Law Week 8K or Now a XXXLarge Nuke

I don't have much of anything encouraging to post about this race. My weight this past week was near 190 pounds, the highest since May 2006. Saturday morning was warm and humid, but the wind wasn't a problem and a thick low cloud bank kept the sun away. In August, I'd call it a cool morning, but in March it was oppressively warm and humid. Hobby had 70 to 71 with the dewpoint at 67 to 68 and an East wind at 7 to 3 mph.

Law Week 8K Results

I started out with a 5:54 mile and felt OK but most of the people I wanted to stay with were in a group about ten seconds ahead of me. Mile 2 was a 6:15 and mile 3 a 6:18. I was just going through the motions. Autumn Ray passed me in the third mile and I tried to hold on to her for a while. Mile 4 was the worst, a 6:34. I was soaked in sweat and felt really fat. Another guy passed me with about a quarter mile to go, and we pushed each other to the finish, but that last 0.97 was still something like 6:11. Not anyway near the sub-30 I was hoping to run.

I'm nearly 15 pounds heavier than I was in January. It really is time to quit buying the candy and desserts. Unfortunately, I don't have much time to turn this around before the Spring Series ends. The Bellaire Trolley 5K is this Saturday and the LP Run is the following Wednesday.

I spent all night at the power plant for the start of Unit 1's refueling outage. I mentored our new graduate Nuke Engineer on inspecting the reactor coolant loop piping. I tore my protective clothing climbing up on a scaffold rack to show her where we had a sample tubing leak. How embarrassing! I had to put on another pair of protective coveralls (big yellow suit) and the Radiation Protection person made sure they brought me a larger size: XXXLarge instead of the XXLarge I was wearing. The rest of the walkdown was climbing up the reactor coolant pumps to the hotter upper portions of containment, and in double PCs I was sweating as bad as I was during the 8K! I made it home about 8AM Sunday. After a few hours sleep, now it's time for a Sunday long run.