Garrett Bullock and the Greeneville Astros

The day I posted my blog, my mom sent me a text that said "I love the idea of your blog Caitlin...but what about Garrett? I want to hear his updates!" It is an ongoing joke between Garrett and I that my mom loves him more than me because he helped her mulch the garden when he came to so ill for a visit. Once I told him about the text, he of course rubbed it in some more. :o)

Mom, this is for you then.

Garrett was notified on Saturday, June 27 that he was to report the next day in Greeneville, Tennessee, for a spot on the Greeneville Astros minor league team nestled in the TN mountains. After weeks of uncertainty and perhaps even doubt, Garrett showcased true mental tenacity as he continued to fine tune his pitching mechanics through bullpens with high school catchers, to run track workouts in the sweltering Carolina heat, and to lift weights that nearly tripled his own body mass. He did all this without even knowing what the fate would be for his baseball career, only assuming for the best: that he would get picked up by a team.

Garrett has always amazed me because he has the mental strength and endurance of that of a distance runner. He truly can use his mind to overcome any physical pain or weakness. The mind usually triumphs the body in his case. Perhaps this is what got Garrett to Greeneville, Tennessee, or maybe it was just in fate's (or God's) hands?

Regardless, he has made four relief appearances and has allowed one unearned run on four hits in 4 2/3 innings pitched. His padres both got to see him throw a perfect inning of relief last Friday night (on July 17) against Johnson City, striking out two of the men he faced. You can read his box score online since I don't know that much about it (even though I bought a book on baseball for stupid girls).

To sum it all up, he is super happy, loving baseball, and excited for what is to come.

Be sure to keep checking out the website!!!

http://greeneville.astros.milb.com/index.jsp?sid=t413

Charlotte Running Club

I tend to meet people in random ways. This is how I have met most of the people who have started the Charlotte Running Club.

To understand how the Charlotte Running Club was conceived, it is important to first understand how I met most of its original founding members. Matt was the first runner in Charlotte that I met. I purposely ran the Hog Jog 5k with the sole intention of introducing myself to the guy that ran the time closest to my goal times.

At the end of the race, in the post-run-party-tent, I waited for the announcer to present award to the third place male. After he walks away with his trophy, I immediately went up to him and said, "Hey! Do you live uptown?" He kind of looked at me all crazy and was not sure I was talking to him. I said, "Hey, I'm talking to you!" And then he said "Oh, Hey! yeah, I live uptown." From there I gave him my name and cell phone number to call me so that we could link up for some runs. Luckily, I did not scare him too much because he texted me a couple days later to schedule a "running date."

About a month after meeting Matt, I got a random email in response to a Craigslist posting that I had forgotten about. Right when I moved to Charlotte in July, I posted an ad for a running buddy that could run 760-730 pace per mile for long runs. Three months later, I decided to check my email account and someone had responded! I got excited and immediately responded, and after the email exchange got longer, I found out that this strange man also worked uptown and was willing to run from work in the evenings.

Of course, I put on my safety first hat, and was genius enough to google-stalk him first before I actually agreed to meet him. It was afterwards finding his personal webpage that proved he was not a creeper when I received an email from him, stating that he had a personal website to prove he was not a stalker. Clearly, we were both thinking of the same page. I found out later that he, Aaron, had also google-stalked me and found me on the Wake Forest Sports webpage.

To say the least, I introduced Matt to Aaron, and then as the months went by, Aaron met Jay, another local runner from Run For Your Life. With this core group, Aaron was inspired to launch a running club to bring together the masses of the CLT running community into one scene.

Now, two months after the inception, we boast about forty members, two sponsors, a newsletter, a webpage, and even a logo. Together, Aaron, Jay and I have truly made some big strides of making the club into a reality with the hopes of organizing what was once a disconnected conglomeration of runners that had no central place to find out where people got together to run.

Furthermore, it has been great to be surrounded with a group of people who are truly invested in running and share the same passion as my own.

This post was practically a marathon so I better stop here. Essentially, I trust that the Charlotte Running Club will continue to grow!!

www.charlotterunningclub.org

Welcome...Life Goals.

I started this blog for a couple of different reasons. First, I feel like I get dumber with each passing day as my graduation from Wake Forest moves further away into the distance. Instead of honing on my writing skills, I feel like they are slowly slipping past me and I know that the fact that people could potentially be viewing what I write will serve as a motivator to perfect my sentence structure and my word choice, as well as to make my explanations more elaborate and coherent (as opposed to my verbal stories which seem to branch off into ten different directions).

The other main reason I am now writing publicly is because I am horrible at talking to my parents on a regular basis and they deserve to see and hear into some of my inner thoughts since they don't have the luxury of being within driving distance to their youngest daughter. Finally, more and more of my friends and family seem to be all over the country, and even the world with two of my closest friends in Sweden and in London. Hopefully I can still feel connected to them via this route.

With that said, my first topic was discovered while I was lying in bed this past weekend at 1:23am. I realized that this is the first time in my life in which my next goals are not going to be just thrown at me by outside sources.

To elaborate, in eighth grade, it was a given that I was going to enter high school and join the cross country and track team. I pursued honors courses and did not really do anything else besides run and do homework. I had the final goal in sight the first day of freshman year: to get out of Carbondale, Illinois and go to a college that was not within a day's driving distance to my hometown. I knew that I would develop so many important life skills by learning how to make new friends and find myself completely independent of my parents and everything else that I had known. Clearly, the next goal in life was also a given: graduate high school and go to college.

Once I got to college, the goals were handed to me again. My coach told me what times to achieve and gave me the workouts to help me do that. My professors gave me homework with the expectation that I would complete it. Needless to say, I completed all the steps that would allow me to graduate and then suddenly I was thrown into the real world, with no one there anymore to tell me what the next steps were. At that very instant, I became the luminary of my life, with sole ownership and responsibility for my future life path.

This got me to thinking that I better start writing down some goals before I get to my life five years from now and think "I have no direction, no goals, and have not moved forward at all with my own development since I graduated. Eek!" That scares me, so I obviously am beginning to take the necessary steps by acknowledging it is time to take charge.

With that long explanation, I've split my goals into three different categories of what is most important in my life right now: career goals, running goals, and personal goals. These goals are oriented for my four year future life path. I figured that since my life before this was split into four-year segments, I might as well keep it at that.



Running Goals
1. Sub 18 min 5k road race
2. Sub 1:20 Half Marathon 2010
3. Focused diet and nutrition to keep iron levels at a maximum level.
4. Run sub 3 hr marathon debut 2014

Personal Goals
1. Read at least 12 books a year (would be fantastic if i could get 24!).
2. Take a digital photography class.
3. Take a class at local community college that interests me, to keep me feeling intellectually stimulated.
4. Travel somewhere exotic and see the world.
5. Enjoy my time living with John and continue to build stronger relationships in my "for now" home of Charlotte
6. Move to California whether for school or job by the time I am 25 years old. Target of 2011. It is a goal to live near my sister at some point during my life.
**Personal goals are dependent on how much time I have outside of work and how much I dedicate to volunteer activities**

Career Goals
1. Increased participation in Charlotte Running Club as Vice President.
2. Become a bigger player at the Charlotte Flights Youth Track Club. Make relationships with Coaches, Parents, and Athletes.
3. Work on current team at Bank of America for one more year, get a new title of Change Consultant 2009-2010
4. Find a new role in Marketing at BOA in either Bank of America Marathon role or as a marketing associate for the Olympics. 2010/2011
5. Summer 2011/2012: Application Essays for MBA school for entrance in Fall 2011. Top Schools: Stanford, Northwestern, UCLA, Texas, UC Davis, UNC
6. Study for MBA to improve test score to above 700. Target test date Summer 2011

That's all I've got for now, but any feedback is completely welcome. I have always been an advocate for constructive criticism, so speak your mind!

Caitlin