4.06.2008

Longtom!

I ran the Longtom Half Marathon last Saturday in Sabie which is in Mpumalanga. My finish time was 2:20 which I wasn't really all that pumped about but I got the worst cramps of my life at around 10k. The race was also all hills, which made it intense for me because my province, North West, is all flat. Really, though, this is all just excuses. My friend Adam ran the 56k ultra marathon (The first 30k is uninterrupted uphill. No kidding.) and placed 11th. He's also been training in North West. So really, I just under preformed but that's okay, it was fun and I ran the whole damn thing.
This year PCV's raised over $20,000 for the KLM Foundation! Just to be clear, that's USD!! Many of you really helped out with that... and your sweaty, unflattering thank you pictures are coming soon! It was the most ever raised (by kind of a lot). Overall, it was a really nice weekend with a lot of volunteers in a beautiful place.
Michael and I stayed in Sabie for a week after the race. It was a VERY laid back vacation, much of our time was spent reading and cooking. It was great. We decided we wanted to go fishing so we asked around town for a place we could rent poles. Everyone told us we should go to this trout fishing place so we could rent poles and avoid buying licenses. We walked two hours to this place and when we got there it became obvious it was not exactly what we were looking for. There were lawn ornaments. And benches. Oh, and it was a trout farm. So we rented poles, chatted with the guys who worked there, and then went "fishing". This entailed putting our hooks into the water and immediately catching a fish. No lie, my hook was in the water less than 10 seconds before I had my first bite. In less than 10 minutes we had caught four rainbow trout and it only took us that long because we took turns. It wasn't exactly what we had expected and it definitely pushed my boundaries about killing and eating meat but it was really absurd and funny. The trout was really good...
I'm still homeless, but hopefully that won't be true for long. School break is over in a week and I'm hoping that means I'll be back to work soon.