UNFORTUNATE NEWS

I have had just over 24 hours to digest, think about and ponder what happened on Sunday morning. There are still no words to describe how I feel. Forget that even, because I’m not even sure how I feel let alone trying to describe anything. The anticipation of Sunday mornings 13.1 mile run through Pasadena was at a fever pitch of excitement until I got to the race line and there were just a few dozen people there at 6:15 a.m. There should have been thousands of people.

As I am sure most of you have heard by now southern California has been hit pretty hard by wildfires. The fires aren’t “directly” effecting Pasadena since they are about 25-30 miles away. However, because of the fires the air quality became worse than normal and the powers that be cancelled the race.

Pasadena Star-News Story - Here.

Google Map of Fires -- here.

Personally the most frustrating thing is that some of you donated money to the Union Station Homeless center to encourage our team to run hard and help promote their efforts to end homelessness. Will that money still go the center? Absolutely! I am so grateful that you decided to support them with a donation. It just feels kind of empty that we weren’t able to go out and “work” for that donation on race day. The Union Station actually found a sponsor and gave each of the 40 team member a nice race day running shirt for all of us to wear race day. I wanted to continue to educate people on homelessness throughout race day.

So here’s what I did … I had already been awake for nearly two hours when I found out the race was cancelled so in my nice new racing shirt I ran 13 miles through Pasadena from 6:30 a.m. to just after 8:00 a.m. Certainly it was not even close to the same feeling of actually running a race but I was ready to run so I ran. Like I said, I still don’t know how to feel. I’m trying to keep all of this in perspective. This is just something I have never experienced before and hope I never have to again.

Feel free to let me know any thoughts, concerns, idea or whatever you may have! Once again, I can not thank you enough for all the encouragement! You are awesome and amazing people!!