As many of you have noticed (or tolerated!), I’ve been doing a lot of races lately.  Really.  A lot.  Many.

And because of my current need to have a carrot at the end of a rope when I run, I’ve brought home a lot of hardware from my efforts.  (I’ll leave my discussion about finisher medals with a previous blog post.)  Earlier this year, I grabbed a medal tree to display my medals, but my pace of races has picked up so much, that tree quickly became full o’ stuff, and was pretty unwieldy to deal with.

I’d seen some terrific medal displays from Lifespeed Sports last year at the Hospital Hill race in Kansas City.  I really liked ’em, but at the time, I couldn’t conceive of a time when I would need so much display space.  Funny what a year does to those kind of assumptions…

I saw Wayne and Cindy from Lifespeed again at Hospital Hill this year, and talked with them about creating a massive piece of shelvery to house my growing collection of race medals.  Becky and I talked with them for quite a while, and described what I was looking for.  Wayne was able to translate my sketchy description to his product, and we landed on a six foot long medal shelf with three tiers of hangers for my medals, stained ebony to complement the walls of my office.

A month later, the finished shelf was on the way, and on Tuesday, it landed on my porch.  I started unpacking it at lunch, and discovered it was packed by experts.  The box weighed almost seventy pounds, and was secured inside a custom built wooden cocoon.  Needless to say, it arrived very safely!

And frankly, it was pretty dang easy to put on the wall, using a sturdy piece of lumber atop which to mount it.  It took longer to unpack than it did to hang, and once hung, it was solid on the wall.  I quickly hung about fifty medals from it, placed a few things on the shelf, and made it a foundational part of the “love me wall” in my office.

I’m thrilled with the build quality, and think this will last me quite a while.  When I asked Wayne at HH how many medals he thought that would hold, he thought about 200-250.  I’m not sure it’ll house that many (although Becky has some ideas that may help it store that number), but I get a funny feeling I’m gonna find out really soon!  🙂