Weekend Recap: Some Bad, Mostly Good

With three days of weekend to cover in a weekend recap blog, I could write about 10,000 words. But I’d rather let 11 pictures do most of the talking — that’s worth 11,000 words, right? I’ll still write a little bit and throw some bad jokes your way, though. Happy first day of a short week!

Real quick, 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 make a difference in the autism community, so I’m trying to run 60 marathons this year to raise money for a great charity I’m a part of called Train 4 Autism. So far, so good. 32 down, 28 to. I ran the Foot Traffic Flat Marathon in Portland, Oregon’s Sauvie Island on Sunday. If you want to read about what it’s like to run a marathon when you’d rather run zero miles, check out my race recap.

I Need Your Help!
As you can probably tell by the banner you hit on your way to the site today, I really, really need your help in the Chase Community Giving contest. 200 charities will receive $20,000 each and I’d really love for us to be one of those charities. It’s getting down to the wire — the contest has less than a week to go and there’s not a lot votes separating the last 50 charities in the top 200.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, if you haven’t voted, please CLICK HERE and vote! And whether or not you’ve voted, PLEASE share on Facebook and share on Twitter! If just 20 of you share it on Facebook and Twitter and bring in 15 people each, that’s probably going to put us over the top. So please, be one of those 20 people! Thank you!

My Weekend Started Off On A Down Note
I was homesick before I even left. I didn’t want to go, I wasn’t in the mood to run, and while I was gone, I heard about some fun times my wife was having with my kids. It was tough and I was having an episode of, “why did I sign up for this and is this really worth it?” again.

Last summer, a friend of mine, Jeff Cate, told me, “I have a feeling this whole Operation Jack is going to be a huge test in selflessness. You’re going to face lots of disappointment along the way (whether in marathon performances, support, etc.). But you’ll have to keep on keeping on … more so than ever before.

Be prepared to say, I don’t care if I only have 1 person supporting me (let’s say Tiff), and only $10 in support… I’m still gonna run 60 marathons because I love Jack. That alone would be worth it all.”

I think I hit that point mentally this weekend, and I’m not so sure I passed the test as well as I could have or should have. And really, I’m not fishing — I’m just letting you know how I feel. But I’m human and I’ll try better this week.

Anyways, I got to Oregon and got to go see an old college friend of mine named Stacy. I hadn’t seen her in a good 15 years, so we had a nice lunch and got to catch up. I had to drive four hours round-trip to the Oregon coast, but it was worth it. It was great to see her, plus there’s nothing quite like driving from Portland to Lincoln City. I’ve seen a lot of America this year, and Oregon is probably the most beautiful part I’ve seen.

I drove back and met up with a guy who’s a crazy marathon runner kind of like me named Steve Walters. He’s a nice guy and it was good to meet him. I forgot to take a picture at dinner, but we took one after the race on Sunday.

Steve told me that Nike headquarters were less than a mile from where we had dinner. So after dinner, I cruised by and took a couple of pictures.

After Nike and checking into the hotel, I went to Buffalo Wild Wings to watch the Brock Lesnar – Shane Carwin fight. I can’t stand Lesnar and was excited to see Carwin get him in trouble in the first round. But when Lesnar got him on the ground the way he did in the second, I knew it wasn’t going to happen. Oh well.

Speaking real quick about my hotel, if you remember me talking about the fleabag motel that pretty much caused me to be sleepless in Seattle last week, well, this week was the opposite. I got a bargain on Travelocity and this room had two flatscreens, a room divider, a nice couch … too bad I only spent about 90 minutes awake in there.

Anyways, after the race on Sunday, I met up with Operation Jack supporter Katey Williamson. We played email tag, text tag and phone tag, but we finally got to meet up and chat for 15 or 20 minutes. As is the case with virtually every Operation Jack supporter I’ve met, she’s super nice.

She recommended that I eat at a place called Burgerville. I guess that’s a chain local to Portland. It was decent, but In-N-Out is better (like you’d expect me to say anything else).

I wanted to go to a place called Voodoo Donuts afterwards, and I actually did go, but the line was too long and I had to go to the airport. Incredible donuts are worth missing a flight for, but not if I need to take my kids to see fireworks.

So I got home before dark, nice empty flight. I had my own row! We took the kids to see fireworks. There’s a park with a pretty good view in our city that we go to and we saw about 10 shows from all the Orange County cities. It was pretty cool. But the highlight was when the sprinklers in the park went off and got us wet. We’d seen about 25 minutes of fireworks, so we took off, dashing through the park, laughing all the way! Wait, wrong holiday.

Monday I was off wok and we decided to take a family day, which was AWESOME. We went to a place called Boomers where we did go carts, miniature golf, bumper boats and all that kind of stuff. Jack went on the go carts with Tiff, but didn’t have much fun. He had a blast on the bumper boats.

I got to play golf with Ben (Ava was the caddy) with Tiff and Jack tagging along, I rode the go carts with Ben and with Ava, plus I got to do the bumper boats with Jack. It was a ton of fun. And here’s the pictures:

Oh, and the best news of all … I just found out yesterday that on August 3, my grandparents are moving to an assisted living facility about 5 minutes from my work and less than 20 minutes from my house. They’re about 45 minutes away right now, so it’s tougher to see them. I’m so excited, you have no idea. Their quality of life is going to go way up, and selfishly, I’m going to be able to see them all the time.

So, my weekend started out miserably, but it ended up wonderfully. Life is good. I hope your weekend ended up as well as mine!

Happy Tuesday, y’all. I’ll have 10 random things for you tomorrow!