Category: life

Fall, glorious fall

Man, so fall completely rocks. Aside from last week’s gift of sick from the childrens, things are nigh unto wonderful. A week of “rest” seems to not only have fixed my sick, but to have also helped out the wheels.

We went camping last weekend. Had a blast. Bigger kids mean dad has less crap to carry, and kids that love to backpack means no whining on the trail. Weather was spectacular – cool but not cold, clear, and a full moon. Pictures are at Flickr.com/photos/billjank – or go to Flickr and search on “billjank”. We’ll probably get one more trip in before winter. Can’t wait.

Running has been good. Saturday was my last “sick” run. I punted on the 20 miles on the sked, but did get in about 9, even though I was still hacking up a lung. Went to bed immediately afterwards.

Monday and Wednesday were brilliant. Ran up and over Cow Hill both times. Monday, the wheels were great, and I legged out about 7 before supper. Last night, I managed to cram in 5 miles in 40 minutes before soccer practice. Yeah. Soccer was fun, too.

In other news, I’ve got preliminary ok from the wife to run Mooseman Tri in June with the Amazing Hip, the Running Chick with the Orange Hat, and Salty War. Now I just need to make the decision between the half or the Olympic. Probably the half. Ouch.

On the verge of being sick today

So the question is, will I run or won’t I?

Saturday was the Physical readiness test (PRT) – I rocked it (relatively). 10:23 for the 1.5 mile run, which is about 40 seconds faster than in the spring. More situps and pushups, too.

Afterwards, though, I out to do the 6 miles I had left on the training schedule (mile from the gym to the track, 1.5 miles on the track, and 6). THe first 3 were good, but the last three were the most painful I’ve done in a long while. But, I gutted them out.

Sunday morning, it became clear why I’d been hurting so much – the mucus in my nose and the itch in my throat were clearly a gift from my two little disease vectors, and the disease pools that are their schools. Bundles of joy, my a$$ – they’re little ponds of microorganisms.

It hasn’t developed past a cold, so I think I’m good to go to run today, but I’ll probably knock 15 or 20 minutes off of the 60 minutes I’m supposed to do today.

Bleh

Benefits of running

So, once in a while, there’s just something completely out of the blue that’s nice about being a runner. For Missy and me today, that was not having to worry about transportation when we had to drop the car off at the shop for a periodic tune-up.

Here’s how it went down:

– Fridays are commuter van days. So, I took Melissa’s car (the one that’s up to date on maintenance) to the commuter lot.

– Melissa got Jake off to school, dropped Nate off at preschool, and took my car to the VW shop.

– From the VW shop, Missy did the 4 mile run (Uphill) to the commuter lot to grab her car.

– After the boys were done with school, and my car was all sorts of good again, Missy went and picked it up at the VW shop, leaving her car in the employee lot there.

– After a full day’s work, I left my stuff in the commuter van and ran the 4 miles (downhill) to the dealership’s employee lot (the shop was closed when the van gets back to the lot).

– Picked up Melissa’s car, drove back to the commuter lot, got my satchel out of the vanpool, and headed home to my astounding children and lovely wife, who made a bit of taco salad tonite.

– Played with my new helicopter for a while

– Headed down to the Dutch Tavern in New London for a beer or two, while struggling to remember which plays Eugene O’Neil had written (Long Day’s Journey into Night and Mourning Becomes Electra for the record. I’ve acted in neither).

Anyways, none of this would have been easy without running. We would have had to inconvinience someone. Instead, we both got in the day’s workout, saved some gas, and got even more smug satisfaction than we could from driving Priusii.

Linger on, folks.

Two posts in September

Man, it’s been a good month. New Haven, of course, was 6 hours of perfection, encapsulating everything that makes New England summer enough to get through winter.

Then, and I’m terribly, terribly lax – I spent the better part of 4 great days in Ottawa. Got to run with Warren again. Scratch that – we’d biked together before, so we got to run together for the first time. There were talks of other runners and life, and I got a great tour of a town which I am sure is now buried in snow, not to emerge until spring. Canada rocks.

Other than that , training for San antonio is going well, mostly because I’m actually doing it. Funny how that works.

If I can digress for a moment. Of course I can. What I should have said was “let me digress for a moment.”

I’ve begun to realize that I’m one of those folks whose mind perceives life as a series of stories. (merlin Mann did a great series on “the wire” on his blog if you’re interested) Now that running has become a regular part of my life, the arc is incorporated into the mundane.

Which isn’t to say that I won’t be running – on the contrary, it’s now something akin to sleeping or breathing.

But it is offered as a bit of explaination as to why posting here will be kind of light until I figure out where the next narrative will go.

In the mean time, I’ve got some wonderful threads going on elsewhere -work is increasingly interesting; I started the night program at the War College; Jake is having a blast in soccer and Nate stuns me daily; and I’m increasingly involved at church.

I’m still around – if anyone out there passes through New England, drop me a line and we’ll see if we can mesh schedules to go sweat. Or have beer.

Life is good. I cannot wait for the story to follow.

New Haven, 2008

Monday was Labor Day, so I found myself back down in New Haven for the national 20k championships and in the company of the lovely and talented Jon and the witty and interesting Dianna. As usual, the weather was on the hot side of perfect.

Missy and the boys headed down with me this year, and I think they had a good time. New Haven’s got a great setup on the green, and the kids loved running through the bouncy things.

The race started out exceptionally well – legs were good, and I was just over 50 minutes at the 10k (You can check out the results). I’d felt kind of bad – about mile 1, I ran off from Jon and Dianna, feeling good, good, good. Even down the first long, sun-baked, windless stretch, I felt GREAT.

Then, about mile 5, there started being a bunch of hotspots on my feet. I thought that it might just be cause it was, you know, HOT. ‘Cept that was obviously wrong. In hindsight, I should have stopped to re-tie my shoes. ‘Cept I didn’t.

Sometime around mile 7, the pain finally got to me, so I went ahead and pulled the heck out of my laces, and started limping. No way was I going to DNF this year. Dianna must have passed me about then – man, did she have a good race even though she said she was going to take it easy.

Just after mile 8, I saw Jon pass me thanks to the absolutely stellar hat he was wearing. We ran for a while, then I had to walk for a bit and Jon headed on down the course in his own effortless way. I continued to trudge, completely and totally resenting both the uphill in the park, and the downhill back to town.

And the f’n bagpipers were there again just before mile 11. If there’s one thing that just makes the short hairs on my neck stand up and my stomach churn, it’s bagpipe music – sounds like some sadistic evildoer sodomizing a sheep while strangling it at the same time. Which, come to think of it, is probably how they started.

I made it through to the end. I’d walk for about a quarter mile through each water stop, and run easy for the next three quarters. It really, really, really sucked, but I made it. Not a terrible race – finished at about 1:53. So, it wasn’t my slowest finish, but it wasn’t my best, either. (I’m pretty psyched, though, as I’d thought I was even faster in 2005).

We hung around for a while after the race. I was slow, so the beer line was painfully long. The ice cream line was pretty short, so I went through that twice.

The rest of this week’s been great. I started night class at the War College – man, I dig me some Sun Tzu.

Taking it easy on the last half of the race seems to have worked out pretty well – speedwork on Wednesday rocked. Honest to gosh, it just felt great to run.

Today was another day on the bike. Ever since seeing Rudi in DC a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been back in love with riding. Last week rocked – I actually broke a spoke during a bit of out-of-the-saddle time, which was the first time I’d had to replace a piece of gear due to use-induced failure instead of wrecking it while trying to do routine maintenance on the bike.

Last Saturday was a great ride. The highlight was coming over the hill just past Dean’s Mill School. They had one of those radar displays, and it read 18 MPH as soon as I saw it at the top of the hill, and I managed to roll it up to 25 before I passed it. Caught my breath for the next three miles…

Tomorrow’s an easy run, and then somewhere between 7 and 14 on Saturday, depending on how I feel. I’m trying to really treasure these runs, as Missy’s sidelined with ITB troubles, so I can see how precious good legs are.

Rats

So, I wrote a good post (that hopefully will make it up soon) about the great run this weekend.

And then I promptly miss today’s run.

Sometimes I feel like I suck.

But I’ll make it up tomorrow.

I rock.

It’s good to be the dad

Hey, y’all.

I’m still here. Doin’ well, in fact. Running. A lot.

But, I’ve been working. Work is good. Really good, in fact. But, time is short (I’ve been sleeping).

I got to catch up with RandomDuck (aka Rudi, who’s got a great new theme) down in DC. Good food, great conversation, and a neat trip around Dupont (who, interestingly enough was Navy). Man, I need to get on the bike.

I will pass on one tidbit, both bike and running related: Sometimes, being a dad is an amazing thing. A couple of weeks ago, I had 8 miles on the Saturday long run. I was getting ready to go, and said “Hey, Jake (oldest boy) – do you want to try to ride your bike around the river with me?”

“Sure,” said Jake.

I thought “Crap” – my initial fear was that this was going to be disaster – 8 miles for an 8 year old boy on a BMX-ish bike is a long, long frackin’ way. But, I figured there wasn’t much to lose, so we laced ’em up, and went for the run.

Let me be honest for a bit – my goal at San Antonio is to finish, as it’s been nigh unto 3 years since I’ve done 26.2, I’m still above 170 lbs with the hard part of marathon training just kicking off (the bit where you’re ravenously hungry all the darn time and can’t really lose any weight and still focus for more than 30 seconds), and I haven’t been completely on schedule until about 3 weeks ago (and I still missed an easy run last week).

So, part of the loop around the Mystic River (not the one from the eponymous movie, but the one from the Pizza) included a stop at the coffee shop to say howdy and get a drink. About 10 or 15 minutes of break, then back to the bike/sneakers.

Jake’s great to ride with – full of questions, and starting to “get it” as far as riding in traffic goes. We’ve been watching the ospreys that nest on the river all summer, and it’s been fun talking to him about their recovery. Actually, the questions get kind of old about the 7 mile point, but they keep him engaged.

The first trip was great. Jake pooped out on the hill on River Road and had to walk, but there wasn’t any complaints until he realized we were about a half mile from the house. And then, the complaints were about being hungry.

The experiment’s been a success – the next week, he started asking if we were going about Wednesday, and last week was great – he just wanted to be sure we’d had breakfast first. The last two weekends, we’ve actually done the double – Jake and I would do the long run, then Nate (the younger) would beg to go for a bike ride. So, we headed down to go see the Art festival one weekend, and just to look at the river the next.

So, yeah, I’m digging life. It’s cool when you don’t have to work getting the kiddos to like fun stuff.

Fitness

Hi, Internet.

Hi, Bill!

I suppose you’re wondering why I’m talking to you today. Here’s the deal. I’m tired of being above what’s considered a healthy BMI, and I want to do something about it.

But Bill, isn’t that why you run?

Sure, I suppose so, but in actual fact, I’ve been running more to mitigate a lack of consciously healthy lifestyle. See, I’ve viewed running as a band-aid which lets me eat crap. When, as my gloriously fit wife has demonstrated much to my benefit, it ought to be a supporting part of eating well and sleeping well.

But enough about that, Internet. I want to, right now, dwell on the glories of running in New England in the summertime, with the breeze coming off of Narragansett Bay, the birds singing, and wild blackberries.

It’s been a good week up here in Mystic, my hometown, out there on the edge of the Long Island Sound. I’m on program for running, think I’m going to finally get on to Week 3 of the 100 pushups plan, and my folks are up to entertain the children.

Jacob and I did my long run together on Saturday, he on his bicycle and me on my extremely white pair of Asics. I’ve been alternating shoes between them and my Nikes this campaign, and my legs feel great.

Jake was a trooper, exuberant when we stopped by Bartleby’s for something to drink mid-run. It wasn’t until we got within a half mile of home that he realized that he hadn’t whined at all for 8 miles, and didn’t have much chance to make it up before we got home. So, there was a little gripe about a hill, and a little about being hungry, but his heart wasn’t in it, and he had a smile on his face while he complained.

Sometimes kids just need to feel like their existance is acknowledged.

The rest of the week has been good. I was a bit spent on Wednesday, so didn’t get the full impact I should have from intervals. Oh, and went into a presentation still sweating. Which wouldn’t have been bad, but the guy I was briefing had gotten some third channel bad information, and has a bit of a grudge against my boss’s boss. Which made the sweat look like flopsweat, and robbed me of the ability to make a joke about running at lunch.

But other than that, things are good.

Conundrum

So, I didn’t get in the long run this weekend – camping kind of got in the way. We hiked a ton, and by Sunday afternoon, I was feeling awful sore – knee and ankle especially.

Yesterday afternoon, I hit the road on Jamestown after work, and had a pretty good 5 miler (except for a little bit of heat). Amazingly enough, my legs feel great this morning, which makes me scratch my head.

Anyway, it’s back to work after a long-ish lunch. Had dental work this morning – only one more quadrant of the mouth to get re-filled. Will swim this evening, and then go see The Dark Knight.