Dr. Thomas

You can now call me Dr. Thomas. Yesterday, I successfully defended my dissertation and completed the final requirement for a Ph.D. in Sociology from Michigan State University. Honestly, the ultramarathon was much easier.

Raffle winners

Thank you to Tifosi Optical and Trail Flex for donating the two pairs of sunglasses and six hats that I have raffled off during my fund raising. I have randomly assigned everyone a number and drawn winners for these prizes. I would like to congratulate Alyn Abs and Drusy for winning the sunglasses. I would like to congratulate M. Terri, Kari Zhe-Heimerman, Fred Thomas, and Marcela Westrate on winning the hats. I will be in touch soon and/or sending your prizes to you in the mail. Thanks again to everyone who contributed!

Contest!

Well, the donation site officially shut down a few days ago. With a final donation from my parents, we reached $4,500. Awesome! Thanks to everyone!

I'm finalizing my list of donors and supporters and trying to track down a few missing email addresses. I will do the drawing this weekend and contact winners of the prizes that have been generously donated by Trailflex and Tifosi.

Cardinals beat Tech

The SVSU Cardinals beat Michigan Tech 33 to 16 on Saturday. The weather was great and it was a close game until the Cardinals pulled away in the third quarter. This was my first SVSU football game and really my first football game of any kind in many years. It was a good time and worth repeating. Compared to a MSU game it felt more like a high school football game, but I actually like the smaller, more personal experience better. I hear that five past SVSU football players are actually in the NFL and one of our past kickers plays in the arena football league. Not bad.

Between the first and second quarter, I walked onto the field and they made an announcement about my run and how much money I raised. I felt a little silly since I was just standing there by myself waving. The announcer did a good job and mentioned all the cool details including the 2 million people in the US who have lupus. People cheered and even stood up! Woah. After I got back to my seat, the man in front of me told me about one of his family members who has lupus. Everyone does know someone with lupus, even if few people are talking about it. Here's a picture of me standing on the field feeling a little awkward.

Update

I've taken a break from posting. In part because I wanted to leave the video up as the first part of the page for a while and also because I've been trying to get caught back up at work. I still owe a big thanks to everyone who contributed to my run. SVSU will be mentioning my effort during the SVSU-Michigan Tech football game this Saturday, so I'm hoping to get a few more donations before I officially call this effort done.

Ah, but the cliche that there is a new starting line after every finish line (or something like that) has some truth to it. I bought the domain name www.lupusrunner.com the other day. I've heard from several people who have lupus since I finished my run and it is truly motivation to keep going.

50 mile run video

At long last, here is the video that I took during the 9.5 hours of my journey of 50 miles. Other than some rain that preclude checking in during the middle, I made pretty regular updates. Just a warning, the video is over 20 minutes long.

Video...

Well, I've probably crashed Windows Movie Maker at least a dozen times. After scrapping some embellishments like transitions, I got the video into one piece. Now, I've had to wait in 3 hour chunks to find out that blogger had an error while uploading. I'm going to try and upload it from work tomorrow...