So when I originally created this site, I planned on writing a blog so everybody could kind of follow along with me as I go through the process of running 61 marathons for charity this year. In a way, I don’t really do that. I have a format (weekend recap on Monday, 10 random things on Tuesday, etc.) and I don’t really blog about what I’m going through. So today, I’m going to stray from the format and stick with the purpose.

I’m kind of conducting this as an experiment. I’m not going to plug it or promote it. I’m just going to post it and see what kind of feedback and traffic I get. NOTE: I changed my mind on that and promoted it in the afternoon.

Anyways, just in case you’ve never been here, I’m a father of three and a marathon runner. My middle child, 6 1/2-year-old Jack, is severely autistic. To try to make a difference in the autism world, and to try to help him have an impact on the world, I’m trying to run 61 marathons this year to raise money and awareness for a charity called Train 4 Autism. So far, I’m through 34 of the 61, I’m raising money and I’m bringing people in. So I think it’s working.

Right now, I’m kind of going through one of my infamous funks. I’m a little bit heavy, weighing 205 when I’m typically 200 and could be 195. It’s not that big of a deal, and physically I’m in good shape, but it weighs on me mentally because I know it’s slowing me down. Nobody really cares about my times but me, but when I don’t run to my potential, I feel like I’m not holding up my end of the bargain.

A lot of people tell me I must be glad I can eat whatever I want to this year, but in all reality, I can’t. My miles are way down (I think I’m averaging less than 50 per week, but I typically run 80+ when I’m in training), so I have to keep a careful eye on what I eat. I say that and I’m notorious for eating a lot of ice cream and cheeseburgers, but in reality, I keep my diet fairly healthy. That being said, I’m going to In-N-Out today, although I haven’t been in two weeks.

I’ve been a little slow lately, and I blame that partly on the heat and partly on the fact that I haven’t done speedwork in a little while. I struggled with inflammation in the IT band in my right leg, so I toned things down. That went away, but so did my speed. I was excited about hitting a track workout yesterday, but I went to both high schools within reasonable distance of my home and they were both locked. I was so bummed that I didn’t run. Then I couldn’t go to the gym after work because I had to pick my oldest son up from tae kwon do, so I planned on getting up early this morning and having a nice, hard workout.

But a funny thing happened … I got upset this morning because in reflecting back to last night, I was multi-tasking while playing with the kids. I was searching for travel arrangements for Alaska the weekend of August 14, because I’m running out of time, and some of the costs were pretty startling. I’m looking like I might not run that race, which really has me bummed, because I was really looking forward to seeing Alaska. So like I said, I spent some time searching last night while playing with the kids and I felt terrible about that this morning. I didn’t have the heart to run. So that’s three times since yesterday morning I had a workout I wanted to hit, but I didn’t. I’ll try again tonight after work.

One quick thing about Jack, while I’m talking about last night and the kids. He’s learned how to play Sesame Street games on the computer and he has a lot of fun. Even if he’s not talking, those games bring out learning and he has a good time. For all he goes through, I’m glad there’s something he can enjoy for a good 30 minutes or so at a time. If he finds something that makes him happy, it normally only lasts for a few minutes before he gets frustrated and wants to move on. I installed a new game for him last night and he had a good time playing it for a while. Later, he was hanging out on the couch and was more happy and calm that I can remember seeing him in a long time. It was nice to see him like that. He deserves it.

OK, that’s it for today. I’ll probably return to my regular format tomorrow with a weekend preview.

It’s Tuesday, time for 10 random things. I could spend some time trying to write a catchy intro to get you read the rest of this, but let’s be real. It’s 10 random things. Either you want to read it or you don’t. If you don’t want to read it, I suggest you change your mind. And hey, Justin Bieber made my blog today!

Just in case this is your first time here, I’m a father of three and a marathon runner. My middle child, 6 1/2-year-old Jack, is severely autistic. I want to try to have Jack have an impact on others in this world, and I wanted to put my legs to good use, so I’m trying to run 61 marathons this year to raise money and awareness for a charity called Train 4 Autism. So far, I’m on track, bringing in money and people.

I’m through 34 of the 61 marathons for the year. Now, it’s time to get through 10 of 10 random things for today.

1. I’ve reached the point where I’m going to get serious about my weight. For the most part, I haven’t really cared, because I know I’m fit and I know I’m in good health. But my weight has been hovering for most of this year at around 203 to 205, and I know I can get down to 195. There’s no reason I can’t get the pounds off, plus it will help with the running. And on days like Sunday, when I went to the pool with the family, I don’t want to look flabby with my shirt off! So I’m going to drop weight, period. 195, I’m coming for you.

2. Almost contradictory to write this after that first item, but it’s National Ice Cream Month. I feel responsible to inform you of this. Even though I eat ice cream rather frequently, I consume fairly small portions and I eat low fat/low calorie offerings.

3. If you’re going to be in San Francisco for the marathon this weekend and you have no plans for dinner Saturday, check this out and let me know if you want to go. I’d love to see you there!

4. I got at least 20 mosquito bites at the start line of the University of Okoboji Marathon in Okoboji, Iowa last Saturday. I thought you should know.

5. Two weeks from today and my grandparents are moving! I see them maybe 8-10 times a year right now. They’ll be close enough for me to visit them at least once or twice a week. I can’t wait!

6. I liked hearing Michael Jordan say he wouldn’t have called up Magic and Bird back in the day. I’m no LeBron James fan, in case you couldn’t guess.

7. Water with lemon and Splenda makes lemonade. Keep that in mind the next time you’re at a restaurant and you don’t feel like paying $3 for a soft drink. Then send Operation Jack a dollar.

8. I was struggling coming up with ideas for random items, so I asked for help on Twitter. Somebody suggested running in the rain … I LOVE running in the rain. You know how it’s totally refreshing to take a swim after a run? To me, running in the rain feels like taking a swim while I’m running. While I love running in the rain, I can safely say from my experiences this year that I do NOT love running in sub-20 temperatures, hail, 30 mph wind, heat higher than 85 degrees or high humidity.

9. I’m a numbers geek, so I’m all excited about hitting mile 21 on Sunday. I have 27 marathons to go right with Operation Jack as of right now, so when I get to mile 21, I’ll have 26.2 x 26.2 left to go. I’m a geek and that’s how I see the world.

10. I don’t get Justin Bieber. I didn’t like Backstreet Boys or N’Sync back in the day, but I could understand why teenage girls liked them. Same with New Kids On The Block. But Justin Bieber? I just don’t get it.

Bonus item: I posted this news article on my Facebook wall. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

That’s all for today, everybody. Have a great Tuesday!

You want your week to go by quickly? Miss a flight on Sunday and take a flight on Friday. Then, you’ll only have three days to get you work done. Throw in a few days of Mr. Mom and a $20,000 contest win for your charity and you have a complete blur. But here we are, Thursday. It’s time for a weekend preview blog, plus an announcement.

Just in case this is your first time here, I’m a father of three and a marathon runner. My middle child, 6 1/2-year-old Jack, is severely autistic. I wanted to use my ability to recover well from marathons to try to make a difference in the autism world. I was planning on running 60 marathons to raise money and awareness for a charity I’m a part of called Train 4 Autism. Train 4 Autism helps people raise money for the autism-related charity of their choice. I think it’s a great organization, which is why I’m excited to work towards helping it grow.

So far, I’ve run 33 marathons, brought a fair amount of people into the organization, and I’ve raised about $50,000 (including a $20,000 we just won in the Chase Community Giving contest.

Anyways, I said I was planning on running 60 marathons. Well, that plan changed. So now I’ll explain that.

I’m Not Running 60 Marathons In 2010
I’m going to make it 61. A couple of months ago, I got a request from an Operation Jack supporter in Alabama named Lance Haney to run the St. Jude Memphis Marathon with him. I told him I would if we could raise an additional $3,000. I hoped the possibility of adding a race would help raise money for Operation Jack. Then I started looking into the race and it really became something I wanted to do.

It’s a benefit for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which is a leader in children’s cancer research. I hate autism, but I have no love for children’s cancer, either. I’ve heard that the race is put on really well and I think we’ll see patients when we’re there. How could anybody with a heart not want to be a part of that race?

Well, when we locked up that $20,000, I decided I’d officially add this one to the schedule. I’m already registered for Las Vegas the following day, so it’ll be an extra race — 61 now.

San Francisco Marathon Runners?
If you’re going to be in San Francisco, there’s going to be a dinner the night before. Not a fundraiser, just a get-together for a bunch of runners. It’s going to be at Gordon Biersch at 5:30 and we’ll all just order off the menu. A good chunk of the people there will be from a group of runners I’m a part of, but it was the same kind of makeup at my dinner in February and everybody seemed to mix pretty well.

I have information here. If you’d like to go, just e-mail me by July 22 because I need to call in a head count.

Weekly Contest
I have a contest every week where you guys guess my time in the form of a small donation. If you think I’m going to run a 3:15, you donate $3.15. Whoever guesses the closest without underbidding wins. Last week, I didn’t have the contest. Two weeks ago, the winner was Dina Williams, who plays every week and has won a couple of times now.

A lot of you still need us to ship you shirts. They’re coming … we’re just incredibly overloaded and not doing a good job shipping them out. Believe me, it bothers me a whole lot more than it bothers you and they’re coming. They really, really are. 🙁

Weekend Preview
I’m going to Okojobi, Iowa. A big part of that is that there’s not a lot on the schedule. Welcome to the lean, hot summer months. High of 91 on Saturday, low of 68. Possible isolated thunderstorms. Good thing the race starts at 6. Wait, that’s 4 a.m. body time. Oh well.

I have no idea of the elevation profile o the course, but it’s around a lake and it looks like it starts and finishes at the same spot. So, I’ll get any uphills back, and I can’t imagine it’ll be too hilly in Iowa. But I’m thinking the heat and humidity are going to make it a long day. I bet I won’t get to stop running until 3:22 after I start. We’ll see. So go ahead, make your guesses. What’s $3 and some change to a great cause? I know we just won $20,000, but let’s not quit now! To make your bet, just click here or click on the Donate Now! link at the top of any page on this site.

OK, That’s All For Today
Have a great weekend everybody! I’ll post a race report at some point Saturday.

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:

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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!
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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.
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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.”

OK, so I don’t really have the most exciting blog I’ve ever written for today, but I do have something quick I need to get across to y’all.

I know, it’s the Chase Community Giving contest I’ve been talking about a lot in the past week or so. It’s coming down to the wire (it ends Monday night), and the top 200 vote-getting charities in this contest will receive $20,000. We’ve bounced around between #155 and #200 this week, so voting is tight and the standings are volatile. We’re not the only group trying to get out the vote — that’s for sure! It’s an easy contest — you can only vote once, so it’s not one of those things where you have to vote every day from every browser on every one of your computers.

Anyways, I created something that I think is a pretty easy tool for you to use. It’s going to take you maybe a minute and it’s really going to help. Here’s what you do:

1. Think of three friends who would vote for us and GO TO THIS PAGE and enter their e-mail address in the form and they’ll receive an automated email asking them to vote.

2. If you haven’t voted, VOTE!. If you’ve already voted, skip this step. You can’t vote twice!

3. Share on Facebook and Twitter.

And that’s it. Those three steps will make a huge difference. For bonus points, do step #1 twice and that should take care of really igniting a fire that will keep us in the top 200!

Sorry to keep bugging about this, but it’s such a big opportunity and we’re so close … I really can’t let this slip away!

I’ll be back here tomorrow with my standard weekend preview blog. Have a great rest of your Thursday!