Skip to content

First Day - NYCM 11/02/08

Last year I entered myself into the lottery to run the NYC Marathon. I thought it would be a good way to get myself back into shape via working towards a very real and inescapable goal: 26.2 miles. Shortly after, someone told me how many people enter that lottery vs. how many people get in, and suddenly I felt some odd kind of pressure to live up to what I had gotten myself into.

Somewhere around week 6 in training I got shin splints. I ran through the pain, and thus made things much worse. By the time I could run again, I was too far behind in the program to catch up. With that excuse safely in my pocket, I dropped to running only a few miles a week, and then almost no running at all over the last 3 months.

The nice thing about the NYC Marathon is that if you drop out with enough advance notice, you get your spot deferred to the following year. Today was day one in the training schedule. 3 miles.

I knew this day was coming, but between work and house guests, I had not prepared. The last time I ran was more than 3 weeks ago and I didn’t go more than 2 miles. This morning, I made 2.15 before my left knee started complaining. It was time for a decision: ignore the pain and jeopardize the schedule (again); or slow down and make the last 3/4 mile at a walking pace. I opted for the latter.

It didn’t feel good to do that, but after a short walk my knee felt better and I jogged out the last half mile. I can still feel hints of pain in my knee, but I imagine it would have been worse had I not slowed. Tomorrow is a rest day, then a 4 mile run the day after that.

I won’t be doing scales regularly, but I’ll benchmark this morning by saying I’m 6′3″ and 236lbs.

Asleep at the Wheel

My friends from New England often make fun of the concept of falling asleep at the wheel. I’ve driven through Connecticut enough to understand why. This is the story I tell to help them better understand how it happens. This really did happen to me on I-35 from Austin to Dallas, which has some of the longest, flattest, straightest stretches of road I’ve ever seen.

You have to know you’ve already exhausted every trick you can remember for staying awake. You’ve played the radio as loud as you can, you’ve taken off your shoes, you’ve rolled all the windows down.. You’ve pulled over at two rest stops; spent time slapping yourself in the face and stomping your feet around. Nothing is working. Jiminey Cricket is screaming at you to stop the car. You, the big man, brush him aside as you press on to Yeknod Isle.

So you set onto the road, unaware of how debilitated your decision making process is. You pass a sign that says 12 miles to the 35 East/West split, which is as good as home (it is, in fact, not). You turn off the radio because you can’t hear your own voice as you talk to yourself. You start doing the numbers in your head, about 70 miles at 70 mph means another hour on the road.

You push the car up to 90 mph figuring that you can cut about 12 minutes off your time. If you get pulled over, you’ll explain to Smokey that you were speeding in order to decrease the time you would be on the road, and thus less time that you’re a danger to others. He might even give you a police escort once he hears that.

Now you’ve come to it. You’re doing 90 in a straight line, with no hills or valleys, no lights on the road except those from your own car. You blink your eyes once, and they stay closed just slightly longer than you wanted. A little shock comes over you: partially because you had your eyes closed, partially because having them closed really, really felt good.

Rationalizing that the shock keeps you awake, and the comfort got you a little farther, you are now completely screwed. Orpheus and his lyre could not keep you from where you’re going next. Your mind wanders. Someone told me Isaac Newton would fall asleep on his desk while holding a steel ball - when the ball hit the ground he would wake up. He theorized that was all the sleep a body needed.

On this straight unending road, you count to 5 out loud and figure how far you’ve gone. You squint your eyes, seeing that the road doesn’t turn at all in that same counted distance ahead. Then you do it: you hold your hands still, close your eyes, and start counting.

One
Two
Three..

Four
Five

You find yourself sitting in a field on a cool spring day. The wheat is young and it brushes against your shoulders with the breeze. The sun is setting in an eruption of reds and oranges and pinks. It’s a breathtaking view. You look at the bear sitting next to you. He looks at you.

“What’s going on?”, you pleasantly offer.

“Oh nothing, hanging out”, he says just as cordially, “what are you doing?”

“I’m heading home to see my fam..”

“Oh F@#!” you scream, popping open your eyes just in time to keep the car drifting into the median.

I rarely finish this story because it’s at this point others want to comment on their experiences with driving, or with bears. The real end of the story fails in terms of setting a good example. I was so scared at the sight of nearly ditching that I started to hyperventilate. The resulting adrenaline got me the rest of the way home, and I regretted what I had done starting the very next morning.

Next time, as N and I now say, pull over and watch the sunset with the bears.

Quiet Time

I’ve been too tired, too busy, too frustrated, or too overwhelmed with anxiety to think about writing here recently. I hate that I feel that way.

When I read authors that keep journals I always get a sense of pride in the things they do. I note that a major personal problem right now is that I take very little pride in most of the things I do these days.

Quite the Monday

I’ve been drowning in a work project lately. It involves writing a very long, very detailed document, and I can never seem to get ahead. Documentation is the antithesis of coding. Where coding is intended to take a very large set of instructions and minimize them into a clean, minimal file. Documentation is to take a simple thing and explode it into the most grandiose and spoon-fed details possible.

While I was doing all of this, my little sister had gastric bypass surgery, which means she will also have to quit smoking, and of course she and her husband filed for divorce two weeks ago. I’m suddenly stricken with the idea that writing documentation isn’t so bad.

That Guy

The NYC Marathon is in November. I have a training spec for 18 weeks that starts on July 13th. In the mean time, I’d like to spend the next 6 weeks getting rid of some weight and working back up to being able to run 4 miles without a problem. Don’t think this is some macho-downplaying, this is going to be difficult.

Yesterday I returned to the gym for the first time in 3 months (not counting the completely useless appearance at the hotel gym in Cancun a few weeks back). I found a nice treadmill and got just over the 2 mile mark before my knees started to protest. Not wanting to push the first day, I moved over to the stationary bike.

The bikes in my gym are positioned so that you get to see yourself in a mirror. This is a very funny torture, I think. Not only am I pedaling to nowhere, but I also get to occasionally look up and see my pudgy, pale, hairy mug; sweating profusely, and looking as if I might have aneurism at any moment. That’s right, I’m the ugly guy at the gym.. “That guy”.

So my inspiration now is to not be, “That guy”. I think most of us in so many facets of our lives should strive to not be, “that guy”. “That guy”, was in the locker room yesterday, standing around naked and doing nothing. “That guy”, was really loud and obnoxious in the coffee line in front of me this morning. When I got on the subway, “That guy” was standing in the door and wouldn’t move to let people on.

“That guy” - don’t be him.

A long day of pixelating

I spent almost all of the day continuing work on a Styleguide for one of our clients. I harken back to ‘00 when I started as a lowly HTML editor and was invited into design reviews. Everyone around me talked about emphasis and balance and negative space, while I kept quiet and looked at it thinking only of, “look at all those curves.. how the hell am I supposed to grid out those curves?” Now I find myself on the other end, writing a document explaining how to handle all the elements, and having a lot of pity for whomever has to code this thing. Of course, I’m also hoping I’m not that person.

In the middle of the day, my little sister called me to tell me that she’s getting a divorce. She wanted my advice not just because I’m her big brother, but because our dad divorced my mom when I was my nephews age. The situation has forced her to take the dog to a rescue agency, and she’s scheduled to have surgery next Monday. It’s not a great time there. I called every other member of my family to be sure there weren’t any other crisis’ that I didn’t know about.

Going back to writing the guide, somewhere around hour 11 I started to get a little off. I have a little bit of code that I write in a WYSIWYG editor that helps check fonts in Photoshop compared to CSS. I never save it, I just write it out pretty quickly any time I’m doing this sort of work. I was stricken with how much space in bytes that code takes up on my hard drive, vs. how much space it takes up in my head. I really, really hope my head has a more efficient storage system.

This was a bit random wasn’t it? It’s a good representation of the day.

Anecdotal: Chucky Cheez

Someone next to me (talking on the phone) described Dave & Busters as, “Chucky Cheez for adults”, which made me suddenly remember:

When I was 8 I had a friend who got a Chucky Cheez birthday party. Chucky came out to see us all (holy crap!), shaking hands and giving out hugs. He walked by me, and I got no handshake or hug. I grabbed his tail to get him to come back, and it promptly came loose from his body. Chucky turned, grabbing his now severed tail, and we engaged in a horrifying tug-o-war while I stood in complete shock. Chucky was much bigger, and won in short order, then fleeing to a door that I assume led to the green room for the Country Bear Jamboree. My friends then banded together and told me that I was to blame for making Chucky run away.

I hate mascots.

Sunset Lost

Today was one of two days of the year when the sun sets directly in line with the Streets in Manhattan. I walked up to Greenpoint Ave at the river to find a place to take shots to no avail. Perhaps not surprisingly, all the docks and riverside views are blocked with huge gates and much barbed wire.

After some very fast walking, I found a spot a few blocks north where I could see unobstructed, but the view wasn’t in line with the streets. I shot the sunset anyway while some local gents smoked and fished off the barricade at the end of the street. I haven’t looked at the shots, but I know I could do better. Next time I should scout the position further ahead of time.

I should also tell JB that he has about 2 months to experiment shooting time lapse while the sun sets north of 14th street.

Noelle is making Brats and Kraut for dinner, I’m not sitting here much longer.

This space left blank (for more than a year)

I’ve been reading Michael Palin’s Diaries from ‘69-’79. There is something inspirational about reading the results of someone’s efforts to write everyday (albeit abridged), but even more so when you read the same from someone who you know was at the same time writing comedy that would define the pop references for multiple generations of awkward adolescent males.

So by not having had anything good to say in more than a year, I feel like an epic wuss. This is my post to remind myself to take a little time to write every day, even if I do like to shoehorn 4 thoughts into a single sentence.

Kobe Club - NY

Kobe Club NY
(212) 644-5623
68 W 58th St,
New York, NY 10019+2505

The three things you need to know: Price - This is a big bill restaurant, and you need to be ready to drop a few notes on the meal you’re about to have. Getting In - The front door is massive and heavy, put some shoulder into it man! Dress - despite the cost, this isn’t formal, nor business, nay, not even business-friday.

When we walked in, I thought it was a club. The dark atmosphere and shafted lighting effectively give you a sense of exclusive anonymity. Our hostess greeted us as though we were old friends that had arrived for the party and led us down the crowded, seedy front bar and back into the main dining room. I was thankful that we walked past the area where 1000 swords hung from the ceiling, I was thankful that we passed the small dining room with the massive video display of a roaring fire. Our old friend led us instead to the rear of the restaurant that was something akin to the grotto from the playboy mansion, sans water. (Continued)