Month: November 2009

Found in the Friday Fun Quiz!

So, I’ve had another semi-brush with fame. I was catching up on my RSS feeds, and found that Bike Snob NYC had lifted my picture of the lawyer tabs on my road bike to use in his Friday Fun Quiz:

BSNYC
Here’s the original:

lawyertabs2.JPG
On the one hand, it’s cool. And on the other hand it’s pretty cool to see someone else reusing my work. I’ve dropped him an email asking for photo credit. And it’s incentive to get back to writing – running, biking, and swimming have all been pretty good lately, but not great.

New York Aftermath

So, much like Danny*, I did the annual withdrawal from the NYC Marathon this weekend. There’s a long and tragic series of events leading up to not running; the short summary of which goes:

  1. This was probably my best summer’s training ever. July and August were AWESOME, and I PR’d New Haven, breaking a streak of really, really tough runs. September started great.
  2. September at the office turned into a zoo. After New Haven, I averaged one (1) run per week from Monday-Friday. And those were all about 3 miles, due to a combination of being time-crunched, on travel, or sore from the long run.
  3. Long runs – I made about 60% of them, with an absolutely disastrous 20 miler 3 weeks before NYC. One of my Sunday Schoolers (High School Junior) mentioned to me that she almost stopped to give me a ride that day.
  4. I mis-trimmed my left big toe about 2 weeks ago, and it’s a nasty, sore, oozing mess. I’m tempted to put up a picture, but man, is it grooody and painful.

In the end, what put the nail in the 2009 Marathon coffin was coming down with the Flu a week ago Wednesday. I spent 3 days completely in bed, and still am not quite right. But, I decided to bag the race. I don’t have the cool cancellation message, as it was the 29th by the time I was conscious enough to realize I wasn’t going to run, and you can’t withdraw electronically after the 28th. No huge deal – I think that I’ve realized that I need to do my big race focus in either early September or after the New Year from now on to allow training to mesh with work.

The flu kind of ended up being a relief. I could have finished NYC, but there was no way it was going to be a good race. Not having to go through with the race just ’cause I’d paid (through the noise) for it made life a bit easier.

But there are positives – I dropped the 5 pounds I’d put on over the summer thanks to 104+ degree fevers and not eating for a couple days. And I had an awesome weekend with my parents and kids – Ma and Pa Jank had come up from Texas to watch the youngn’s, and I got to spend a delightful weekend with them, including a trip to Clyde’s Cider Mill on Sunday for kettle corn, donuts, and hard cider.

So, RBF, there you go – true confession, I blew it for this race.

* I mention Danny only because we’ve been swapping emails with sob stories for the last week. Misery, turns out, really does love company.