitress asked him if he wanted a third plate, he declined and I was relieved. I didn’t want to go to nine. We were done eating by about 1:30 p.m. Central time, and I was so full, I didn’t eat at all on the plane and when I got home at 7:30 p.m. Pacific time (eight hours later), all I had was a small serving of chicken and sausage to get some protein in my system. I was still full. Oh, I had some ice cream, too. Couldn’t skip that.
So after all the anticipation, I was able to pull out a victory. I went out fast, held on to my lead and came away with the W. It was a good win over a tough competitor!
We had a contest last week and I’ll announce the winner tomorrow. Too tired as I write this to take care of that. Which leads me to …
My Memorial Day Holiday
Just because it’s a holiday doesn’t mean the calendar doesn’t turn. My work revolves around a monthly cycle and yesterday was the 1st. So Monday I was busy. I’m always guilty of being overly ambitious on how quickly I can get things done. Maybe I’m just overly optimistic?
Anyways, I had a pretty crazy week last week and I knew I had a full day of code writing ahead of me on Monday. I got started at somewhere around 9 or 9:30 in the morning, and aside from taking maybe an hour or so for lunch and then dinner, I didn’t finish until about 3:45 in the morning … yesterday? I guess it was Tuesday at that point?
I woke up naturally at about 7:45, got Benjamin ready for school, worked at my kitchen table until about 1:30, took a nap for an hour, then I think I got back on the computer for an hour or two, but I don’t really remember. It was kind of a blur. But I took another nap from 3:30-5:30, and then a few hours passed by and I think Tuesday was over? I’ll sort it all out at some point.
But that’s why I didn’t have a blog yesterday. I didn’t really feel like writing it at 4 a.m.!
That’s All For Today
I think that was enough. My ice cream streak is at 122 now. Is tomorrow really Thursday already? Wow. Time for a nap.