Run!

Do you ever keep watching a video over and over and you’re not sure why? Yeah, this video is kind of like that. I’m not sure why I like it so much, perhaps it’s the awesome title or the music. Or perhaps it’s the fact that it caters to my short attention span and my need to be entertained without having to invest too much of my valuable time.



On a running note, I plan to complete Razz’s GW,MA!6.66MR tonight so I should have a “race report” (air quotes!) ready to go for tomorrow morning... or tomorrow afternoon... or the next day, or whenever I feel like getting around to it. What are you, my boss? Get off my back already!

Things I Imagine While Running

When I was little I was in Cub Scouts, along with various other youth programs all designed to stop you from becoming the kind of adult that I became anyway. The motto of the Cub Scouts, which they drilled into our heads during my short time there is Be Prepared. You might have already known that. It was a motto that I took to heart and one that I still believe in today. Part of being prepared is imagining all of the worst case scenarios that could come your way and figuring out how you’ll deal with them. I employ this technique when I’m running.

For example, I often find myself out running when it’s dark. This is when there are unsavory characters lurking around every corner to get you so it is especially important to be prepared. Each cyclist that you pass could be a terrorist in disguise, sent to take you captive. That woman walking her dog could be an Al Qaeda operative whose mission is to rub you out. When I run at night I imagine that each pedestrian that I pass is a mortal enemy. I look around for reflective surfaces so that I can keep an eye on them without alerting them to my alertness. After they pass me I know that they are circling back around to attack but my Spidey senses are tingling and I feel the danger coming. As though I have eyes in the back of my head I deftly duck out of the way of their initial blow and then turn my defensive maneuver into a deadly counter attack. I spin around with lightening quickness and take the highly trained, combat-hardened terrorist completely by surprise. I execute a roundhouse kick with Chuck Norris-like perfection that catches my assailant squarely in the jaw. Stunned but not knocked out, the terrorist stumbles backwards and I immediately pounce and pummel them with brutal body blows from my steely fists. I put the terrorist in a choke hold and demand that he tell me who sent him. Seriously guys, I make Jack Bauer look like limp-wristed mama’s boy.

Later I’ll give an interview on TV where you’ll still be able to see my bloodied knuckles and sweat drenched shirt. I’ll describe in the most nonchalant fashion how I captured the most highly sought after man in the US and got critical information out of him that will save countless lives. It’s thoughts like these that keep me at a heightened state of awareness when I run, I mean sure, sometimes I almost run right into other runners because I’m so immersed in my daydreams, but for the most part I’m super aware.

Of course none of this has ever actually happened. It usually turns out that my tingling Spidey sense was just indigestion and if anything like that ever did really happen I’d probably crap my pants and faint. Later that night the local news story would be about a heroic woman who revived a runner that had passed out and soiled himself for no apparent reason.

Half-Fast Friday

One of the routes that I run through my neighborhood goes past the back of some houses that have 6 foot privacy fences lining their yards. Several of the houses have dogs all of whom bark at me and one of them even jumps so high that his head pops up over the top of the fence. Somehow I am always startled by this, even when I know it’s coming and prepare myself for it. Then his head pops up and he barks at me and I can feel myself jolt. I used to wonder if he was really jumping that high or if there was something on his side of the fence that he was standing on like a table or piles of dead runners that he’d somehow managed to grab. Then I saw this video (via WG). I wonder no more.



Let me add a note here to say that I own a dog and I love dogs, but I absolutely can’t stand it when dogs bark at me from their yards. Just leave me alone bitch! (Get it, bitch, because it’s a female dog! These are the jokes you get on Half-Fast Friday.)

A Virtual Race Unlike Any Other Virtual Race!

Ok, so it’s exactly like any other virtual race but that’s not really very attention grabby now is it? Head on over to ROATM and sign up for Razz’s 6.66 mile virtual race. There are prizes and everything, in fact, one of the prizes is going to be supplied by yours truly and it’s autographed!! Let me say that again: IT’S AUTOGRAPHED!!! Do you have any idea what that’s worth? Roughly $8.57. You might think that I’m overstating it but the item that I’m donating as a prize really, truly was devalued by at least that much when I signed it with indelible ink. You won’t be able to wash that out.

There are certain rules and guidelines to signing up for the race, but you’ll have to go read them at Razz’s blog because I didn’t understand them the first time and I’m not about to put myself through another attempt to make sense of the stilted gibberish he posts over there. (Ooooh, the ref takes away a point for a low blow!) The race can be run anytime between March 5th and March 14th and you do have to sign up in the comments at ROATM.

I think that the idea behind the race is that we’re all giving Ol’ Man Winter the big middle finger, even though I don’t think I should do that since Ol’ Man Winter has been relatively kind to us here in Colorado the last few days. He’s been the friendly old grandpa who doesn’t come around much and always brings you money when he’s in town as opposed to the crusty old codger who finds the worst moments to be incontinent. Razz came up with the name of the race all by himself. It’s the “Global Warming, My Ass! 6.66 Mile Run” which I find kind of ironic considering all of the complaining that Razz did about lengthy race names. (PFCRNRAZM anyone?) Anyway you should head on over to his blog and sign up for the GW,MA!6.66MR which has an even longer abbreviation than the PF Chang’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Arizona Marathon, assuming that you count the punctuation, and I do.

Crazy Drivers!

You know what’s worse than a driver who won’t stop at a crosswalk to let you cross? A driver who stops when there’s no crosswalk. Here’s what happened on my run last night:

I had decided for no apparent reason that I would prefer to run on the other side of the street. Sometimes I do this in the middle of a run just to change things up, it’s the whole ‘sidewalk is always greener over there’ theory or something like that. As there was no cross walk for at least a couple of blocks and I’m extremely impatient I decided to wait for a break in traffic and make a run for the better looking sidewalk. Now, this street is not a busy four lane highway so I’m not talking about having to make a frantic, frogger-esque dash for the other side, but there are a few cars on the street so I stopped on the sidewalk to wait for a nice long break in traffic.

The car that is approaching from my left sees me standing there and begins to slow down to allow me to cross. I hate it when drivers do this because to the cars behind him it makes me look like THAT runner, the one that darts out in front of you and further impedes your commute, in fact if I was in the car behind him I’d probably be on my horn. So I try to wave him on and indicate that he should just keep going. He’s emphatically waving back at me signaling for me to go ahead, but traffic behind him is beginning to catch up and I’m worried that I’ll get smoked by the impatient driver behind him who I can see has four pairs of runners shoes tattooed on his front fender. One more and he’s considered an Ace. My concerns prove to be correct when the driver behind him, who clearly doesn’t see me despite the fact that I was flaunting my pasty white legs (53 degrees yesterday! Suck it East Coasters!), roars past him in the wrong lane yelling and cursing as he went. I give the polite driver a look that says ‘see, I told you’ and he can no longer be referred to as the polite driver as he too is yelling and signaling to me that I’m number one. Yeah, I’m the idiot here for not playing dodge ball with evening commuters.

To sum up, here are the driver’s crimes that landed him a mention on my blog today: 1. He was observant - he saw me standing there and recognized that I wanted to cross. 2. He tried to be polite, perhaps it even occurred to him that I would prefer not to have to stop running. So, my advice to you all when you get behind the steering wheel is to be less observant and less polite, the world could use a few more of these drivers.

Finally, I reserve the right in the future to complain about drivers being impolite and unobservant and not allowing me to cross the street.

Oh, and the sidewalk on the other side of the street was not greener, nor was it any more pleasant to run on.

Back to FIRST

As I prepare for the Bolder Boulder 10k on Memorial Day I am finally getting back on an official training plan. I’m going to be using the FIRST plan and will be doing some of the P90X workouts on my cross training days. You may remember that I had been doing P90X as part of my off season regimen. Or maybe you don’t remember since I notice that none of you have even bothered to ask how it went. Maybe that’s because you can tell how ripped I am just by reading the words that I type onto this blog, you can tell how quick and strong my fingers were when they typed these sentences and realized that obviously P90X had worked and obviously there was no need to ask how it was going because I’m so obviously ripped. Obviously. Or maybe it doesn’t seem like it’s been 90 days yet, but that’s only because the post where I originally mentioned P90X is still on the front page of this blog. Go ahead and look, I’ll wait while you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page (no, I won’t actually wait, that would be silly not to mention a logistical nightmare). Or maybe you haven’t asked because you just don’t care about me like I care about you - by the way I care about you based on your worth to me, which Google AdSense tells me is roughly $0.06 per page view, which is why I haven’t asked YOU how YOUR training has been going.

Regardless of the fact that you haven’t asked I’m going to give you my thoughts on P90X (although you kind of tacitly asked by coming here unsolicited). P90X is a tough and challenging workout and you definitely see results with this program, but I prefer to focus on the negatives (it’s what makes me who I am) so here are some of the problems with the P90X program:

I am a free man.
It doesn’t make you do the workouts. I still have to choose to work out, which is kind of a problem for me because it turns out that I’m not very good at choosing to spend an hour sweating to a home workout DVD. What I really need is for someone to take me captive and actually force me to work out on a daily basis.

I figured out what the 90 means.
I started out doing pretty well. You may remember that I had intended to mix running in with the P90X workouts and initially I was successful with this. If you don’t remember that then you can scroll all the way back down and read the post again while I pretend that I’m waiting for you. So I was adding two runs a week to the six P90X workouts which was a shock to the system for someone who was used to running three or four times a week and doing little else. Eight workouts a week means no rest days even if you subscribe to Paul McCartney math. Anyway, there was no way I was going to survive eight workouts a week for 90 days. 90 days? This program is three full months? What kind of sick masochist came up with this?

I outsmart P90X.
I pretty quickly figured out which workouts were considered ‘strength training’ and which ones were ‘cardio.’ (Note to anyone considering the P90X program: the CardioX DVD is cardio.) This created a situation where I was able to rationalize (because I’m so smart) which workouts could be replaced by running which also happens to be a form of cardio. Pretty soon I had the P90X schedule down to three or four workouts a week because I was also running, only I wasn’t running. You see, I kind of stopped running on account of all the time I was putting in on the six P90X workouts, but I had (cleverly) pared down the P90X schedule to make room for the running which then turned out to be superfluous. I don’t expect you all to understand this because it takes a special kind of circular logic that only I possess, but just trust me when I tell you that it’s brilliant, bordering on genius.

I disagree with the nutrition plan.
A nutrition plan? Are you kidding me? I have to be careful about what I eat too? I thought that this workout was X-treme? If it’s so extreme why do I have to watch what I eat? Why can’t someone come up with a workout so extreme that I don’t have to watch what I eat? If the fire is hot enough anything will burn, even Big Macs.*

For the most part I liked the P90X program, which is why I’m incorporating some of the workouts into my training. Time (i.e. race results) will tell whether it has helped me or not. For a better review of P90X you can visit The Great Fitness Experiment because Charlotte is not smart enough to realize that you don’t have to do all of the workouts every week and so she did them all and in a completely unrelated turn of fortune managed to achieve better results than I did. Plus Charlotte always manages to get fantastic images for her posts and her P90X review is no different, I don’t want to ruin it for you but it does feature MacGyver.

*Quote stolen from that one famous book about a runner.

Half-Fast Friday

Today I’m introducing a new regularly recurring feature here at Half-Fast called updating your blog Half-Fast Friday. Here’s how it’s going to work: Friday’s post will be Half-Fast, phonetically speaking. This will make Friday’s post much easier for me to write and I deserve to take it easy on Friday. You know what? So do you. Some Fridays I’ll probably take it so easy that it will look like there’s no post at all, but don’t be fooled, you’re probably just tired from a long week at work. Take a nap and come back later.

For those of you wondering whether or not my neighbors responded to my open letter on Tuesday, they did. Well, most of them did but there’s always one. Just take a look at the minefield of snow and ice that I had to navigate through in front of this one Jerkwad’s house. It’s a wonder I survived!

Have a great weekend everyone!

The Winter Olympics

I love the Winter Olympics. Love it. I watch almost everything. I watch the hockey, I watch the alpine skiing events, I watch the sliding events, I watch the cross country skiing and the biathlon - it’s skiing AND shooting! I watch the speed skating (note to Sven Kramer: “What are you stupid?”). I even watch some of the curling. “The USA has a curling team? Awesome, TiVo it I’ll watch it while I’m running on the treadmill!” (Side note: Why is men’s and women’s curling segregated? Can women curlers not hold their own with the men? Keep it segregated I say, all the more curling events for me to watch). I watch the snowboard cross and the ski cross, I watch the aerials, the moguls, the ski jumping, and the halfpipe. It’s all very good. I do draw the line at the ice dancing though. When the ice dancing comes on that’s when I catch up on the other shows I’ve been neglecting in order to watch the Olympics.

The other night I was watching... I don’t even remember what event I was watching but I had a thought. You know what the Winter Olympics needs? A marathon. The marathon is the pinnacle of the Summer Olympics, you can argue that the 100m is watched by more people or that the swimming gets more coverage, but none of the other events have their medal ceremony incorporated into the closing ceremony. Only the marathon winners get to receive their medals during the closing ceremony of the Olympics. It’s like a tip o’ the hat to the marathon as the original Olympic event, so why not have a Winter Olympic Marathon too?

Now the Winter Olympics likes to have a bit of an X Games feel to it and we’d have to make some changes to the Winter Olympics Marathon course to keep with that theme. The race would be held in and around the host city so it would be a cold weather marathon. Perhaps the race would actually be an ultra marathon, what’s more X-treme than that? The course could traverse deep snow fields and treacherous frozen lakes, maybe it would even have transition areas so the runners could change into snow shoes or spiked shoes for the different sections. The runners could run up one side of a mountain and down the other side, it would make Heartbreak Hill look like a pimple. I think it would be a great event, but unfortunately we will have to wait for the next Winter Olympics to incorporate this idea because the Canadians would have tried to make the down hill portion of the race faster and more dangerous, eh.

An Open Letter to My Neighbors

Dear Neighbors,

As you are no doubt aware we’ve had some snow lately and I couldn’t help but notice on my drive to work this morning that some of your driveways and sidewalks are still unshoveled. This is quite disconcerting as you know that I’m scheduled to run tonight. (I trust that you all received my running schedule in the mail along with the rotation of whose turn it is to provide refreshments.) The temperatures today will be in the mid 40s and it’s expected to be sunny all day. This means that tonight when I embark on my run your sidewalks could be completely dry if you just get out there and shovel them so that they can benefit from eight hours of sunshine. I in return will take down my Christmas lights, or at the very least I’ll stop turning them on every night. Also while you’re out there shoveling your sidewalks it really wouldn’t be too much to ask for someone to shovel my walk too, would it? It would? Well then don’t worry about my sidewalk. It’s more important that your sidewalks get shoveled since they occur in the middle of my run. Those of you with north facing driveways whose houses thoughtlessly block the sun might want to think about putting down some salt and I don’t want to insist that you hook up your wife’s hairdryer to the extension cord but I think that basic human decency necessitates it. That snow’s not going to melt itself.

I write this congenial letter to appeal to you on the basic tenets of human decency, I know you don’t want to see me slip on your icy sidewalk and you definitely don’t want to receive a letter from my sue-happy attorney. Trust me, you don’t want to be on the defendant’s end of a lawsuit when a greedy fat-cat banker such as myself, teams up with an ambulance chasing lawyer. See? Basic. Human. Decency. I’m an expert at it. Try to emulate me.

Sincerely,

Ian (The guy with the Christmas Lights)

Site News: Please note that I have not posted an apology/excuse for not posting over the last few weeks. That’s not because I’m not sorry, although I’m not sorry, you’re sorry! The reason for the lack of an excuse or apology is because there’s a pretty good chance that posts are going to continue to be sporadic at best and if I have to apologize every time I’m gone for a week or two it’s going to get tiresome for me to type and for you to read, but most importantly for me to type. I think we’ve already established that I don’t care about you people. (Seriously, thanks for coming back and still reading.) Anyway, you’re just going to have to put up with my sporadicity sporadicness sporadicality sporadicism sporadicity as work has been consuming a lot of my time lately (like, easily 30 to 34 hours a week) and I covet the time I get to spend with my family (sometimes I even pause the TV and pay attention to them) so I don’t want to spend that time writing blog posts. Also, I think it’s funny that you would ask me where I’ve been when it’s been quite obvious (I have Google Analytics) that over the past few weeks you yourselves have not been coming here. Where have I been? No, where have YOU been?

Where Have I Been?

You have probably been asking yourself that question and it’s one that I hope to answer with this post. You may also be worrying that I’ve stopped blogging but hopefully this post today is enough to allay those fears.

Q. Where have I been?
A. I have not been posting.

I hope this clears everything up.