Race Bibs

I am a horribly sentimental person who is overly attached to "things" -- possibly because I have a poor memory, possibly because I live in a fairly spacious place so there's no need to purge, possibly because I'm cheap and try to reuse things, who knows why.  The end result is that I keep too much stuff.  Fortunately, I don't like shopping much, so my house and closet are full of things I've had for a long time, many of which has sentimental value.  And because our house is not excessively cluttered, there's no particular reason to purge.  I need to force myself to do it anyway, but the mood seems to be rare...

One place that is becoming overly cluttered however is the corner of the tall dresser in our bedroom over which I drape my medals. 

Hanging medals wouldn't be bad if it were just marathon medals, since I only have 16 of those.  But I hang ALL medals there.  Half medals, age group award medals, random 10k medals, whatever.  And the stack is out of control.  My husband is now afraid to hang any medal up there because he doesn't want to be the person who topples the stack.

So for a while, I've been brainstorming what I wanted to do with all those medals (probably just the non-marathon ones). 

Somewhere, probably Pinterest, I saw the idea of a "motivation wall."  And the more I thought about it, the more I thought I'd like to do that in my garage.

Basically, I would mount all of our race bibs, which I have also saved, on the wall, and then I was thinking I would hang any medals from those races nearby.  I think I will likely keep the marathon medals in the bedroom, but all other race medals can go in the garage.

One pre-project was to get our race bibs in order.  I decided to combine all our race bibs (so if we ever get divorced, among the many other things in my life that would fall apart, the garage motivation wall would be a disaster) and put them in chronological order. 

I have done over 100 road races so far, and I have almost every single bib.  On the back after the race, I'd usually write my time, any comments (like weather, mile splits), any AG award, whether it was a PR, etc. 

So within the last week I finally pulled them all together (they were in a drawer already and in rough chronological order), and put them onto a large ring. 

I'm so glad that I have my bib from my very first race -- it will be a decade old later this year! 

So next step I think is to buy a gazillion of those command strips so I can hang the bibs without damaging the wall (in case the project sucks).  And then I just need to find a long weekend day to get to work. 

The ring of bibs:

Hanging:

First adult race bib:

 

Guess I will put those command strips on the grocery list so that I can complete step 2 of this project, then there really will be no excuse not to move forward with step 3 (unless it gets really hot, then I'll have to wait until the fall since our garage gets warm).