Santa does show up at the Reindeer Run. No really. Apparently the Alcoa High School track coach is Santa “helper” and puts on a “fat” suit and races with his “reindeer”. THe “reindeer” are really “high” school student with “fake” antlers. “Are you ‘tired’ of the qoutes yet?”

Actually in addition to the actual Race, the post race awards, the post race door prizes and the Triple Crown door prizes, there is a Christmas Costume contest. The winner with the best costume or holiday spirit decoration wins something. I forget what it is, but the judging is based on the calibrated ears of one of the race officials. Whoever gets the loudest cheers gets the prizes.

So this guy, I mean coach, dresses up like Santa and the track team put on reindeer gear (antlers, red noses, etc) and hook up with rope so that it appears that Santa and his Reindeer run in the race. Not sure how that messes up the finish line, but it’s pretty interesting.

So Sunday will be my last race of the year and I am feeling pretty good about it. I don’t think that I’ll have an earth shattering race and crush my PR time. However, if you feel an earthquake at 2:21:55pm EST, that would mean that I broke my PR time.  I’m actually looking at around a 23:00 minute finish time. So we will see…

I’ll have all the gory details in the race report…

I had a chance to visit one of my favorite Knoxville places, the recycling facility, yesterday. I was dropping off my mixed paper supply and I was dropping off some extra plastic bottles that had built up over the holiday week.

It was a lean day at the Recycling Facility for MyCokeReward Points. Although this excursion I wasn’t really jumping into the containers and looking for them, I did find 2 codes hanging out. So I didn’t go empty handed.

On a MyCokeReward note, I was thinking that they were going to close up shop on the game because they didn’t restock their inventory at the start of the basketball season like they did last year. The new prizes that they did add to the list of rewards were pretty much crap. I was actually thinking about cashing my points like Weiner Hallie and buy MORE Diet Coke. Of course, that would leave me with 30+ coupons of soda… not bad. But I would rather get something really nice and then use the other points to offer give aways! I mean the next Guess My Time, Win Crap contest will be in January and then about once a month through May, that’s alot of free swag that I can have shipped to people.

Then, I get this email today saying:

So just when I was going to bail on them, they tell me they love me and I’m hooked all over again. I sure hope that whatever they decide to add to their prize locker is less sucky then what is there now.

  A big thanks to all the people who send me codes!!!

Last night after my run, I was out completing errands and I was torn between Starbucks and Taco Bell on what to eat. Taco Bell is the easiest Fast Food Place to get Gluten Free food (Reg. Taco) and it has a little bit of casein with the cheese, unless it’s like the McDonald’s plastic cheese. On the other hand, I was cold and I wanted something warm for my insides. Starbucks can be Casein Free if you order with soy milk. However, there has been doom and gloom about how bad for you Taco Bell is and how many calories the Starbucks Coffees have… so let’s compare:

Think Out Side the Gluten - Taco Bell.

Here is the 3 Reg. Taco Combo with Diet Pepsi:

GAWH!

Here’s Your Coffee Mortgage - Starbucks.

Here is the Soy Caramel Latte Grande:

Huh… I chose well better with the Starbucks. Although the Starbucks has quite a bit more sugar, I had just run so that my internal furnace would burn that a little faster. The Starbucks had a fraction of the fat, nearly no Sat. Fat and no Trans Fat. The Sodium is LOT less. Not as much fiber and not as much of the vitamins listed. The only thing that the Taco Bell has going for it is the protein which would help me with muscle repair. Oh, and the Starbucks had no cholesterol, something I need to monitor.

Also, there was negligible price difference between the two.

As my The Younger might say about Fast Food: “skeerwy”

Susan from I Run For My Life is running her second Marathon this weekend. The St. Jude’s Marathon in Memphis. What makes this special is that she is had dedicated her race to Elijah, a personal friend of her’s who is going through chemotherapy for a second time. What makes it special is that Elijah is 6 and will turn 7 on December 1st, which just happens to coincide with the marathon!! And he just came home from the hospital!

Susan has been raising money for the St. Jude’s Children Research Hospital and now the raising money and training is complete, it’s now time to put the shoes on the asphalt and RUN! (technically you can still donate )

I know that She and I have crossover readers, but if you don’t read her blog on a regular basis, I encourage you to go over there and leave a word of encouragement.

On top of all this, she is well primed to totally destroy her previous PR time of 5:38:15 she ran at the Little Rock Marathon on March 4, 2007.

Part of the Christmas Season Tradition for me has been to bake stuff. Anything that I could, whenever I could. Typically, I try to fall into the holiday genre of baking, such as the Gingerbread Houses, Gingerbread Cookies, Making my own Reese Peanut Butter Tree clones, Truffles, can’t think of any others right now. I made a red velvet cake Christmas tree one year.

So this year, the rules have changed. I now am baking my Christmas Munchables without regular flour (sans Gluten) and without Cow’s Milk (sans Casein). Okay, I might use some chocolate that might “techincally” have casein in it but for all practical purposes, it will be Casein Free with an asterisk, since this is the year of the “asterisk” (at least in Sports).

Here’s what I have on my list:

Truffles (made with Almond Milk)… yeah, who knew that Almonds had udders.

Monster Cookies - these are those cookies that you make in a huge batch in a huge dish that makes close to 1000 cookies. The only change I would have to make is 86 (leave out) the M&Ms and replace the Chocolate Chips with Dark Chocolate Chips. I think everything else is okay. Unless you are in the camp that Oats, could be “contaminated” with Gluten. I took the Blue Pill and think that Oats are okay.

Gingerbread House/Train - Now, I was reminded that we are going to borrow a train mold to create a gingerbread train for The Elder since one of his special interests is trains. The Younger, well, he gets one too because he’ll just repeat like a broken record “me me too, me me too” if he doesn’t get one. I was thinking that perhaps along with the train, that I would build something 3 dimensional. I would say 4 dimensions but I don’t want to scare anyone. I saw how my readership dropped off after I gave you that mathematical scare. Just remember that mathematics, when used for recreational purposes, can be enlightening. I was planning on making a 3 dimensional train, but I think the mold is just a boring 2-D thing… which is fine for the 4yo.

I was thinking about making a house of some sort, but wasn’t sure of what and how intricate I would want to make it.

Thoughts, Opinions, Rants or Raves?

I wasn’t all that motivated to workout today. What seemed the best idea was to just stay under the hot water in the shower for an hour and knowing that it was someone else’s hot water. Somewhere in my brain something said that it would be better for me to run today and to shrivel up like a prune in the locker room.

My race week is a little off because my race is on Sunday afternoon, which means that no speed work on Friday instead of Thursday. It also means that I need to do a tune up run on Saturday instead of Friday, but since I don’t have the opportunity to run on Saturday, I have to run on Friday, but it’s not a speed day!

Well, I’ll work that out when Friday and Saturday comes around. What I needed to think about was what to run Today. I thought that an Easy Run would be in order since 1) I wasn’t all that motivate to run and 2)I had an excellent Speed session yesterday. I thought with those two factors that I could resist from my Tempo Tendencies where I turn every planned run into a Tempo Workout.

Not only was I not really motivated to run, I wasn’t all that motivated to run on any of the courses that I run on a normal basis. So that meant, branch out and try something new. I thought that I would run the first mile on a course that I was familiar with so that I could check my pace and make sure that I wasn’t creeping into that Tempo groove.

The first mile was 9:11 and although it was about the same as my marathon pace, it felt pretty easy. I was able to look around while running and see all the great sights. Eh, not that many great ones today. So, after the 1 mile mark, I decided to explore down in World’s Fair Park where I could map out another simple route that would be easy to remember the mile markers for future runnings.

Not to bore you will all the intricate details of my ever so exciting easy run. I ended up running 3.12 miles at an 9:07 average pace. I still finished with enough time to get in a 10 minute nice hot shower. So, the day wasn’t lost. Actually, my legs were a little sore from yesterday’s speed workout, so it was a good thing that I ran easy today. I’m thinking that I’ll just run tomorrow with Soon-To-Be-Dr. David after work as not to tire myself out too much before the race.

MY Family can be so proud of me that I’m not a Drunkard…

83%LUSH

My Lovely and Talented Wife needed me to make some bakery sweets for the Advent By Candlelight event at our Church tonight. We had a Gluten Free Pantry Chocolate Truffle Brownie mix in the cupboard and we had decided to use this since we wouldn’t have to buy any extra groceries. So, I had to get home to make the Brownies, plus take care of the kids for the evening. I knew that either the kids would wreck havok on the house like Godzilla on Tokyo, if I didn’t watch them like a hawk (they do have my DNA). So, I recruited them to “help” me. Luckily, The Younger, whose favorite line is “NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! I CAN DO IT” when it comes to everything, wasn’t all that interested in helping. He was much more interested in running around and playing with plastic bags. The Elder was much more engaged with the whole mixing process. I think he figured that if the dry mix tastes good, the finished mix must taste good as well.

So, I made the brownie mix, but that’s not all… we do alot of our Gluten Free Shopping with Amazon. Mainly because we can get bulk for pretty cheap. Like the Thai Noodles that we like are $2.50 at the store, but if you buy 12 from Amazon in bulk they’re only $1.50ish each. So, the box with the smiley face (that’s an Amazon box) was delivered with 6 boxes of Gluten Free Pantry Chocolate Chip mix… and well, since I was making the brownies, making the cookies would be just as easy since I was in the cooking mode.

So, I made the cookies and they turned out pretty good. They’re not exactly as good as Nestle Tollhouse Cookies, but for “homemade” cookies, they are good.

aside: My Lovely and Talented Wife just came in and said there were “A MILLION desserts there. A MILLION!” So being the highly intelligent person that she is, she brought home our gluten free brownies since most people wouldn’t appreciate them.

While the brownies were cooking, the cookie dough was set on the sheets and hanging around the kitchen. Funny that one cookie, the closest to the edge kept shrinking. The Elder apparently  “needed a fix” every 30 seconds. Once the cookies were out of the oven, I gave them a small glass of milk and a cookie.

Here are pictures of my “helpers”

The Cookie Addict

 
Saving Some for Later

It’s my only picture of me at Autumnfest and although I am not running, I am working hard!

Picture courtesy of My Lovely and Talented Wife

I’m sitting here at work, at little aloof on what I need to do or what I need to focus on. There’s an hour before the Stock Market closes, so there’s not much to do in that arena, I’ve blown an hour surfing on StumbleUpon - only to find a few funny things and no real content. My email is slow today. I figured that if I concentrated on something here that would jumpstart me and send me off into the right orbit - the orbit of productivity.

Today at lunchtime I ran a speed interval in preparation for Sunday’s 5k race. I wanted to see how well I could handle the rigors of speed especially since I had such a good pace for Autumnfest. I ran a fast 1st mile, then a recovery 1/2 mile, a speed 1/2 mile, repeat and then a cool down mile. Seeing that I don’t have a lot of time to really work on speed, I’ll take what I can get.

In my first 1/2 mile, I got a PR for that distance. Technically, I keep track of my PR time for less than a mile in meters since  it’s a little more accurate to monitor this on a track than out on the street. However, I am very familiar with my Gmap course of my Market Square Fab 4 miler, so I clocked my 1/2 mile time at 3:12.09. My current 800 meter PR time is 3:13.99 and since 800meters is only 0.497 miles, I can conclude that my time for the 800 meters on the 1/2 course is faster than 3:13.99. I will use the 1/2 mile time for my 800 meter time, since “technically” none of it certified, other than I said so (and so I say it). Oh, let me make that more official sounding. By the power granted to me by myself, the time ran by Terry on this the 26th day of November in the year 2007 of 3:12.09 say now be set as the new personal record for the 800 meter distance in Terry’s personal log book.

Although I have a good amount of speed right now, it will have to be a in-race decision on whether to attempt to break my current 5k PR time of 21:56, yet another 6 year record. I’m not quite as confident that I could break this record, as I am still in the “endurance” phase of training more than the “speed” phase. Plus, the course isn’t PR friendly. However, I know that I could get something under 23 minutes. So we’ll see.

***

Last night, we watched the movie Amazing Grace which is about William Wilberforce (no, a real guy) a Parliament (not George Clinton Parliament) member in late 18th century, early 19th century that through his passion was able to abolish slavery in England. The reference to Amazing Grace (The Song) is that it was written by the captain of a slave ship who witnessed the atrocities of his trade, repented and later used his knowledge to help Wilberforce. It wasn’t action packed, all the dying was from illnesses and it’s not a chick-flick (although one couple does fall in love and marry) but it’s a clever portrayal of political activists and political passions.

***

yeah, I don’t have much today…

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Now playing: Belinda Carlisle - God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
via FoxyTunes