September Is Zeptember!

Ah, September! Traditionally it is one of my favorite months of the year. Cross Country is under way and so it the football season, soon hunting season will be open for waterfowl and the air has the hint of fall in the air already! The past several nights we have had temperatures below 40 and Butte even saw 27! Brr, it's still summer!

We finished up our big job at work and now we are going to be doing some small jobs for awhile. It is going to be nice to be working in different places around town. The air was so bad the other day that an warning was issued for air quality. Today however the air is crisp and clear and things are looking good around here. We went to Wal-Mart this morning and picked up some plants and a set of chairs and table for the deck. Everything was on clearance so we found ourselves some good deals! Most of the day is going to be spent listening to the Huskers football game and planting the plants.

You might be wondering about the title today - Zeptember? The classic rock radio station is paying tribute to Led Zeppelin this month and they have declared September as Zeptember. I thought that was a pretty good deal!

Now, as I promised, here is my tribute blog:

It's not often that you get companions who will stick with out day in and day out when you use them and abuse them daily - sometimes twice in a day. Sometimes I would wake up at 5:30 a.m. to take them out, and then I would be back at 4:00 p.m. in the blistering sun to give them a pounding. Why would they stick with me for so long you ask? Simple, they are my running shoes! That's right, some of the most reliable companions a runner can have. In my case, I am talking about my Reebok Premier Road Lite running shoes. I picked up these shoes at JCPenney, yeah that's right! I started running in these shoes about a month before my senior cross country year (2004) - and I have been using them ever since. Yes, I have a new pair waiting for me to run out of these shoes, but they are just going to have to keep waiting. The other day, while Laura and I were finishing up a run, I got to thinking about how far these shoes have taken me and all the places they have ran. My senior year of Cross Country we ran in South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado. For track we did it all over again, in some cases more than once. We ran in bright sunny skies with temperatures reaching over 100 degrees, rain, sleet, snow deeper than we could run in, winds stronger than we could run against, and races on occasion. Sometimes we would run three times a day, we would run time trials and sprints in them as well. So here's some math to show how well these shoes have done... I started wearing them in July of 2004 and during that month I ran about 160 miles, August, September and October were months we ran close to 70 miles a week, that's 280 miles a month already they should have been retired! So far we are up to 1,000 miles. During the off season of November and December I usually did somehwere around 150 miles a month - 1,300 miles - when Indoor Track rolled around we would do about 50 miles a week, or 200 miles a month and that lasted until March (200 X 3) + 1,300 = 1,900 miles. Next we have Outdoor track where we would be doing about 60 miles a week (240 miles a month) and that was March, April and some of May - about the first 10 days so I will call it 75 miles. (240 X 2) + 75 + 1,900 = 2,455 MILES! I have ran on and off since retiring from the collegate running world, I even took these shoes on my Yellowstone Backcountry trek - that was 70 miles in itself, so I have easily put 2,500 miles on these shoes. Those are some reliable shoes!

Until again

-=Nolan=-