Tuesday, April 6, 2010

A Day in the Life ...

... of a race director. Goes something like this ...

(BTW: My new banner is from sunset boat ride/fishing at (St. Cloud River Runner) Rick Hlebain's cabin last fall. We spent a wonderful weekend there. It was such a pretty sunset. A wonderful memory.)

I drove to the Y to lift and swim. It was a little drizzly and I am trying to cut back, contrary to popular opinion! Talked to Cherie Jensen at the pool for a little bit. Wendy Nevala was swimming in the next lane, but we just exchanged a howdie. Went to work. (That's my desk.)

Today was much better day than yesterday. Poor Kathryn. I got there and things weren't going very well. She no longer had internet access on her laptop and the printer wasn't working and we needed to print something for a client that was coming in momentarily. So I stole her printer and hooked it up to my PC until I got the big printer working, but no luck with Kathryn's internet access. She had to call someone. Sounds like it is a firmware problem, so she's now using wireless rather than wired access. But we're rollin' again. :-)

Anyway ... back to today. I had to help serve a lunch at church at noon, so bopped across town to do that. Then went home to work on race stuff. Got my medals all separated according to race and age-group. (It's too stressful trying to do that while people are waiting for the awards to be announced.) Worked on volunteer assignments some more. I'd sent out the info last night. But some wanted a different assignment, one broke his collar bone, I forgot to give one person a job, and I have some more volunteers so have to shuffle assignments a bit. Arranged for the laptops and Time Machines and printer to be delivered to the scorer (THANK YOU Jim Mason--they both live in Northern Heights and Jim works a hop, skip and a jump from the shed), printed off finish order sheets, printed labels for awards (cookies, (chocolate) Speedy Bunnies, and gift cards), finalized the artwork for the back of the shirts, baked 118 cookies (for volunteers and 20K age-group awards), exchanged stuff with Jean, and I think that's it for today. There's not much else that I can do before Friday, except possibly some course marking when the rain all moves out, so I feel pretty good about things. Even had time to bake a batch of brownies, vacuum, clean a bathroom and take out the trash. :-)

Then it was time to head to the hills ... The rain clouds parted in time for us to get in a nice hill workout. Most ran 10 x the 10th St SW hill with a long recovery. Trevor, Andy, Randy and I (Andy and Randy ran earlier) did half of our repeats on the 9th Ave SW hill, kiddie-corner to 10th St. I did 6 of each. A good workout. 7.47 miles. I KNOW ... I KNOW ... All good. :-) I feel great. Participating were: Tom x 2, Renee x 2, Jim, Paul, Roger, Trevor, Randy, Andy, Joe. Good job, one and all. :-)

I've been feeling chunky for a couple days, so supper was rabbit food (a plateful of lettuce, sugar snap peas (love 'em), tomatoes), some turkey, and a piece of sunflower whole wheat bread. Delish. I'm trying to up my water intake, too. I always feel like I'm slightly dehydrated. So I'm keeping at it pretty diligently.

I decided to pass on the movie night and dinner at Whiskey Creek. They went to see Ghost Writer. I'm sure the gals had a fun evening. There will be another opportunity, I know. Tomorrow, the Girls of Team R.E.D.
will be stopping by for a little ... project. Look for pix from Byron on Thursday. 6 pm at Bear's Den. Jean gave me a slew of "buy one entree get one free" coupons for Bears' Den from some fundraiser . Thank you, Jean!! I will share them.

I've gotten a few takers for the pasta dinner at Boston. Peter Maves, Ann and Joe Moyer, maybe Dave Phillips and his wife. Will be fun. It's such an event. It's hard to imagine how they serve all those people so quickly. But they get 'er done. Nicely.

I owe Lana from TX a dozen cookies again this month. I think it will be Snickerdoodles this time. Next week. :-) It'll be a much quieter week.

Jim Benike (Rochester) and Brian Woods (St. Cloud) are running the Zumbro Bottoms 100-miler this weekend. Best wishes, guys. You'll do great. Weather sounds wonderful for an ultra.

Well, I'm going to go do some experimenting before the gals get here tomorrow. Have a good one, friends.

1 comment:

Rocco said...

Hi Renee-

Good luck with all your race planning and the event itself. I had no idea this was your race when I was writing it up this weekend. It seems like a really cool race. I'll have to make a point of making it down there one year.

I added your blog to the MDRA blog list. Check it out at http://runminnesota.blogspot.com