Big news...

Okay...sorry, but nobody's pregnant or anything quite like that.

But we are moving.

Autumn and I have accepted positions in the southwestern city of Dayton, Ohio, and will be moving on November 10th. We're a bit nervous, but very excited.

I will be working for Legacy Ministries International as a 'Financial & Administrative Specialist.' LMI is an umbrella organization that oversees several Christian ministries including the Dayton Christian Schools (four campuses with approximately 3,500 students), a few church assistance ministries (printing, media management, and technology partnerships), an assisted living center, a retirement community, two or three mission organizations, and a radio station. Several other separate Christian organizations lease buildings from LMI, including Athletes in Action which has their national headquarters on the Xenia campus.

I will be directly assisting the controller and chief financial officer in their day to day responsibilities as well as assisting the other members of the senior management team.

Autumn will be working in the school system as a teacher in the English department. One of the school's veteran teachers had a series of corrective surgeries that didn't really correct the problem, and due to complications from them, was required to step down mid-semester. Autumn will be assuming immediate responsibility of the classroom and will be teaching 7th-grade English.

This move came as a major supriseto us and most of our friends, and we wish we had more time wrap up our time here in Minnesota and say proper goodbyes. I'm sure I missed calling a few people to personally tell them what was going on. If I missed you, I'm sorry. Please stay in touch with us and we'll be sure to give you our new contact information as soon as we know it.

eazakes@juno.com

The Grand Canyon Rim to Rim to Rim (R3) Part I

Part I

Twenty-four hours straight. 50 miles of extremes. 20,000 feet of elevation change. Temperatures ranging from 28 to 106 degrees. Snakes. Worst of all, the birds.

It started in my junior year of high school. My parents encouraged us to challenge ourselves, and I’d done all sorts of wild, maybe foolish, things. I had decided that by the time I was eighteen I would have completed each of the Ironman distances individually—2 miles of swimming, 100 plus miles of bicycling, and a marathon’s worth of running.

Since I had grown up racing road bikes, the 100 plus miles of riding were already done. Swimming two miles was harder. I swam during my freshman year of college and knocked it out on a Saturday night after studying for most of the day. The marathon fell when a friend and I, inspired by another friend who was trying to run 75 miles in a day, decided that, “Really, how hard could it be…” It turned out to be pretty hard.

With those notches in my belt, I continued to look for the next opportunity to push my limits. I managed a solo 200 mile bike ride in one day a year or so later. But then my jackpot idea arrived. During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, the idea of going across the Grand Canyon and back in a day somehow managed to surface in my mind.

It was an original idea for me. I didn’t know if anyone else had done it, and I thought it’d be great to “conquer” it. A month later at my next door neighbor’s garage sale, I was thumbing through an old box of Arizona Highway’s when a beautiful cover photo of the Grand Canyon at sunset caught my eye. Beneath was the title of the main article in that month’s issue, “Grand Canyon—Rim to Rim to Rim.”

On one hand, I was a little unhappy. I couldn’t be the first. On the other hand, I was elated. Someone else had done it before, so it 'should' be possible. My neighbor gave me the magazine and I read the article several times. It detailed the journeys of several runners in a yearly race across the canyon and back. Elite runners that year did it in about 12-15 hours.

I began rolling the idea snowball around in my head, letting it gather more and more weight. I pushed it to the edge of action hill, where it needed nothing but a nudge to push it into possible. The nudge it needed was someone to go along.

My parents wouldn’t let me do something of that scope unless someone went with me. Who though really wants to try to go across the largest canyon in the world and back in one day?

Nobody.

It took two years to find the right person.



Part II coming soon... (Part II is now available here)

Anniversary...

For the few people that check this blog, I just realized that it has been an active blog for 1 year now. During that time there have been 16 posts. Just a bit better than one per month. Certainly that could be improved on, but thanks for your patience. I'll see if I can improve things over the next year.

More Marathon Madness

The marathon went fine. Autumn and I finished in 5:45 and some very small change. We didn't run into any major problems other than the heat. It got up to 86 degrees. We'd been training in the low 50 degree temperature range and then we hit this major two day warming trend, so we definitely suffered from that.

My dad finished in 4:40 in his first marathon at the age of 49 with no long history of running so that was pretty exciting for him.

My mom ran into a lower leg problem during her training and had to take 5 weeks off with no running and then visited a therapist every week thereafter, so that certainly hurt her. Her long run was only about 15 miles. She managed to make it 17-18 before the bus caught her. The course wrapped up at just over a 6:10 hr pace.

Autumn and I were safely under the time limit for her first marathon by about 20-25 minutes and had an enjoyable (and perhaps repeatable) experience.