My pre-BSR jitters

The broad street run is coming up this sunday... for those that don't know, the broad street run is a 10 mile race through Philly from north to south on broad street. it is a net downhill course and is supposedly one of the fastest 10 milers in the country. It is pretty darn big too... something like 15000 people or something... at least that is what the bib numbers go up to.

As with every other race I have run recently, I have a bit of the pre-race jitters. Why do I get nervous for something that really has no bearing on anything in life? I guess probably because running is something I am trying to improve at... and the success of me trying to improve or not is pretty blatantly obvious... if my times go down... i am improving. Interestingly enough, all of my races thus far have been a personal best, and I am a little nervous for that first race that isn't. Sunday won't be that because it will be my first time running the distance, so it is a guaranteed PR, but still. I have set a goal pace of 7:15 and I will be pretty disappointed if I don't get it. i guess I can always get it next year if I don't this year.

on top of the pre-race jitters, my ankles, knees, and leg muscles have been very tired and stiff all day. After getting up from sitting around at work, i feel like an old man... i hobble around a little until my legs loosen up. hopefully that doesn't screw me for sunday. i am going to run an easy 4 or 5 tomorrow to get the legs loosened up, so hopefully i will be in tip top shape.

My Appetite

So I am a big fan of eating. I am not really sure why I like eating so much, maybe the taste, maybe the fact that I can, maybe just cuz I get bored when I am not eating. A strange thing happened though when I got home from work today. I was really hungry, but all I wanted to eat was something that filled my stomach, it didn't even have to taste good... just something that was easy, gave me calories and filled an empty space in my belly. It was a strange feeling, but maybe I didn't eat a big enough lunch or something and just needed calories, or maybe I was just too lazy to think about cooking something tasty. I ended up having spaghetti with feta and olive oil which I like... but I just wanted the spaghetti and I would have eaten it plain if I had too.
i ran at ridley creek pretty hard today... ran out on white and then did the blue to white loop twice in about 32 minutes round trip... not that that means anything to anyone but me... but i think i could ahve done it in 30 minutes no problem.

My Asynchronous-ness

As discussed with my friend today over IM, the quality of my posts has gone down in recent history... as has the frequency. Somehow I think they are somewhat related... perhaps not as much interesting stuff has been happening to me lately, or perhaps I am becoming jaded and the stuff is still happening, but I am not enjoying the quirkiness of life. Either way... to remedy the problem, I am going to try to blog more to vent more thoughts and hopefully flush out any blogging block.

here is an interesting thought for all you runners, or other excercisers, out there. I talked with laura about this today... what do you think about when you are a running and do you remember what you think about and the thoughts you have? I seem to never remember anything specific that I think about when running... i remember general topics of thought, but not individual thoughts. it is a little bit like a dream... but with more motion and stiffness afterwards. actually I take that back... i did remember something after the fact and this is a bit of a longwinded story...

so when I was running today I heard a whining when a car drove by... and I was like... hmm that sounds like a super charger. and being the engineer that I am I start thinking about when to use a supercharger vs. a turbocharger and what the plusses and minuses are for each. when I was thinking about the supercharger, i was like... when freeway driving at constant speeds superchargers are less efficient because they are driven through a gear or belt directly from the motor... where a turbo is driven from the exhaust and is thus more efficient. There is a name for the type of loss and I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was called... something loss... totally was drawing a blank. it had something to do with evil creatures that suck blood or nutrients from something... like a leech or a lamprey eel or something... i just could't remember the word.

Later that afternoon at the zoo, I was looking at some of the plaques that they have in front of the animals and I saw the missing word... and it was parasitic!! a supercharger is a parasitic loss. when i saw that I just started smiling... it was funny...

My Absence

So it is has been a week since my last post, and that is unacceptable. However, my excuses for this week include a friend being in town, ran a lot, school, work, and computer trouble. I know... i am an engineer and I think I have more trouble with electronics than an 8 year old, but it has just been a bad streak for me. my stupid internet connection on my normal pc is on the fritz... it is all over the road... like changing from 11mpbs to 1 mpbs to 5.5 to 2... it is just weird. for a day or two I was totally off the internet... not sure what I did to fix it... but it has been fixed... sort of.

With my run of 11.75 miles this morning, I think I broke the 35 mile mark for the first time in my life which was pretty exciting. I think I will be in pretty good shape for running broad street next sunday. I will just finish up the week a little easier than normal and I should be good. My friend brian was in town this week so I was able to run with him twice and once with the guys from work... so all in all I only ran by myself twice out of 6 times... which would normally be like 5 out of 6 times. so that was good. it makes putting the mileage in easier when someone else is suffering with you!!

I think I just ate 4 servings of tortellini. it was an impressive feat. i went shopping around 5 oclock and realized once I pulled out of the driveway that I was really hungry... but I didn't get home to eat something until 6:30... poor me. so i gorged myself on tortellini. carbo loading? hmm... not so sure. I am pretty proud of myself today cuz I did tons of cleaning and tons of laundry. the stuff piled up this week so it was nice to have a day to myself to just get caught up with everything. don't get me wrong, I love being around people, but it is always nice to retreat from the hustle and bustle of life for a day and just focus on me... more specifically my clothes and filthy house.

My Retaining Wall

So, ever since I moved into my place, my front yard has been the eye sore of the neighborhood. I have this wood retaining wall sorta thing that is slowly creeping its way down the hill of my street. It is also sporting a cornucopia of dead plants and tree type things, both never-greens and some ivy. Every time I drive into my drive way I am just embarassed that i live there and haven't taken care of it by now. I figured my year-long grace period was finally over so I began tackling it.

I talked to a few people at work about how to fix these retaining walls and the concensus was to get rid of the wood and replace it. However, if the wood was still good, you could salvage it by just rebuilding it... so I was hoping that would be the case, but I really couldn't tell because of all the dead foilage (said like marge simpson). So my first task, and one that I completed today, was to rid the retaining wall of all the dead crap. I did that... which included much stumping pulling and weed yanking... but it is mostly done. It looks a ton better without all the dead crap, but the retaining wall looks like it is in bad shape. the wood is pretty rotted out so it looks like I am going to have to replace it... which is going to be a ton of work.

i ran a 5k this morning and I was pretty happy with my time. I ran around a 6:30 pace I believe.... i can't quite be certain because I screwed up the old watch again. Apparently when I get really tired I can't function well enough to understand what the two buttons on my watch do. you think it would be pretty straightforward... stop and split. how hard could it be? apparently very hard. anyway, when I get my final time I will certainly post it here.

My Lost Boys

So I went running yesterday during lunch with a couple people from work. They are trying to get into running and I also want new people to run with so I said, hell yah I would go. So we went to ridley creek state park and found some hiking trails that we could run on. The trails were pretty darn fun, lots of good hills and stuff. One of the dudes was beat by the first time up a hill so he started walking so we said we would drop back to him every split in the trail to tell him where to go. So me and the other guy kept going and going. Somehow, me and the guy i was running with split to find the walking guy and I kept doubling back to find the walking guy but somehow I missed him. eventually we all got back to the car safely after 65 minutes of being on the trail. about double what we wanted to do but still fun. it was a nice break from the work day.

for some reason, my body still hasn't figured out that I am losing my hair and insists on still giving me zits. i think that is a bunch of crap. i only have a couple, but they still piss me off. maybe I am doing something wrong... maybe it isn't good practice to smear lard on my face twice a day. I never saw anywhere that I shouldn't so it must be good for me. i started tackling my front retaining wall. all of the dead evergreen things in there are a pain in the patoot, but I need to get it done eventually so I might as well start now. it will probably be at least a month until I finish the whole project, unless some sort of miracle occurs. speaking of projects, my closet is still nowhere near done. since the weather broke, I am focusing on the outside since I can work on the inside when it sucks outside. it probably won't be finished even for next winter. that is how slow of a worker I am.

My Congratulations

First I would like to congratulate Kevin and Stephanie on their new beautiful baby boy, quentin michael. He was born yesterday and I hope I get to meet him sometime in the near future!! Congrats!!

This past weekend was the best weekend that I have had in sometime. The weather set the stage for the whole weekend. It was probably the most perfect weather anybody could ever ask for in the history of the world. simply beautiful. On top of that, I got back into the running groove this weekend... over the past 3 days I have ran 18 miles which I am really happy with. I got some yard work done and it actually looks like I am making some progress towards something. it is slow progress mind you, but progress nonetheless. And... i hung out with some cool people this weekend that capped off the fabulous weekend.

There is something about getting to work early that also puts me in a good mood. This morning I got in before 8 oclock which is probably one of the earliest times i have ever been at work. it makes me feel all productive even though i am probably not any more so. I had an orientation for some math tutoring volunteering today and it seems like it should be pretty cool, but could be a bit of a challenge. hopefully I can be a little helpful. we will see.

My Adventures Part Trois

Sorry for not blogging this past week, I was in Mobile again, and this time without easy internet access.

So I have a couple of loose ends relating to luggage that I need to tie up relating to last weeks story. On monday, I went back to the airport and officially filled out a lost baggage form on my way back down to mobile. I get a call that night from the baggage delivery folks to verify my address. I give them my work address cuz I will obviously not be home to pick up my bags. The next morning I receive another call from the courier service wanting to verify my address again and the address they give me is totally wrong. somewhere on F street? So I tell them the right address and at this time I know for sure that I will never be seeing my bag again.

Surprisingly, they deliver it on tuesday to the office so i was happily surprised to hear that. Ohh and one other thing... the thursday night when it was raining so bad (see the My Ark posting), i went running right? Well my clothes had not fully dried by the morning so I had close my luggage with some clothes and my running shoes still wet. Needless to say, by the time I opened them up 1.5 weeks later, they weren't the most fresh smelling things in the world. i wore those clothes to the party last night...

Last night I went to a birthday party for one of the girls I run with. I had tons of fun... they are all great people. I ended up drinking maybe 3 or 4 drinks, and like clockwork, I woke up at something like 4 a.m. this morning and couldn't get back to sleep for a while. damn drinking, why does that happen? there has to be some medical/biological reason why my body does that... anybody?

I ran 10 miles yesterday (saturday) and felt like crap and I am going to do a short 4 or 5 today. I am trying to get back in the swing of things running-wise now that I won't be traveling much for a while. Hopefully I can break 25 miles this week.

My Adventures Part Deux

Hopefully I will finish the story in this installment... otherwise I will have to figure out what comes after deux... troi? I don't know...

So the rest of work went off without too many hitches, other than the fact that right before we left, we toasted a circuit card on a valve, but no biggie, we can replace it later. I hop in the car and head to the aiport. I get all checked in for my flight and get through security, then realize my flight is delayed over an hour. it was still going to be possible that I will make my scheduled flight to philly, but just in case the guy set me up with standby on the next flight to philly. When I was standing in line there was an older woman, something like 70's or 80's and I think she was doing everything she could do not to stab the gate agent. She kept doing this very uncomfortable "I am going to kill someone soon if I don't hear what I want soon" laugh and looking around at any one that was listening. I was half-hoping that the flight would be cancelled just so I could see an 80 year old woman stab a 25 year old man. comedy gold...

The flight ended up being delayed another hour so it left about two hours late... after we land i turn on my cell phone and it is 9:31... and the last flight to philly leaves at 9:40. So I am thinking I have 9 minutes to bolt to the next plane which happens to be in a whole different terminal. nice. but luck was not with me on this day because we ended up sitting on the runway for about 10 minutes before we got to the gate. so I get off the plane, look at the monitors, and the last flight to philly shows that it has departed. so I pull a charlie brown shoulder slouch and still head to the gate where I was supposed to catch the plane with hope of some freak accident of the monitor being wrong. I get there show them my ticket and they say no joke, "Here's our DiBona!!" I thought that was pretty humorous. So the gate agent tries to put me on the flight to philly in the morning, but all of the flights are full so she would have to put me on standby and then I could possibly be stuck in the atlanta airport for the whole day. but she proposes another idea...

I could fly into newark that night, and figure out a way to get to philly. either by train or car. my bags would still get to philly the next day, but I would at least get home tonight. so I say, what the hell, and she put me on standby for the flight. So I am the last person that makes it on the flight via standby so I figure my luck has finally turned for the better. After an APU issue, apparently this plane didn't have one, we got off the ground and we were on our way to newark. I get to the newark airport a little after midnight and I make what proves to be a very bad decision by not checking for my baggage in newark. I figured the gate agent would have known whether or not my bags would have been sent there or to philly, but apparently she didn't. So apparently, according to the delta folks, my bag is sitting somewhere in the newark airport. They put in a request to have it forwarded to philly about 30 hours ago, but absolutely nothing has happened since then. No wonder all the airlines are running in the red, they have no clue how to do anything correctly. I am pretty sure I could find a route for those bags in about 10 minutes using orbitz (its called send it back to atlanta and then on to philly... they have flights every hour). ohh well... nothing important was in there other than my toiletries and my running shoes, which were wet at the time of packing, so they might be all moldy and ruined by the time I get them.

So after this mistake, I went to national and rented a car. basically i paid the money for the rental, and then you walk out to the parking garage and then steal whatever car you want cuz they leave the keys in the car and they aren't assigned to anybody. it was pretty strange. I ended up paying for a mid-size and got a full-size cuz I didn't know what the difference was. ohh well. so I make the two hour trip to philly without any hitches. ohh by the way... the rain that we got in mobile thursday and friday... was the same rain I had to drive through to get home. all told, i ate 9 servings of pretzel and cheese combos and ended up getting home around 3:30ish in the AM.

anyway... i ran 5 miles today despite having a bit of hangover and I felt so much better after doing it. after abusing my body the last couple days, I finally did something nice for myself and it felt great. I really need to start getting back in the groove with my running. Before the half marathon, I was really cruising, but things have really slowed down... maybe this week will get me back on track (my goal is more than 25 miles, 20% of the way there already!!).

My Adventures

So yesterday was one of the more action packed days in my life. This entry is going to be a long one so grab a box of frosted mini wheats, some gatorade and a comfortable chair. I am quite tired so please ignore all of the grammatical errors, because I am sure there will be many.

The day started out exactly how the day before it ended... lots of thunder, torrential downpours, and lightning multiple times per minute. how is this possible? did I only sleep for 15 minutes? Nay, I got nearly 7 hours of sleep...it was just that big of a storm. Supposedly mobile got around 8-12 inches of rain in parts... thats a lot. I was hoping to run that morning if it wasn't raining, but it was so I decided to just get everything packed up and take a little time to go over some notes for the day.

I go down to the hotel lobby for the free breakfast at around 6:03. I start grabbing food to eat and the lady brings out the bisquits so I grab one of those. Then from the corner of my eye I see the lady staring at me all pissed off. I look up and she says something like "well I guess I was ready to start serving breakfast". Keep in mind this was continental/buffet type breakfast where there really isn't any "serving" going on. So I know the day is going to be a bad one if it starts out with me being scolded by the breakfast woman. I apologize and say sarcastically something like "ohh sorry, let me put this back", then she says, "no its fine". then I say, "then why did you say anything in the first place" and by say, I mean think to myself 24 hours after the fact.

I hop in the rental, a pontiac sunfire, and I start making the trip to the work site. As I pull out of the service road from the hotel there is a big lake that I have to drive through. I could still see the bottom so no big deal. Meanwhile on the radio, the DJs are saying how that it is a bad idea to drive through any of the big puddles and that peoples cars are getting stuck and floating a way. The trip goes smoothly until I am about a mile from my destination, where I come upon a large lake that has taken over the roadway. Keep in mind I have no clue of a secondary path to get to my destination, so if I can't make it through this way, I am hosed.

A couple trucks give it a go and make it through, but I am still skeptical of the sunfires ability to ford a river (just like in oregon trail), but I see a maxima make it through and I am like ahh, what the hell. so I give it a go. i hear the water sloshing around on the body and I am thinking to myself, I am going to start floating away soon or my car is going to stall. sadly, I didn't install the snorkel on the sunfire before I left so I was a little concerned. I slowly made it through and made the boat to the ship with no problems.

After on board, I prepared for my moment to rub elbows with the powerful. Today, the chief of naval research, an admiral, was coming on the ship to look at some of the work we were doing. Nobody else from my company (or my project for that matter) was there so I had to give a brief (maybe on 3 minutes) overview of the work we have been doing. So here I am standing here having one on one face time with probably the most powerful man I have ever met. I give my little spiel and he says some stuff about it is good to see this work being implemented, good job, and pats me on the shoulder. I know it sounds pretty gay, but I thought it was an impressive gesture from the dude.

my fingers are tired and I am only halfway through the story... maybe I will write more later on today or tomorrow.