Another Cellcom Half Marathon story

After most big races you can read numerous human interest stories about the runners, their history, and their amazing run. I always felt these stories were glorified or otherwise made newsworthy by folks that "enhanced the truth". Well now I'm a believer in these stories-now that I have a personal experience with one of them.

The start of the race.

In January 2009 I went to the first Cellcom training run and as you might imagine it was cold. I met Joe Lamers at this run. He is from Appleton WI and had just stated running a few months prior and made a commitment to run a half marathon in 2009. This was the start of serious training and he was a novice at long distance running. Over then next several months I saw Joe improve and grow as a runner and our friendship blossomed.

Fast forward to race day on May 17, 2009. Joe and I hadn't seen each other or exchanged e-mails for 3 or 4 weeks. My running partner and I lined up at the starting line with the other 10,000 runners and guess who was right next to us? Yep, it was Joe. Thus begins the human interest story.

Joe was excited, nervous, and pumped. Here is what he told us before the race began. On Saturday (the day before the race) he was on the East Coast. His flight to Green Bay ended up being canceled but there was no way that Joe was going to miss the run that he had trained for 5 months. He caught a flight into Minneapolis MN (a five hour drive from Green Bay), rented a car, and drove through the night - arriving in Green Bay a few hours before the race. This is when we saw him.

Below is his e-mail to me describing his race.

Yes, I did the race under 2 hours and just about died. I was on my 8 minute per mile mark at 7 miles. I then hit "THE WALL" and everything was going so bad. My feet were going so numb that I could hardly walk. My biggest problem was I could not get air. My heart rate was fine, but no air. I had cramps, numb feet, over heating with jacket and no air. I had to pee for the first time ever while running. At mile mark 8 I peed and dropped jacket.

Then at mile mark 11 I sat on grass and loosened my shoe laces. I laid down and start to cry. I was getting taken over by emotions. It was then that I decided that the race was not going to end this way! I did not train all this time and drive across the state all night for it to end this way. If I didn't get up and run like hell I never would make it under 2 hours.

I thanked God for this opportunity and got up and ran like HELL! I thanked all the people who got me this far (you were one of them) and focused on a spot ahead and reeled it in. Then I hit the spot and picked another and another and another and another. At one point I realized that I was talking and yelling out loud. People around me must have thought I was crazy!! Others started helping me reel in spot after spot.

Half way through Lambeau Field where the fans where screaming I started to run faster and faster. Just before I crossed the finish line I could see the clock reading 1:XX . I had no idea of the time I had finished but I knew it was under two hours!

And to make this even more incredible Joe told me that 3 1/2 years ago he could not even ride a bike due to spinal problems!

I find his story inspiring and hope you do as well.

Cellcom Half Marathon

I'm ready to race.

My running partner, Melodie Dugenske, and I ran the Cellcom Half Marathon yesterday. The temperature at race time was about 40 degrees and sunny. Perfect for a great race.

We finished with an overall pace of 9:32/mile which was way below our expected/hoped for time of 9:00/mile so we could finish under 2 hours. We came in at 2 hours and 05 minutes and, while disappointed that we didn’t get 2 hours, it is a personal best for me by 45 seconds.

At 5 miles we were dead-on the pace for 2 hours with 8:57 miles. We both ran out of gas around mile 7.5 and our overall pace at the 10 mile mark fell to 9:22-ouch. The last 3 miles were a struggle with us both saying at some point – “I just need to make it to the next water station” and “When the hell will this end?”. Looking back it doesn't seem that hard.

We saw the back of the t-shirt on one of the runners that summed up our last three miles well.

Next year I think I’m just going to run for fun, slap high fives along the course, and generally just soak in the experience. Just forget about time and pushing myself.

Enjoying a beer specially brewed for the Cellcom.

Stock Decisions

Last night (May 11) my investment club met. Let me explain what an investment club is, just in case you don't know. Investment Club YenoM is made up of 14 individuals that contribute various amounts (from $25 to $100) each month and then we meet to determine stocks to buy and sell. We use software designed by IClubCentral to keep track of how much each of us own. It works just like a mutual fund with two exceptions. We only value the stocks once per month (a mutual fund does it daily) and the club members make investment decisions (a mutual pays big bucks for others to make the decisions).

We have a well defined portfolio management process with 7 separate criteria.

Last night we decided to sell 1/2 of our position in Lowes (LOW) and purchase a similar amount of Fastenal (FAST).

We decided to sell Lowes for 3 reasons: 1) our projection for the future return was lower than any other stock in the portfolio 2) it is a large cap stock and we have too large a percentage of our stocks in large cap and 3) sales growth projection was too low.

We decded to buy Fastenal for 3 reasons: 1) it is a mid cap stock and we need more mid cap 2) our projection for 5 year return put it in what we call the "sweet spot" and will raise overall portfolio return and 3) sales growth is 13% which will raise the oveall portfolio sales growth.

We had an new person join the club, welcome Irene and one visitor.

Portfolio Management

Here are the seven criteria that my investment club uses to decide on stocks to add or remove from our portfolio. I'll give a brief description of the criteria. If you have any questions please leave a comment.

1. Number of Stocks: 16 stocks plus or minus 4. This is enough stocks to be diversified but not too many to follow.

2. Company Size: Large Cap stocks 50%, Mid Cap stocks 25%, and Small Cap stocks 25%. We want stocks of all size because one never knows what are going to be the next ones to increase. Our weighting towards Large Cap is a bit more conservative than I would like. We have had problems finding Mid and Small Cap stocks so this forces us to keep looking.

3. Sectors: We use 10 different sectors as defined at Manifest Investing. Our goal is to have no more than 25% in any one industry and no more than two industries with no stocks. This helps to make sure we aren't loading up on stocks in one sector.

4. Portfolio PAR: PAR stands for Percentage Average Return. PAR is our estimate of the return we might expect from a stock. We also use Manifest Investing to give us an estimate of the weighted average PAR. We look for portfolio PAR to be 5 to 10 percentage points above the median PAR of all the stocks in the Manifest Investing data base.

5. Portfolio Quality: Manifest Investing has a method of measuring the quality of the companies. We expect our overall quality for the portfolio to be above 65 (Excellent).

6. Portfolio Sales Percentage Increase: We look at the weighted average percentage expectation of the increase in sales for the portfolio. We want it to be between 10 and 14 percent - generally toward the high end of the scale.

7. Individual Stock Percentage: We don't want any stock to be more than two times its proportional share nor less than 1/2 that same share. For example, if there were 10 stocks in the portfolio a proportional share would be 10%, therefore, we won't want any stock to be more than 20% nor less than 5% of the portfolio.

It's always fun trying to balance all of these.