Sea World and My Aching Back

So since my post 2 weeks ago, the day after the glorious Clinton Lake 30 Mile Trail Run much has occurred.


Firstly, I took some time off and headed down to Orlando where I accompanied my nephew Dakota and my parents to SeaWorld. We had a great time at the park and hanging around the hotel pool. Dakota and I got a little one-on-one time with a trip to Wonderworks for some Laser Tag. SeaWorld was extremely clean, well ran and staffed by lots of helpful, pleasant people. It was a little bittersweet of course with the recent death of Dawn, a good friend of Jill's. Like the friends and acquaintances I've lost to Naval Aviation, she died doing what she loved. I did not know her personally but still feel a loss and hurt for Jill.

I returned to St. Louis on Friday the 2nd and spent the night at the lovely (not) Pear Tree Inn and had dinner with dear friends Jim and Judy Stroup. The next morning I got in 16 miles on the awesome Chubb Trail with 3 other SLUGs before returning home to Springfield.

All was well until Tuesday morning when, on my first of what was to be many box jumps, I pulled something in my lower back. So the rest of my "vacation" week was spent alternately in front of my computer studying and squeezing dollars from the stock market, and lying in bed on a heating pad.

As of today my back seems a little better, but I'm only cautiously optimistic I'll be up to running the Double Chubb 50K trail race next Saturday. I'm going to try to weasel into an appointment with a chiropractor friend on Monday and see if he can "snap" me back into shape. At this point I'm willing to try anything to get back on those wonderful trails!