Happy New Year!

OK everybody, here I am, sitting in front of the computer on New Year's eve eve, (that would be December 30th for people who don't want to do the math), an despite a serious case of writer's block, I feel I need to wrap up the SLG year. And a fine year it was for SLG. We only need to look at the postings from the past year to see all our accomplishments, but I do want to point out some highlights.
First of all, having the blog itself was a big accomplishment. After some resistance from the coach, and later on from certain members, who thought it was too much effort to click on the link provided, by the coach with every new post, the blog ultimately became a big success. I do want to thank Thomas De Geest for putting the idea of a blog out there and then being proactive in creating it for us. In retrospect, it was a great thing to do! Actually, the other day I was browsing in the FAQ, and it seems that you can have a "team blog" where other members of SLG can do their own postings. Not that that hasn't happened before, and not that my password is so secret, but I do think it would be fun if other
SLG'ers could add their own post!! So, my new year's resolution (and generally, I am against them), is to find out how to set that up so that all SLG'ers can put their postings if they so desire.
Second, there was the growing membership of SLG. The Belgian chapter is going strong, the Minneapolis chapter has doubled its membership in a few months time, the members of the NY/NJ chapter put down some excellent running times and some amazing PR's down in the winter and spring of this year and of course this all culminated in the running of the Chicago marathon hosted by Philippe Schaillee and his wife Petra De Rijck during the 3rd weekend of October.
I remember signing up for this event at the annual New Year's day party hosted by Erik Sevenants and Wendy De Hoef, and Stefan Ewald warning me that fireworks would probably be coming out of the computer, announcing me as the first "signer upper" for the Chicago marathon 2006.
Of course, there was a lot at stake, the first awarding of the "Catch me if you can trophy", handed out by the coach/queen for any runner other than Patrick Bijnens and Clem Mertens of the Belgian chapter who were considered "hors de categorie". Clem has disputed that status after Gil Perrone won that CMIYC tropy resoundingly.
Also, during the Chicago marathon, Erik Sevenants and Dora Illy improved their marathon PR's by 42 and 41 minutes respectively. Ho, Hop, Super!!!
Mike "the flyer" Smyth became a member of SLG. To this day, it is not clear whether he is a closeted flyer who really wants to be a SLG-er or whether he is a closeted SLG'er who really thinks of himself as a flyer. In any case, he got a nice rivalry going with Gil Perrone in shorter to medium distance races and he decided to join us to go Chicago.
Gil continues to baffle us by placing 2nd or 3rd in his age category in almost any short to medium distance race. First place seems to stay beyond him as long as nobody has the common sense to hire a hit man to get rid of the elusive "Edgar Sandoval" or "Inkul Yo0".
2006 was also the year of the official SLG logo, designed by David Garcia and that "merchandising", so much pushed by founding father Stefan Ewald, really started to take flight. Besides the orange long sleeve T-shirt, which was our first item, and an "unofficial" SLG-baseball hat, we now have the official technical T-shirts with the official logo on it.
So here we are, looking forward to SLG in its 4th full year. We are still considering which marathon to run in 2007. And although the NYC marathon is alway there, and run in the front yard of the NY/NJ SLG chapter, we are now considering some other marathons. The Twin City marathon has made a strong pitch to us this year, not only by the Minnesota T's (terrorists, twins T's...whatever you prefer) but also by its race director, Virginia. Anyway, it promises to be the most beautiful urban marathon, sign up starts with the opening game of the Minnesota Twins and tops out at 10,500 runners after two weeks. In 2007, it will be run on October 7th. We might want to consider it since Stefan, one of the founding fathers of SLG claims to already have a conflict of interest on the day of the NY marathon, his son Noah will be 3 years old on November 4th 2007!
Conflict of interest? What a better way to celebrate the arrival of your son 3 years earlier by running a marathon in his honor! If Anne reads this, she will probably send a hit man for me!
Speaking of births, Mark (the other founding father), and Helena, welcomed their second son, Hugo, brother of Erik this past September. Petra and Philippe had a new addition to the family as well, a daughter Sienna, born on November 15th, sister to Maxim.
Stefan Ewald received his American citizenship and was the first foreign born SLG'er
to become an American. Congratulations to Stefan. Hopefully, Anne's green card will soon follow!!
Liesbet Deleersnijder, who ran her first NYC marathon (and her first marathon overall) in 2004 and promptly made it on the cover of Runner's magazine, moved back to New York from London (now that was a hard choice).
Probably the MOST important trend for SLG in 2006 was the fact that our blog seems to have gotten attention from some random people, many years our junior. Apparently, the trend started with a young woman from Pittsburg who found our blog and must have found it so fascinating that she shared it with some friends of hers in Scarsdale, NY. Hey Stefan, your wish has come true, we are getting more famous by the minute.
I might be forgetting many other important facts about this great year, and without my writers block I might have been funnier, but I thought it was most important to give a big cheer to SLG and wish us all a Happy 2007 with a lot of good and especially fun mileage!!! Hop, Hop, Super!!!
Big hug from the coach (who never had as much fun running as the last 3 years when her fans turned into runners themselves). And to confuse everybody I will sign off with a "Stefan-ism"
CHEERS!!!