Run to Win

Windy Hagar married her track coach at the beginning of the week after coercing her folks into signing a consent form. She is 16 years old and a Junior in high school; he is 40 years old and just resigned from the staff at her school. It is the fourth case in the past year or so in North Carolina with an innapropriate relationship between a kid and a teacher or a coach.

I do not have any kids yet, but I can not fathom allowing my daughter to do something like that. I probably would have some harsh things to say if she tried marrying somebody twice her age when she was 18 or 21, but at 16 I have to think that I would move our family out of state rather than become a party to this whole situation. Maybe it is because I’m a yankee and I grew up near the top of the country, but I can not understand why a parent would allow their daughter to get married so young, ignoring the age difference between her and her husband.

You can read the whole story and watch a video clip from Good Morning America over at ABC.com.

This week last year was centered almost entirely upon football, with the exception of my getting engaged and a tip on how to help yourself lose weight.

• Listed first but coming at the end of the week was my description of the best marathon training run ever, where I proposed to my wife after I caught up to her on a 17 mile training run. That was a lot of fun.
• My thoughts on cutting out sugar water from your diet, and when you would and would not want to do that. Soda and sports drinks can make it more difficult to lose weight over just drinking water.
• I described UMaine’s loss to Nebraska last year, but I neglected to mention that I got pulled over for an OUI after that game. Since I hadn’t been drinking anything but water I had no problems, but the cop did not believe that I could come out of a bar after 3 hours and not have had any alcohol. The folk I was driving home were definately not sober enough to drive, though.
• Two NFL careers ended this week last year. Jerry Rice retired and Thomas Harrion had a heart attack. Despite hurting his ankle, Brett Favre still started though.

This morning I headed into the gym to resume my weight training, which has been non-existant for the past two months. Given that I have had trouble running, I probably should have gotten in and done more weight training than I have. But, that is all right. My quads remember what it feels like to start a new program again. I am going to try to repeat the training that I did for my last marathon, although I do not think I have enough time for the whole thing so I am going to mix it up a little.

Today was the first time I have lifted weights since I got married. Other than a clinking sound now and again, I did not really notice the wedding band. I was worried that it might pinch my finger or cut off circulation, but such was not the case. I am still getting used to wearing it.

Thankfully, being made of tungsten, it did not ding at all during the workout. It is supposed to be scratch proof, so over the next 8 or 9 weeks I will be putting that theory to the test. So far, so good.

For the last few weeks I have had great Sunday runs. While I was here in town, I hooked up with various folks to get about 8 miles in the middle of my 17(ish) mile training runs that were quite a bit faster than I have been doing (6:19-6:24 the first week and 6:20ish to 6:30ish the second week). I went up to visit my uncles last weekend, and wanted to get a good workout in.

My uncles live, appropriately enough, 17 miles apart. Last year, I missed a turn and it wound up being a 28 mile run (which I ran 27 of), but this year I made sure I knew which direction I was going. The fun part comes in with the motivation to run faster; my girlfriend was also doing her long run.

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