Exciting Times!

It's exciting times in the Stoves' household...our house is almost done getting painted and then we'll basically be done with exterior work on our house! When it's all said and done I'll have to put before and after pictures on here so you can see how much work we've had done this summer. I have truly learned the benefit of hiring people that you know to do work on your house. The painters we have working used to work for me at Olive Garden when I managed there...for those in Lincoln, I highly recommend SuperiorPro to paint your house...good guys and they do good work for a good price. We also used a contractor that used to live across the street from us to do a bunch of handyman/fix-it type projects, and he's installing a door and window for us...We didn't know the stone people and they were a hassle...I don't recommend using Edward's Stone if you're thinking about doing that kind of thing to your house. The end product is nice, but the process was a big headache.

The other bit of excitement is that on Sunday I'm doing the Omaha Half Marathon. Hopefully that'll be a good time. I'm shooting to get it done in about 2 hours 7 min...that would be a 9:45 mile pace. A fairly aggressive goal for me, but I can comfortably do 9 miles at that pace right now, so I want to see if I can keep it going for the extra 4.1 miles. I'll have to let you all know next week how I did. I'm only about 3 weeks away from the KC Marathon...I don't have any crazy thoughts in my head of going that fast for that run. I'm hoping to keep it under an 11 min. mile pace. It'd be nice to get it done in 4 1/2 hours, but that'd be at a 10:17 pace...don't know that I can do that. I'm heading out for an 18 mile run here in about 10 minutes or so and that'll be a good test to see where I'm at. I have not done a good job keeping up with my training program at all...by now I should've done a 20 mile run and then next week I'd start tapering...I need to do 18 miles today, take a couple days off and do the half on Sunday and then next week do 20 and then start to cut back...I was really hoping to get a 23 mile run in before the marathon, but alas, that probably won't happen. Of course, prior to doing the Disney Marathon the farthest I went in training runs was 18...'course it took us over 6 hours to get done...