National Employee Health & Fitness Day

Today is National Employee Health and Fitness Day. Did you know that? It does say “National” in the title so I assume that this is something going on all over the country today but I am not sure. My company has participated in this all the years I have been here and usually they let us go on a mile and a half walk in the morning and then feed us bananas and squirrel food, you know, healthy stuff. This year my company encouraged us to bike to work so I decided to take them up on it.

I woke up early and biked about 5 miles to meet up with 9 other of my co-workers to bike in the last 7 miles. It was a nice morning with good temps but quite windy in our face the entire way. I have not been on my bike for a ride since last fall so my legs were a little tired after the 11 ½ miles or so against the wind. Let’s hope the wind stays the same direction for the way home. I will be taking it easy as I want to race good this weekend.

I had left some clean clothes at work the day before so I was able to change when I got here today. I will change back for the ride home. I parked my bike in the building today since we have room and a friend of mine thought it would be funny to put on some yellow paper tassels in the end of the handlebars. He dared me to ride home with them on so I am thinking of taking him up on it. Most likely they will fall off but it would look funny to see someone biking a Trek with tassels.

Sunday is the Madison Marathon. Paul decided to run the whole thing and Chaz wanted to do the relay so Chaz and I are partners in the 2 person relay. Chaz thinks he will run round a 1:24 to 1:25 and I want to break 1:40 so I guess our goal is to break 3:05. Nothing like running 13 minutes slower than he (Chaz) ran an entire marathon just last weekend. Chaz ran the Green Bay Marathon in 2:52 for a PR. Paul is pulling yet another back to back as he also ran the full in Green Bay last weekend in 3:41. He is close to qualifying for Boston but I think he needs to stop this back to back stuff and concentrate on getting a good race in and not tiring himself out every weekend.
Chaz and I still don’t know what order we will run in. Here are my thoughts. I think I want to be second because with Chaz leading of, he will be running with the fast runners pulling himself to a good time with no traffic (He will run close to 6:30 pace). Then I can run my pace using my Garmin to keep me to where I need to be. There will be people passing me and maybe near the end, I can use the faster runners to pull me faster. If I ran first, I would run with people my pace but Chaz then would be having to pass lots of people running over a minute per mile faster. Anyways, those are my thoughts.