Nowhere, Wisconsin

Some might argue that all of Wisconsin outside of Mad Town and maybe Green Bay is nowhere, WI, but I'm talking really nowhere. Like, 8 miles to the nearest town with a population in the double digits nowhere. Anyways, what I was setting up there was my recent trip to my fraternity brother and housemate's cabin in northern Wisconsin. Its like two and a half hours from the cities, though we ended up making it up there in 4 and a bit coming up. We took three cars and one ended up getting lost (it wasn't me) plus we had to stop at a grocery store to get supplies for breakfast and other shenanigans, one too many liquor stores, and a fireworks shop.

We finally got up there and pretty much went to bed right away. That was Friday. Saturday I got up at 7:30 for a 10 miler, except I only went 6. This cabin was so far out of the way it was a good mile or two to a paved road. That, and they had a 3/4 of a mile long unpaved driveway which seemed like it never ended. This kid actually has two cabins, although the one we were staying at was pretty much a shed with a bunch of beds in it. The other one, three miles away or so, was furnished and was where the rest of his family was staying. I woke up at 7:30 Saturday and was pretty sure I was the only person awake within 10 miles or so. It was pretty cool. I could hear a bunch of animals in the distance, thank God. Wolves, bears, that sort of stuff that I'd been warned about because honestly, if a bear got me while I was running I was pretty much a sitting duck.

So I run to this guy's other cabin, only about two or three miles being on paved roads and didn't see a soul. It was the most relaxing thing ever. I had thought I could do the whole thing in road running shoes- my synchrofuels- but was sorely mistaken. After 8 miles my feet were bleeding and felt like bricks. In fact, the all- yellow upper of the shoes is now all brownish with dried blood. But its all good because when I got back to our cabin I jumped in the Chippewa River (which was freezing) and then threw a couple fireworks in the cabin to wake everyone up. After yet another trip to the liquor store in Winter, we went rafting down the river.

We stopped midway down (actually more like a half hour into our float) to this dumpy old place called the Wannegan in Ojibwa for some pizza. I'm pretty sure- no, I'm certain- that it was just frozen pizza thrown in a pizza oven, but at that point I wasn't complaining. After the pit stop we all left, beer coolers in tow for Dave's other cabin (I said his name, he's probably going to be pissed), which was a good hour and a half down the river more. Nobody passed out, no casualties, although we had a ton of beer left over, which was okay since we were going to have a beer pong tournament that night. I'd resolved not to drink until I got done with my running, and because I've had a grand total of 1 beer before that weekend. So once we beached our crafts we went in to warm up (it had started raining before we got to our destination).

Dave's mom, grandma, and two brothers were at that cabin, and man, I haven't had that kind of hospitality in a while. She cooked us hamburgers, beer brats, and corn on the cob fresh from the co- op in Winter, and it was delicious. I was in a food coma. After a good three hours of playing cards and helping out around the cabin, we headed back to our cabin in "the truck" which was an ancient pick up truck with monster truck tires. Most of us climbed in the pick- up part of the truck and almost died a few times. Dave's a really bad driver. Most everyone went to sleep right away, which was kind of a bummer. I didn't, and stayed up talking by the fire until midnight or so, then set my alarm for Sunday's run.

Sunday was supposed to be 10 miles, but I decided to loop around Winter for a 16 mile loop. Luckily I brought my Cascadia 6's with me so I threw those on, as well as a Wisco XC singlet I got at the Griak invite last year. It was a pretty cool run. The town wasn't all that hard to find from the cabin, and I was able to take fire roads all the way into town. When I got there it was pretty cool. It goes without saying, everyone loved the singlet and it seemed like the whole town yelled something to me- they love their bucky up there. I was thinking the whole time about Once A Runner. You know how Quenton Cassidy goes to train at Bruce Denton's cabin for a couple months? thats exactly what I felt like. I should do that, just go up to that cabin and just run and run and run some more. That would be awesome. After I got back, I chilled in the river for a while, and then packed up my stuff feeling much more of a runner.

On the way back our car stopped by the leinenkugel's brewery in Chippewa Falls. Pretty cool stuff actually, plus we got 4 free 8 ounce glasses of whatever we wanted. We each had two glasses before the tour and two after and we were set, or at least I was. I'm actually surprised I was able to handle that much beer. I know I'm a lightweight, but I don't know how light, and I don't really want to find out. But whatever, that was good stuff.

Okay, well its getting close to 2:00 A.M. and I have to get up for work at 8, so I should probably stop writing.

The ground beef relay and other shenanigans

Saturday I went running. Twice. That shouldn't suprise you though, its summer, thats just what you do. I went for a regular 17 miler in the morning, took a shower, went to bed again, and woke up around lunchtime. My roomate was grilling, and my other roommate- the one who freeloads all the time for food- says to me "oh, hey, want to run to Cub and get some ground beef?" So I oblige and tuck $5 in my shoe and we're off. I had a tough time getting going, and almost threw a temper tantrum because I had to wear a shirt (the whole no shirt, no shoes, no service thing), but before you know it we were going at a good clip and halfway there. The store is only 2 and a half miles away, but we were both pretty sweaty when we got there on account of the fact that it was like 90 degrees, so we walked in and got some serious stank- eye dropped on us by everyone in the store but its all good. We wondered around for a good 15 minutes before we found the meat aisle (clearly labeled MEAT AISLE) and got some ground beef and left. The freeloading roomate got 2 lbs and I got 1. Freeloader rooomate thought it would be a good idea to put them in a bag, not carry them. I won $2 off a $1 lottery ticket and bought a soda, so this bag was already getting heavy.

With that, we took off. We were going pretty quick, hit the 1 mile mark in 7:12, and I was dying. I was carrying this bag with me the whole way and it just wasn't happening. I downed the soda I had bought like nobody's buisness, and it started to rain. We had to get home quick too since we needed to get the ground beef into the fridge before it did whatever ground beef does when it gets too hot. So, we devised a plan: each of us would run 2 blocks with the bag of beef and toss it back to the other guy. So thats what we did. We almost dropped the bag a few times throwing it around, but we got home real quick. It was a good time. We were singing and making jokes about our huge meat and immature stuff like that. And then we cooked it and then we ate it. The end.

I also ran yesterday. Holy cow was that hot. I went 2 hours just because and got sunburned for the first time this year. I was also white from salt. When I came home I literally passed out in my bed. Today I'm going to go later, like 9 or 10.

Related: I ordered a pair of cascadia 6's today

Osama Bin Laden Hide and Seek Champion 1998-2011

I'm alive! I'm sure you were all deathly worried about me, right? Well, I've been busy- er than usual. Its been a really horrible couple of weeks. Like last week, I pulled three all nighters and am still behind on homework. Its because last weekend was both Sigma Chi initiation and Relay For Life. Initiation was awesome as always, we initiated 9 guys, which is actually a bigger class than the University of Minnesota. Initiation was Friday night into Saturday morning and I stayed up all night for that, even though I didn't have to. All the initiations I've been at, save my own, I've missed something. So, I stayed up all night so I made sure I wouldn't miss anything. That ended at like 11:30 when we stopped cleaning up, so that was all nighter number 2. I got home, at lunch, and tried to convince myself not to take a two hour nap because I knew I wouldn't wake up. At 3 I went over to the Anderson Athletic & Recreation Complex Fieldhouse to start setting up for Relay For Life. We actually got done a little before 6, when teams were slated to set up, so I was able to grab my team's stuff and stake out a decent campsite.

Relay itself went really well, and I had a bunch of fun- after midnight. Before midnight was an absolute ****show. No one really had any idea what they were doing when, stuff didnt get printed out, and everyone had their own idea of how they wanted things ran. Somehow I got everyone on the same page and we were good. The one thing I was really worried about was the Luminaria ceremony. The glow sticks we were using to light the Luminaria bags looked to be going out every five minutes or so. We decided to pass out glow sticks before the ceremony, and have people crack them as they walked around the track. It looked really cool and it worked well. We had an acoustic performance during the luminaria ceremony (and after as well) by Matt Griswold and it was really touching. The ceremony, the speakers, all of that was really well done if I do say so myself.

I ended up losing the concessions stand key for a while, which was really stressful for a while. I figured out that I had locked it in the concessions stand itself, so all I had to do was open the door and get the key. The problem was, there are only two keys to that door- I had one and the Athletic Director had the other, and it was 1:00 in the morning. I called our public safety and they called Saint Paul police to try and get the door open, but nothing worked; they didn't have a key and couldn't pick it. I had left some ice cream out on the counter to thaw and I was cooking pizza rolls on the hot dog rollers (because there was no oven), so after I was resigned to the fact that I wasnt getting the door open until the AD answered his phone, I got pissed that I would have to clean all that ice cream up off the floor.

It was all good though, we just got breakfast to the relayers on time and we had enough food! Some highlights were watching TC and the Wild mascot play beer pong against eachother, watching the chair of the Political Science department do the velcro wall, a 6 hour long volleyball tournament, and running a 4:52 midnight mile in my boxers. Good stuff, and I can't wait until next year.

Also, a quick shout out to Dougie Fresh, emperor of the Brooks Fanatics program, who donated two free shoe certificates toward the event. You're the man!

We ended up raising $29,082 toward the American Cancer Society

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.