Practice Away From Practice

Well I knew it had to happen sooner or later. This past weekend Jamie and I took off for the weekend to visit my family in Pleasanton (Bay Area), so our normal Saturday morning practice turned into a solo run for us. It was a bit tough to hang out with my three brothers and not have some beers with them the night before. One beer led to two and I ended up staying up till about 2ish. Needless to say the 6:00 AM wake-up call came and went. I cracked my eyes at around nine and stumbled out of bed - this was a four mile day, a new bump up in our mileage, and I was not about to let this own get by me. My brother Kevin the night before made the comment in his drunken state that he wanted to run with me, so I roused him out of slumber. He woke with a bit of contention, but eventually met me downstairs for some hydration and stretching. We headed out to a local spot where I had mapped a 4 mile run. He brought his blades and I my running shoes; we strapped up and blasted off.

As we started out Kevin made the stark discovering that the course I had mapped out deceptively turned to gravel. This made for an amusing display of rollerblade acrobatics on his part - a damn funny site. We rerouted and I just judged my distance by my time. The run turned out to be pretty easy; 4 miles did not seem that much longer then 3 miles for me. It was good hangin with my bro and running in our home town. We were able to extrude a few good stories from some of the familiar sites we passed through… aaaaahh reminiscing, isn’t it great (that’s a nice slice of cheese for you, now how about some wine?). I finished out my last half mile with a fierce pace, doubling that of my normal pace. We headed back to the house where I found Jamie wrecking a 30 minute ride on the stationary bike. Give her blog a glance to see why she’s biking instead of running.

So the whole reason for this weekend visit was to head out to an A’s game with my dad, brothers and nephews – a guy’s day you might say. My dad always took us to A’s games growing up, so we still like to keep it going. These games are always a blast; drinking beer, eating peanuts and hot dogs, and yelling obscenities at the umpire for bad calls. It was a damn good time hangin out with my dad like this. That's him above with my youngest bro David and his to boys Owen and Joshua. It is so unbelievable that my dad is battling cancer; he is so fiery and full of energy. His positive momentum seems to be collecting energy by the day.

Speaking of my dad’s battle, he just finished his third round of chemo and can now say the majority of it is behind him now. HELL YEAH!! Three more to go... keep rockin it dad!!

All for now. Try and keep up!!

B