The Past Week in Running

I am currently in the second week of training for the Hyannis Half Marathon at the end of February.  Coming off my PR in the marathon back in November, I have decided that for this training cycle I would concentrate more on speed workouts and less on total mileage.  I will also be switching back to running six days a week, instead of five, which shouldn't be to bad as my total volume of running is down.  Hopefully the weather continues to be fairly mild, as any snow could possible mess up my speed workout days.

The past week in running:
Monday - 3 easy

Tuesday - 5 total, with 7 400's at 5k pace.  Need to start doing these on the track again as doing them on hills is not fun.

Wednesday - 3 easy

Thursday - 6 total, 45 minute tempo run.  Hills around here again made this fun.

Friday - 3 with two at around HMP, still trying to figure out exactly how fast I am going to try to run this Half in.

Saturday - Off, as  I has been out partying the night before.  I actually could have gotten up and ran, but just wasn't feeling it.

Sunday - 10, felt fantastic.  If anything, I know covering the 13.1 miles is not going to be hard, it is a matter of how fast I want to do it.

Bringing it back.

I haven't written a blog post since September, as I have been super busy with school this semester.  However, with the semester ending, I am going to have a lot more free time on my hands here soon, and thus will be posting again soon.  Let the countdown begin...

Barney: By announcing the time, you ruin the suspense. You have shown your hand! 
Marshall: And as of 3:00 PM tomorrow, your face will show my hand.

My ten years later.

I graduated high school in the spring of 2001.  In less than a month, I will be returning home to attend my ten year high school reunion.  I haven't seen some of my fellow classmates in years, and there are many I haven't seen at all since graduation.  I am sure we will talk about good times from high school, and the shenanigans we participated in.  We will also chat about what each of us are doing now, and where our lives have taken us.  What I am sure we will not talk about, however, is what impact 9/11 has had on our lives.

Like many who had graduated that year, by the end of the summer in 2001, I was ready to head into the next part of my life and start attending college.  Since the university I attended started classes before Labor day, I had already spent a few weeks at school by the time September hit.  I came to the conclusion, however, that I was not ready for college.  I wasn't ready to be away from home and I wasn't ready to devote myself to a full time work load, so I withdrew.  I just happened to withdraw on 9/10/2011.

On the morning of 9/11, I was feeling happy and excited that I would be returning home.  One of my friends had driven down to take me and some of my stuff home, and we decided to go out to breakfast.  We were having a good time in the restaurant, laughing and joking around.  We were totally oblivious to what was going on.  Sometime while we were at the restaurant, or on the way back from, the first plane had hit.  When we got back to the dorms, there were a bunch of people sitting around the TV's, and that is when I first found out that New York had been attacked.

The rest of that day and the week now is just a blur.  I remember making it home sometime, and hanging out with my friends and talking about what was going on.  We were sitting on the main street our town, and at some point my friend Luke just felt like he had to do something.  He made an impromptu sign that simply stated  "Honk for America", and proceeded to stand at the cross section of the two main streets in our town.  Almost everyone who went through that intersection honked.  We continued to do this every night for the rest of the week, each night attracting more people and signs, till on our final night when we had a candle light vigil.  I remember standing there that night, waving an American flag and thinking I needed to do something more.  A few weeks later I enlisted in the Navy.

And here I am, ten years later, reflecting on how much a single day has affected the last ten years of my life.  I served our great country for six years, and while it was tough at times, I never forgot why I was doing it.  Two of my brothers have also served in the military since that day, one who tragically lost his life serving in Iraq, the other who continues to serve.  And despite all the grief and tragedy that occurred not just on that day, but since as our troops continue to serve overseas, there is a bright spot in my own life that has occurred.  While serving I met my future wife, who's care and love has been much appreciated since we first met.

My many thanks for those who served, and continue to serve this great nation.

To those who lost loved ones on that day, and the days since, my heart and sympathy goes out to you.

Never forget.

Really House of Representatives, really?

So for those of you who have not heard, last week the House Judiciary committee passed a bill that will require all Internet Service Providers (ISP's) to log all of their customers internet activity for a year. Named the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011, the aim of the bill (so claimed) is to try and catch child pornographers. You can read some details of the bill here or here. While the intention of the bill is of course good, the method that the House decided to go with is just a bit absurd.  As mentioned in one of the previous articles, there are currently around 272 million internet users in the United States.  The current estimated population of child pornographers in the country makes up less than one percent of all these users.  The plan is to log all the internet activity of every internet user in the country, including sensitive information such as credit card and bank account numbers, hand this data over to law enforcement officials, and have them search through it all to find this small population of child pornographers.  Anyone every try finding a needle in a haystack?

This bill seems entirely pointless to me.  Besides the issues of searching through all that data, anyone can set up their computers so that their ISP can't see the internet activity of that individual.  Any one trying to hide anything (say child pornographers), can easily set up these tools.   How many people does the government really plan on catching using this method?  While I am sure they will catch someone, did they really need to log all the activity of every American to catch that one person?  I am sure there are more efficient ways to go about it.

The question must also be asked, what does the government plan on doing with all this data once they have it?  Granted I have not looked at the fine details of the bill yet, but I can almost guarantee that they will not be destroying it.  No one destroys data anymore because they never know when they might need it.  Also, are ISP's going to keep a copy of the data, and what will they be allowed to do with it?  This year has also been a big year for hackers, and this data is going to be a prime target.  I wouldn't be surprised to see all of our internet bills going up to pay for both the extra storage, and the cost to keep the data secure.

I for one, am just outraged by this so called "bill".

Hello July

Here we are, July already, and first things first: Happy Birthday to my wonderful wife!  Wishing you all the best!

July also brings the start of marathon training, and I am already three days in and it is going well.  This year I am switching some things up, instead of running 6 days a week with only one rest day, I am looking at only 5 days of running and two rest days.  I plan on topping out my weekly mileage at 60 miles per week (won't be there till sometime in the middle of August), so with less running days, I will have to run more miles on those running days.  The hope is to concentrate mainly on endurance this year, so I can handle the last part of the marathon better.

On the golf scene, shot the best round I have shot in years this past weekend, which is good.  Still have a long way to go til I am happy with my golf game, but starting to see improvements.  Need to straighten out my drives and long irons, and get the chipping and putting thing back down, but my short iron game is really coming along.

Also, I have now been out of school for over a month, and I am reaching that point where I am extremely bored and just want the next school year to start already.  Two more semesters, and then done, really looking forward to it.



“Here is how you run a Marathon…Step One: Start Running. Step Two: There is no step two.” -Barney

Productive Week

So since my last blog, the wife and I have been fairly busy.  First though I must point out that Karina was rear ended by a hung over Bruins fan this past Thursday.  She stopped to let a pedestrian cross the road, and apparently the guy behind her wasn't paying enough attention.  She is okay, had some minor whiplash, but seems to be recovering well.  Her car is going to need some work, but the rear bumper worked exactly how a bumper should.

Speaking of cars, we finally got a second one.  Since we are planning on moving out of our current apartment to an area where I wouldn't be able to take public transportation to school, was going to need a second car.  I am now completely mobile and don't have to bum rides off of people, which I am sure those people who I bummed rides off of are happy.  While we were out working out the details for the car, we got a call from one of  the apartment places we were looking at.  The apartment we wanted had become available and we needed to put a deposit down to secure it before someone else snatched it up.  So we ended up with a new apartment and a new car all in the same day.  On top of all that we changed up some financial stuff, and came to the realization that we may very well be growing up and becoming more responsible.

On the running scene, I am in the weird post event/race phase were I am just running to maintain fitness, and not training for anything in particular.  This is a actually the hardest time for me because with nothing to focus on, tend to start feeling lazy and want to skip runs.  However, I need to keep at it as I need to be ready to start marathon training in a couple more weeks.

As a final note, spent some time on the golf range the other day and am proud to say I didn't slice a single ball.  Hit some fades, but I can live with a fade if I can cut back on how often I slice.  I attribute this feat to going back and relearning some golf basics, such as the proper grip, and remembering that you don't hit a golf ball, you swing a golf club.

New England Relay - Done.

So I have now ran/driven through all of New England.  It was a bunch of fun, and I will consider doing it again next year if they hold it again.  Officially I ran 26.4 miles, but according to my Garmin it was closer to 27.  If you add up my times across all three legs that I ran, I would have ran the distance in 3:32:00, which would be a massive marathon PR for me.  The question now becomes, how well would I have ran across a full 26 miles with out stopping and resting for up to 8-9 hours between legs.  I don't know if it still would have been that fast, but while running this past weekend I noticed that I am a far stronger runner right now then I was last year.

Leg 1: 8.1 officially, 8.45 on my Garmin.  I ran this leg in 1:08:59, or 8:09 minute per mile pace.  This leg started with a 300 foot climb within the first mile and a half.  What was great was that when I started the leg I couldn't see the hill, and I was running along a nice flat section for about an eighth of a mile.  Having hardly ran at all on our honeymoon, my legs were nice and rested and I was thinking to myself, man my legs feel great.  Then I took a right turn and saw the hell and went oh hell.  I am proud to say I didn't stop to walk at all as I went up the hill, though my quads were starting to hurt a lot by the time I got to the top.  From there the entire run was almost completely downhill, and in case you didn't know, it is actually far worse on your legs to run downhill then up.  It can also be a bit dangerous as gravity kind of just drags you along and you can reach speeds that are hard to slow down from.  One of the things I was trying to do was to keep my paces relatively slow as I knew from my overnight relay last year that your legs could just be completely dead by the time you reach the third leg.  With all the downhill running though it was hard to keep the pace around 8:30, so this leg was a bit fast.

Leg 2: 6.9 officially, 6.97 on the Garmin.  I ran this leg in 53:15.  Out of the three legs, this one was the most fun, nerve racking, and speedy of the three.  Fun because it was ran late at night in the rain, which running in the dark can be fun and I enjoy running in the rain; nerve racking because it was night and raining and I was running down route 9 in New Hampshire, so the few cars on the road were of course flying down the road; speedy because again the run was mostly down hill.  This leg again started with a 300 foot climb.  As soon as reached the top of this hill, I immediately started the speediest section of all three of my legs as I started a downhill run that was just over one mile in length.  While there were a couple more uphills over the rest of the leg, it was pretty much all downhill till it flattened out just after mile 5 and by the time I was able to carry my momentum till the finish.  Because of the long downhill, my average pace for this leg was 7:38, way faster than I wanted, and I could tell by the time I finished that my legs were really tired and that the third leg was going to be tough.

Leg 3: 11.1 officially, 11.45 on the Garmin.  I ran this leg in 1:31:04.  After running the first two legs faster than I wanted, I knew that I was going to be tired for this leg.  This leg thankfully didn't have a 300 foot climb at the start, and while it did go from 400 foot back to around sea level, it was stretched over 11 miles, so I didn't really notice the downhill running as much.  I must have psyched myself up a little because my first four miles were all around or under 7:30 pace.  After that I started to slow down some, but overall I generally kept the pace under 8:30.  By the time I hit the last two miles, part of me wanted to stop and walk some because my quads were just done for the day, but I knew if I stopped that I would not be able to get going again, so I toughed it out and finished, though I did walk for about 30 seconds over the final hill.

I am really surprised at how much stronger a runner I am right now then I was a year ago.  If my marathon training goes well this year, it will be interesting of what my time goal will be for the marathon.  I currently have a goal in mind and I may have to adjust it slightly just based off of how well I ran this weekend.  But for now I just have a few weeks of maintenance runs, and then marathon training starts at the beginning of July.