I finally bought a new heart rate monitor to aid in my training. After spending some time looking at different ones I decided on the Garmin Forerunner 305 which gives me the added benefit of speed and distance while runner over normal HRMs without foot pods. I have set it up on motionbased so you can see my training runs at

We finally decided on the Chicago marathon which takes place on Oct 12th of this year. Right now I am in a warm/building phase before I start actually training for the race.

I finally earned enought money to get the laptop I have been wanting for a couple of years now. I ended up going with a Lenovo X61 tablet due to its price over the Fujitsu tablets I was looking at.

Right now I am makeing it a goal of mine to finish a marathon this year. The plan is to be ready for late October or early November, although I may try for one earlier. The ones that I am looking into right now are New York, Chicago, Twin Cities, Grandmas, Grand Rapids, Detroit, Whistlestop, and the North Country Trail run. If anyone is interested in doing this with me or would like to suggest a different race please let me know.

This week I started my first full time job with GE Aviation in Houghton, MI. So far it has been going well and I should get into the working routine soon. This should also leave me with some more free time to work on things like this site.

On Saturday August 11 I competed in the Ore 2 Shore Mountain Bike Epic in Marquette. I did the 28 mile Soft Rock race as I was unprepared for the 48 mile Hard Rock. The course took me 1:52:45.5 to complete giving me an average pace of 14.9mph. This put me 5th in my age group and 105th in my division. I am quite satisfied with my performance even if I did lose to the guy in front of my by half a second.

On Sunday August 4th I competed in the Copperman triathlon in Copper Harbor. I ended up 4th in my age group with a huge gap (~8 minutes) to third place and 28th in my division with a time of 1:48:14.2. My splits were 19:02.7 for the 800 meter swim, 52:35.2 for the 18.5 mile bike, and 36:36.3 for the 5 mile run. Overall it is a very nice race to do and I would highly recommend anyone looking for a sprint distance triathlon to try this one. The one issue I had was that a large illegal peloton formed in the bike which prevented me from riding at my own pace once it caught me. I tried to avoid riding with it however I commited to myself that this race was my one to break 20mph on the bike so I was forced to stick with the peloton since it was blocking the road. The race director recently addressed this issue with all the racers this issue should be fixed in next years race.

Saturday (July 21) I competed in the 10 mile Canal Run. I managed to run it in 1:11:49 giving me a pace 7:11/mile which was just over my 7:00/mile goal. Overall it was a well run race with a nice course and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a long race to run in.

On July 1st I competed in the Olympic distance (1.5k swim, 35mi bike, 7mi run) Block 58 Triathlon. I did horrific in the swim but made up a bunch of time in the bike and run sections. Overall I finished in 3:22:23 which put me 10th out of 32 people and 14minutes ahead of my Dad who I had to beat. My overall splits were: Swim - 36:25, T1 - 1:46, Bike - 1:49:45, T2 - 0:27, Run - 54:02. Of those I am most proud of T2 since it was second fastest overall, the only person to beat me did it by 4seconds due to the lack of a shoe change.

Over Father's Day weekend I competed in the Chain Drive MTB race. I ended up completing the 16 mile course in 1:19:28.8, putting me in 15th place in my age group and 50th overall. Overall it was a very fun race and I look forward to doing more mountain biking this summer.

I am doing some new work on the site backend finally. Hopefully I will have remote entires up soon which should me lots more updates!

Did some debugging today and figured out why the site was not working. Had to add a little more error catching and make sure my libraries are loaded. Should work for a while now.

I finally sat down and figured out why the main site stopped working. It was due to the server no longer loading some PHP extensions that I use. Now they are included by at least the news scripts so the main page works again. If anyone notices any other pages with problems let me know.

I will soon post some new content on races and a few other things so hold on just a little longer if that is what you have been waiting for

I am working on getting some backend and page updates done so that I can upload them to this site. Work and training for races this summer have been doing a good job of keeping from spending to much time on the site which is the reason that not much has been done so far.

Sorry about the lack of updates recently. The end of the school year came with some extra work such as switching houses and adjusting to life at work. Hopefully now that I am settled in I can start working on this site more (such as fixing the bug on the bio page).

I have setup the basic Atom stuff for posting and making the feed so I should be able to start updating this site more often.