February is here!?!

I can’t believe we’re already into February! January was packed full of activity and I didn’t realize just how much until I completed my calendar for the 30-day Ragnar Training challenge. Ragnar provided a calendar and asked everyone in the challenge to submit a picture of their completed calendar for a sticker touting their accomplishment. I’ve been playing with a lot of digital pictures lately on another project and decided to fill out my calendar digitally as well.

I definitely had fun looking for pictures to differentiate the things I did in January, especially the tongue-in-cheek nature of the 50’s woman cleaning to highlight all of my January Cure work. I ended the month having completed 9 of the 20 January Cure assignments, so that will certainly roll over into February before I can completely check that off my list, but it’s going to get done! I’ve also really ramped up my training as I count down the days (77) until the Blue Ridge double marathon. I ended up running just over 136 miles in January which is 50 miles more than I ran in any month in 2016. I’m still feeling really good on my runs, though the early mornings are a little bit of a struggle.

My biggest time suck over the last week was completely re-building the Charlotte Women’s Soccer League website. We’ve used a few different platforms over the past few years and had moved to a system that allowed us to handle all of our registration, team building and basically all of the league management electronically which was great for me and the team captains, but the website user experience wasn’t very good, especially for anyone trying to access the site via a mobile device. So, last weekend I started building a new website based off of WordPress and as of the wee hours of Friday morning, the site went live and is so much more aesthetically pleasing and easier to navigate for all of our existing and prospective players. It was definitely a love-hate relationship building that site. It reminded why I got into playing with computers in the first place and also why I decided that a career in IT was not how I wanted to spend 8+ hours every day.

Today kicks off my first long run of February with 20 miles on the schedule. Here’s to another great month of getting outside and getting stronger!

Catching up on August

It’s been a full month since I last posted and a lot has happened in that time. I just got back from my second Westward Adventure trip, though this time I headed out to New Mexico and Oregon for even more running and hiking fun! In early August I was cleared to start playing pick-up soccer and got put on a 4-week training plan to get me up to full-speed soccer. The goal was to have me ready to play by the beginning of September when the woman’s league started. 

Unfortunately 4 days after I officially graduated my physical therapy training program, I was playing pick-up and felt another pop in my the same knee, just a week and a half before I was scheduled to leave for the Ragnar trail relay in Angel Fire, New Mexico. 24 hours later I was back at the physical therapy office. They used some ultrasound on my knee and got me on the stationary bike trying to work out some of the swelling and get some range of motion back in my knee. When I mentioned I had a race the following weekend, they looked at me like I was crazy and said “we’ll see” at which point I said “did I mention I’m going to New Mexico for this race?!” They were not very encouraging about the race, but told me to come back a few days later and see how I felt then. 

After a few days of rest, I was able to walk normally again and my second appointment went much better. They even let me run on a treadmill at a 12:00 pace and told me to take it easy over the weekend. By early the next week, they were able to fully test my knee and decided I still had enough of an ACL to keep my knee from moving the way it’s not supposed to, so I was cleared to run the two races that I had signed up for, which was good because I was leaving in two days! 

Stay tuned for a full recap of Ragnar Trail Angel Fire, New Mexico, Oregon and the Hardesty Hardcore trail race!

My new part-time job

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve taken over running the Charlotte Women’s Soccer League and even though I’ve been working on a lot of the details since January, the past two weeks have been super hectic with the start of our spring season. The first thing I did was to revamp our website – the last one wasn’t bad, but it was set up by someone else and wasn’t in a format that was very user friendly, plus I’ve gotten used to how Blogger works, so I changed our website to be hosted on there as well. 

Last week was our open play session where we try to recruit new players for the spring season. We got over 30 new players and about 90 returning players, so we’ve got a strong group for our spring season. Then last night we held our team round robin session so that all of the teams could get a little practice in with their teammates before we start the official games next week. Coordinating over 100 people is definitely a bit chaotic, but once we start our regular season, things should calm down a little bit for me as teams get settled into their own routines and I can rely on the captains to manage their teams. 

Needless to say, my life has been full of lots and lots of paperwork the past few weeks and I’ve spent most of my evenings this week attempting to create a schedule for the teams which accommodates player requests (including my own!) for specific game times. After a few days of wrestling with the schedule, I finally said “I’m done!” today – it’s not 100% to where I wanted to get it, but 95% isn’t bad. Now it’s on to tackling the registration forms and waivers to make sure everybody filled everything out correctly! 


In other news, I’m looking at adding two more relay races to my calendar for this year – stay tuned for more details! 

How’s your week been going?