One more call!

Just got back from my second to last call. One more go to at Thornton! Has it been a busy month! I'll be heading out to UCLA for a 2nd look and to round with the consult team next week, and I think after that I'll be finally done with the interview process (well, almost... still have UCSD to go to, but unlikely to rank it above #3). I finally finished my poster for the research project I was doing, and presented it at the CRRT meeting at Hotel del Coronado. However, given my schedule, I was basically going there after work, so didn't get a chance to check out the place. I think that's it for now, pretty status quo on everything else. Looking forward to finally having a weekend day off in a month!

Friday the 13th

It's Friday the 13th! Hope everyone's day has been uneventful. I am now on Thornton wards. A lot has changed, and it's much better than last year when I rotated through. However, it's still busy. And I got used to not being on call so often... I'll be going to UCLA next week for my nephrology interview. There is very high likelihood that I might end up going to Cedars-Sinai, but I feel that I should at least see what UCLA has to offer. Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. It's been one crazy month (or last few), and this kind of arrived a lot sooner than expected. Noelle is coming down to SD and we're going to the Gaslap district to get some steak. Hopefully she won't be disappointed!

Our trip to Japan is more or less finalized, we'll be leaving April 17 for a 9 day tour of Japan and then a few days in Taiwan. I'm really looking forward to going. I wonder if the flowers will still be in bloom.

Surf City Half Marathon

It's the first of the month, and we finished our first race together! Today, Noelle and I ran the Surf City Half Marathon. It was an early and cold day, but the weather turned out to be fantastic for a race. The weather stayed in the 50's, yet be both got sunburned. I ran with Noelle for the first mile or so, and then she let me run free like the wind. We started out at the very end, so I ended up having to weave about to pass the walkers. The hardest part of the race was when I saw all the runners already on the home stretch, and I'm just not sure when the turnabout is at. However, after circling around, I hit my stride, my "runner's high," and had a comfortable run from mile 9 onwards. It was a fairly flat course, so I was better able to maintain a good pace. I have never ran more than 10 miles at one time, and given all the interviews this past month, not much time to train either. Well, the results are in: I accomplished my goal of finishing in less than 2 hours! My final time came out to 1:58:47, with an average pace of 9:04 per mile, or 6.7 mph. I finished 1708 out of 4230 male runners, and 287 out of 638 in my age class of 25-29 y/o, so still in the top 50%!

Noelle clocked in at 2:46:03, with an average pace of 12:40 per mile. She finished 4570 out of 6513 of the female runners. I'm so proud of her; this is her second half marathon, and she beat her Disneyland time by almost 7 minutes! Our goals weren't very ambitious, but we didn't have much opportunity to run together. We'll probably enter the Disneyland Half Marathon in September, and maybe this time, we'll actually be prepared.