Today’s Advice – Train for Races!

Our main accomplishment for this week had absolutely nothing to do with the house. Several months ago one of my co-workers came into my office with a question. He said “would you and Chris like to be miserable and sleep-deprived for about 30 hours at the end of September?” And of course we were naïve enough to agree to run the Washington DC Ragnar Relay.

The Ragnar Relay is a race that starts near Cumberland, MD and goes 201+ miles all the way to Alexandria, VA. The relay is broken into 36 different legs ranging from 2.5 to 9.8 miles in length. Each team consists of 12 runners (less for “ultra” teams) and each runner has three legs to complete.

Our team consisted of co-workers Bryan (the organizer), Caitlin, and Matt, Bryan’s 4 siblings (Beth, Michael, Erin, and Amy), their friend John, Caitlin’s husband Andrew, and Matt’s friend Katrina. Since there was so many with a connection to NASA we went by the name “Astro-Nuts.”

I ran legs 1, 13, and 25 and Chris ran 3, 15, and 27. Our total distances were similar but the elevation profiles were quite different…


Normally, we would have spent sufficient time training for such a race but with the house work we’ve been out of time and energy most days (not to mention the ridiculously hot summer we’ve had here). Fortunately, I was able to complete my runs with minimal (almost non-existent) training. Our legs are pretty sore today so hopefully we’ve learned our lesson that training is a very good idea!

We did have fun but we were sleep deprived and, at times, miserable. The high temperatures for the race were around 95 degrees. Our legs were run on Friday morning, Friday evening, and early Saturday morning, so our van missed out on the hottest hours. Our team started the race at 8:30 Friday morning and finished a little before 7 pm on Saturday – that’s a total of 34 hours and 15 minutes!





After getting plenty of rest on Sunday, Chris was able to finish installing the light tube in the kitchen. The light tube was initially installed by our contractor and it was done incorrectly. It is very delicate and finicky so it took awhile to get it all right.

I’ve been working on moving everything back out of the medium bedroom so that we can start unpacking and organizing everything. My parents will be bringing down the rest of our furniture and boxes this coming weekend so soon we will finally be all moved in!

Also this week, the chimney company finished up everything on Tuesday and we had our boiler serviced on Wednesday. Now we are ready for (and looking forward to) cooler temperatures (this weekend we tied the record for days over 90 degrees – we have had 67 so far this year!).

This coming week we’ll be working on unpacking and installing radiator covers and trim. It’s really starting to come together. We still have a lot of big projects to complete but having finished rooms definitely lessens some of the stress.