July 9, 2007 by jon.

  Now that I got your attention…I did get a job offer, or actually, I was asked to do a volunteer position.  Anyone who has read this blog for any amount of time knows I get a kick out of weather and report daily precip to a site called CoCoRaHS.  Well, they asked me if I would be the Kane County Coordinator for volunteers.  I guess there is getting to be enough volunteers that this county needs someone to help out.

  I said not right now.  I have to get through a few things at work and some travel and if they still needed help after summer was over, I’d be glad to step in.  I was kind of surprised with Tim (Illinois State Coordinator) said they would wait.  I guess they’re not as hard up as I thought. 

   Oh, here is a good article on how CoCoRahs got it’s start.  I remember the Ft. Collins flood that they are talking about.  Matter of fact, the bookstore I was working at was contacted by the CSU Library to help replace some damaged books.  Kind of brings this to home for me as I went to school in Ft. Collins and the flood area was near there.  Kind of neat to be able to volunteer on something now that might help give warning to an event like that again.

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July 9, 2007 by jon.

I haven’t posted much on running lately.  Actually haven’t posted much of all lately.  I just haven’t gotten around to it.  I am still running and it’s not feeling too bad.

I think in one of my more recent posts I mentioned that my back was still bothering me and I couldn’t figure it out.  Well I have been seeing Dr. Mark twice a week for 3 weeks now.  He found two adhesions in my lower back which have been probably causing most of my discomfort.  He thinks they are pretty old and just from over-use.  He has been using the Graston Technique to release them.  Not completely gone yet, but my back sure is feeling better.

So in getting ready to run the upcoming Wild West Relay, I’ve ran some hills yesterday, in the heat.  Not fun.  Of course hills in Illinois mean something completely different from hills in Colorado.  I have about a 60 foot hill not far away that I can run up.  Johnson’s Mound is a leftover from a glacial period and is just a glacier deposit.  Highest point around though.  There is a nice loop road that climbs up the hill for over about 1/4 mile and then descends the same amount in about 1/10 of a mile.  You see what’s coming?

I did repeats on this thing starting with the easier slope.  I would run up that slope and down the steeper one, then turn around and go the other way.  I made it up the gentle slope 4 times and the steeper one 3.  Gotta work on that as my first leg in Colorado is 3 miles mainly up…at altitude.

I did catch the profile on my GPS but haven’t looked at it.  I’ll post the numbers once I do.

Needless to say, I need to run this thing a lot more in the next 3 weeks to get ready for the relay.

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