After the Race is Before the Race

Before writing this post, the famous Sepp Herberger quote "Nach dem Spiel is vor dem Spiel" (eng.: After the game is before the game.) was bouncing around in my head. I always loved this sentence, even in my non-athletics days, because it contains a very simple truth that can be applied to pretty much any field in your life. Sure it's great to have accomplished something, but most of the time ending something, means to start working towards something else. Only because you just finished this huge project at work doesn't mean you won't show up the next day taking on new challenges - right? Or do you want to end up like Wile E. Coyote in the picture (taken from Runner's World blog) above? ;-)

Obviously, the adventure of doing the Blue Ridge Relay is still not quite digested and I caught myself chuckling several times in the car on my way home from work just thinking of: the "safety thong", "Kerrie would never do this!", "You live on M&Ms and TUMS right?"... For some of the things you just had to be in van #2 otherwise it doesn't make any sense. You would think that so shortly after the relay, we wouldn't want to see or hear anything from each other, but yesterday there were already e-mails flying back and forth, talking about how much fun we had and to wrap up some organizational stuff. In the middle of all this, Brian (aka Guz) brought up the idea to venture out doing another relay and within minutes we basically decided to do the American Odyssey Relay (AOR) from Gettysburg PA to Washington D.C. end of April 2010 and over half of the BRR team already committed to join in the fun... And the rest will come along over the next couple of weeks - Sure thing! :-)

As promised, here are some links to race reports about the Blue Ridge Relay of other teams, in case you are interested. (Link list is taken from http://www.runningrelays.com)

• Run, Theoden, Run
• Foot Rx
• Coach K Is Going Somewhere
• Team 4Tunate (To Have 2 More Runners)
• Screaming Mountain Goats
• Run Bob Run Bob
• Ingram Running Team
• Just Kev.in

While I happily jumped on the bandwagon to do the AOR yesterday, I also finally decided NOT to do the American Warrior Triathlon this coming Saturday. Several reasons played into this decision and on top of the list is certainly that I wasn't able to train properly in the last three weeks. Even though I am not competing for trophies, I want to at least compete against myself and I don't feel like I would be able to… This was a tough one, because it means that I only did one triathlon in my first tri season and my plans at the beginning of the year were much more ambiguous. I guess, I have to do a better job planning my 2010 season. :-)

But it's still "before the race" for me because of the Race for the Cure 5K coming up on September 26th. I know, it "just" a 5K, but I like doing them… It's a nice distance, you don't have to put hours and hours of training into the preparation but it still keeps you from slacking. Also, it supports the great cause of fighting the fight against cancer and this is a topic that touches all of our lives in one way or another sooner or later. It's not too late to donate, click here for my fundraising page. Besides, I still have unfinished business with this race course around the CU-ICAR campus. I did the Candlelight Run end of June of this year. It was still over 90 degrees when the gun went off at 9 PM… The humidity was out of this world. I never suffered that much on a 5K and I never posted a worse time for this distance… Not this time…

Oh and I almost forgot, the official results of the Blue Ridge Relay are out.

Team: Do Not Resuscitate
Time: 31:47:53 hours
Placing Overall: 75/106
Placing in the Open Category: 33/45

Once again, great job team! The BRR is considered one of the most challenging relays and we jumped into the challenge with both feet as complete relay newbies and made it happen. So proud of our accomplishment!