Race Day Miscellany
It’s 5:30 AM on the morning of the Twin Cities Marathon, which starts at 8 AM. Next time I blog, God willing, I’ll be a guy who has finished a marathon. Right now, I’m scared as hell.
I bottled my pumpkin ale last Thursday with the help of my sons while watching the vice presidential debate. The pumpkin ale survived fermentation; now it’s a four-week countdown while it conditions in the bottle to attenuate and bring out the flavor of real pumpkin used in the brewing. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, could use a few more years.
Last week I volunteered for a total of nine hours — two hours washing windows at the Ronald McDonald House, three hours entering data for Keith Ellison’s congressional campaign, and four hours making phone calls for Al Franken’s senate campaign. I feel pretty good about all of that.
This summer I mastered the equivalent of two college semesters’ worth of modern Hebrew in about 4 months with the help of an outstanding tutor. My rabbinical school application essays? Totally blocked, but I feel pretty strongly about getting a draft done for at least one school this week.
Right now I’m going to daven Shacharit and pray my heart out, thanking God for letting me live this long and begging for the strength and perseverance to cross the finish line sometime before 2 PM. If you’re local and want to cheer me on at some point, you can find the route map in this PDF guide for spectators. The map is on page 10, and page 8 has a chart showing where I will be when, based on my expected finish time of between five and six hours. You can also see my progress online at this cool site.