My First Half Marathon

Many of you know that I've been training for the Chicago Half Marathon. Over the last few months I have run a few 5k races in the Chicago area and have been doing as much running, biking, and strength training as possible to train for it. I was doing really well at first but then the last few weeks of training I kind of slacked off a little bit so I wasn't sure how it was going to go. The half marathon (13.1 miles) was this past Sunday in downtown Chicago. It also happened to be the rainiest weekend on record in Chicago with 10 inches of rainfall. It rained the entire race so it was somewhat miserable, but I finished and beat my goal time. I had hoped to run it in 2 hours and 10 minutes and my actual time was 2 hrs. 4 mins. and 31 secs. so I was really happy with that. Unfortunately because the weather was so bad Hannah wasn't able to get pictures so I am going to be ordering some that were taken by a company at different points along the race. I will put those up when we get them. I hope to run the Indy Mini-marathon in May and my long term goal is to train for the Chicago Marathon (26.2 miles) next October!
Randy

The End of Summer

Another update anyone?

> August 11th - 15th: The Oregon Home goes to Green Bay!

Our co-worker Sara is from Green Bay so she invited the girls to visit where she's from and her father kindly hosted us at his home. Our first stop on the trip was to the Jelly Belly Factory.

Packers pre-season game at Lambeau Field!

The following days we went to Heritage Hills. Heritage Hills is a plantation of old homes, a village of old homes really. The girls got to tour and see how they lived in the pioneer days. Then we went to the Green Bay Moose lodge for dinner that evening. The girls went around greeting and thanking the Moose memebers for all they do to keep Mooseheart running.

The next day, Wednesday, we went to Bay Beach where they had a little amusement park. I, Hannah, got sick from all the spinning rides and had to sit out the rest of the morning. Then that evening we went to a local water ski show. We ended the trip with a visit to the beach.

All in all we had a wonderful time. We ended each evening by watching the Olympics. We just had a very nice restful time relaxing and bonding with the girls and were greatful for safe travels. Oh! While Randy & I were in Green Bay we recieved the news that we are now approved drivers. So we helped our co-worker by driving home from the trip.

> August 29th - September 1st: Labor Day weekend at Lincoln, IL

We just got back from a long weekend away with the girls camping. The Illinois Moose lodges hosted a camping trip for our campus down in Lincoln. We had beautiful warm days and nice cool evenings. They had all kinds of games Saturday morning...

Water Balloon Toss

Sack Races

Balloon Walk Egg Toss

That evening we enjoyed a little karaoke and a lot of dancing.

The rest of the weekend we hung out and visited with the other homes from campus, had a camp fire and roasted some marshmallows, went to Church in Lincoln, went swimming at a lake in Clinton and just had a great time. So summer is officially over now and school has started. Now we have girls volleyball and football games to look forward to. Autumn here we come!

Some have requested photos of our quarters and house on the inside. So stay posted and we'll try to get that taken care of. Well I know this was quiet a general update. Randy tends to be better at giving detail so maybe he can post the next post. We thank you all for your continued prayers and support and look forward to catching up with all of you in the near future.

-Hannah