North Dakota, holler

This weekend has by far been the highlight of my running career outside of racing, and the highlight of my Sigma Chi life since Initiation. I was meaning to post about this before the weekend, but whatevs I guess. I pushed off my tempo run until Friday and switched it with an easy run because I was sick on Thursday, which is usually my tempo run day. I skipped work because I needed to sleep in. I usually wake up for work around 5:30am, so I think I just basically ran myself into the ground. I slept until 9am and felt good enough. So anyways, easy run that day on the treadmill, watched an entire episode of divorce court. **** got real. The next day we were set to go to North Dakota at 3, and seeing as I got out of class at 1:30, I kind of had to drop the hammer a little bit. I was supposed to go 2@8's, then 5@7's, then 1@8's, but it turned out to be something like 5:00@8's, 5@6:25's, 1@7:45's for time's sake. I just barely got to take a shower too.

Me and 5 other Sigma Chi brothers headed down to the NDSU campus for the North Central Provence conference 2011. For those who don't know, which is probably everyone, provence is kind of like a regional conference. So Friday night we rolled up to our sketched- out hotel around 7, and called for dinner. We went to Granite City, and waited three hours to get our food. Granted, we did have a group of 30 and it was a Friday night, but come on. It was midnight or so when everybody got finished, so we just went home and went to bed. The actual provence meeting was the next day, and that was pretty cool. One of our Grand Officers skyped in, so that was kind of cool to have someone 1/3 of the fraternity's leadership at the meeting. So that went well, it was long though.

After the meeting we went back to the hotel and the guys I was with drank a lot. Then we went to a place called the Sports Bubble, which is kind of like the metrodome only not as big and still inflated. We were like the only guys there, which was a little weird, but we played football anyways. I'm not even that good at football, but since everyone was drunk, I was doing work.

After that most of the guys went to a cigar shop that we couldn't get into because the entrance was through a bar and I'm not 21. So we went to the NDSU sigs' house and the other brothers said they would join us in half an hour. So it was good and we hung out there for a while, until all of the NDSU sigs fell asleep, which was a little weird because it was only 11:30 and now we were the only guys awake. By that time I was getting pretty hungry, so me and the guy I was with took a pizza from the fridge and turned on the oven. Not our pizza, but whatever, we're brothers, right?

Shortly after, one of the brothers who wasn't drinking called me and let me know he was coming home from the bar. I told him to swing by and pick us up, because now it was 12:30 or so and I wanted to go to bed. so he did, but we still had this pizza. We didn't have an oven in the room, so we tore it in 4 pieces and microwaved it. Long story short, it didn't work. So don't cook pizza in the microwave.

That morning, I woke up to a call from our consul's girlfriend at 5:30, and she was thinking I was our consul, so she was laying the mack down pretty hard. That was pretty awkward. Anyways, I had an 18 mile run, so I got dressed and did that. That was really cool. I knew where I was going, but at the same time I didn't. I headed out from Fargo, and made my way down to Moorhead, through the campus of MSU Moorhead, and Concordia and back to Fargo. It was pretty cool running past the "Minnesota welcomes you" sign on the way there and the "thank you for visiting" sign on the way back. I wish I had a camera, it was pretty cool, and I felt like a total badass.