Life Event, Pt. 1 Today's my birthday. I've never been much of a birthday person. For this one, I'm thinking a 16km run, 10 climbing routes, and maybe driving out somewhere to catch a meteor shower. The run will be solo, the climb with some friends, and the meteor shower with who knows. One of those instances where having a partner would be nice, but here we are. Community Involvement I'm on the board of local Nonprofit. We've been going for 25 years. We might end up going dark next year due to a lack of funding. What happened? Years of mismanagement both monetarily and people-wise, a lack of board members, and a lack of focus on sustainable fundraising. This year, one of the members had promised at least submitting 5-6 grant applications, with help from some local graduate students. The graduate students did their part, yet the grants were never submitted. I really like this organization and think it's good for the city, but damn. Talk about a situation to find yourself in... Life Event, Pt. 2 Ran my last race of the year this past weekend. A 25km race out on the peninsula, it was an amazing course with some single track trail interspersed through a great park. Small crowd, extremely friendly crowd which is par for the course for trail running. I went with two friends, who came in 1st and 2nd overall. Somehow I'm friends with some really great runners, who are also really great people. My race got off to a great start, was going to set a personal record for this time and probably place top 15 overall (granted, the field was probably 50 people but I would have taken it!). Until my achilles started to blow up. What an exciting, new issue to have come up! It was a crushingly disappointing moment, standing there after 15km, feeling great outside of one small area of your body, but knowing that dropping out is the safe option if you want to keep running in the near future. I haven't been that angry in a long, long time. Ended up wandering off into a field and just throwing a lot of my clothing. Working on finishing up my marathon training plan, fitting in climbing and strength workouts, and planning to get a full gait analysis at a place up in Seattle, along with chatting with a "hopeful 2020 Olympian" friend on all this. I'm feeling so much more determined to make 2018 a great running and racing year after this letdown. Maybe that's what resiliency feels like.