Things I Don't Get About the Metro

Why does the train roll a few feet and come to a jarring stop, roll a few more feet, come to a jarring stop, rinse and repeat?

It's not like the train operator is surprised by traffic and has to put on the brakes. It's a fucking tunnel. If there's a train ahead of you, don't move. When the track is clear, on we go.

I don't get it. The train comes to a stop in the tunnel because there's already one on the platform ahead. That's fine. Thanks for not ramming the back of the other train, you know? But why on EARTH do we have to do the start-stop routine five times? Open your fucking eyes! If the train is still there, don't go!

I think I speak for all Metro customers when I say we'd rather stay stationary for the extra 20 seconds than start-stop several times.

Also, I feel like this has the potential to become a running feature on the blog. So there you go.

My Latest Song Obsession (*sigh)

Coolest Video EVER

In my life, I will never again see something this awesome. My jaw dropped open and remained that way until I'd seen it three more times.

The Mythbuster guys disintegrate a car by shooting a rocket-propelled steel plate at it. The plate hits it at 650 miles per hour.

Dogs Welcoming Home Soliders

OK, this is seriously the best thing I've ever seen in my life. A page with several videos of soldiers getting home and being greeted by their dogs after MONTHS away overseas. Best. Ever.

And then there's a video at the bottom of solider dads surprising their kids at school. Unbelievable. It's getting a little dusty in here I think.

Here's the link. It's awesome.

Thank you to all the soldiers who have ever, in any way, served our country and made it safe for us to live the lives we choose to live. We get to make that choice because of what you do. So thank you and Happy Veterans Day!

Sooo I did it.

As you probably know, last weekend I ran my first half-marathon. I started training on Aug. 10, and I worked all the way through the race day on Nov. 1.

The training guide said not to set a time goal for your first race, and that finishing should be enough. Yeah, right. I know me. I set a goal, albeit a modest goal -- two and a half hours. It's not really that fast a time -- it's an 11:30/mile pace. But I didn't want to push myself TOO hard. After all, the most I'd ever run in my life up to that point was about six miles, but I only did that once. Other than that, the most I ever did was three miles.

I woke up at 5 a.m., got to the starting line a little after 7 a.m., and I was off. My official time was 2:19:51, almost 10 minutes better than my goal (or 45 seconds faster per mile). It rained the whole time, and it was cold the whole time...haha. Frankly, it's a miracle I did not get sick. Running in shorts and a T-shirt in temperatures that did not rise above the low 50s and RAIN.

But hey, nothing in the world can compare to the surge and the rush when I turned the corner and saw the downhill road to the finish line. I sprinted the home stretch. Well, it felt like sprinting to me. Actually, I don't know what it felt like. I couldn't feel my legs at that point; I was just forcing them forward.

I stopped for a few seconds at two water stations to drink some water, and I tried to drink a cup of sports drink while running, but I think I ended up just pouring it down my shirt. Otherwise, it was a good race. The course was pretty difficult, I think. Lots of hills, so I'm glad my regular training route included a pretty big-ass hill. I felt prepared for it, and I experienced no pain until later in the day.

For the next few days, I seriously considered going up the stairs on all fours and sliding down the stairs on my ass like we did as kids. I made it though. The pain is gone now.

A former co-worker of mine ran her first half-marathon and marathon recently. She started a blog about it. But the theme of her training was "Pain is temporary; pride is forever." I can tell you right now, I'm addicted to the feeling of crossing the finish line. Three months of training, two-plus hours of running -- it's all worth it to feel the rush of crossing the finish line.

I will run another one. Probably not in the next 12 months, but we'll see how I feel when summer rolls around. I can already feel the change in one way: it feels funny taking the week off from running. I'm actually getting an itch to run. I never imagined that would ever happen.

So either this week or maybe next week, I'll get back out and run three or four miles four or five times a week, just to keep in shape. I feel like this is the best shape I've been in in several years, all thanks to the training -- running four days a week, weight training three days a week and I added 400 crunches per day. Let's just keep it going.

I'm also thinking about doing P90X. My roommate has the DVDs and said he'd allow me to borrow them. It would give me something to do as far as working out goes during the cold months when I probably wouldn't enjoy running around outside. If I do that and it works for me, I'll post some before and after pictures. They're pretty ridiculous, so I hope to have some news to report there. We'll see!

For now, I'm just so incredibly proud of myself for actually sticking to the training for three months and running the whole race. Oh yeah! I ran EVERY STEP of the race, which is significant because I could not complete a training run during the previous three months without walking some. But last week, I didn't stop to walk once. I just kept going. I surprised myself.

So yeah. I'm just really proud of myself for doing this. I never thought I'd ever run ONE half-marathon, and now I'm actually excited to run another one. You better believe I hung up the medal I got for finishing. I wore that thing the whole day afterward.

I'm rambling now. IMAGINE MY SURPRISE. I'll just stop now while I'm ahead. I'm just really happy with myself. :-)

LATER!
-BG

WIN

One more Yankee post because I still love everyone and everything:

YANKEES WIN...THEEEEEE YANKEES WIN!!

YES SIR!!

It's been a long nine years. I know it doesn't compare to the suffering of Cubs fans or Indians fans or anything like that, but I'm not a Cubs fan or an Indians fan. Still though, Yankee years are like dog years. Every year feels like it's much longer than a year.

This feels GOOD. After being one out away in 2001, I had "New York, New York" ready to go on my computer. Arizona came back, and I was put on hold. I couldn't play the song, and I blamed myself ever since.

I have literally not listened to that song by choice since then.

That all changed tonight. I got to play it loudly and proudly after the Yanks beat the Phillies in game 6 of the World Series tonight to win title No. 27.

After 2001, and then losing so painfully in 2004, and then missing the playoffs completely last year, wow. This, this just feels really, really good.

GO. YANKS.

Quick Hits

A couple of quick things:

We Met Our Goal!

Bark for Life is Saturday, and our team (Viva La Duck) reached our goal! We set what I thought was a pretty lofty goal of raising $1,000, and through the donations of SO many generous people we surpassed the goal.

Thank you so much to everyone who donated in honor of Erik! Now just come out on Saturday and walk with us! Dogs not necessary! Come walk!

Positive Thinking

I've always been a bit of an optimist (with the exception of sports for the past few years). I generally believe things will work out, and, for the most part, things usually DO work out for me. I've been accused of just having incredibly good luck, and maybe that's true.

But maybe good things happen because I expect them to happen. If you're waiting for bad shit to happen, bad shit will happen. Guaranteed. It's just the way things work.

So I've really tried to focus on thinking positively about as much as I can. Don't get me wrong -- sometimes shit just happens. But for the most part, for the past couple weeks anyway, I've felt better about myself, about life in general. I try not to dwell on negative things because, really, when has that ever helped?

I resolved to think positively when I was laid off back in April, and I had a very relaxing month at home with my dog, living off my severance pay. And then the first job I really applied to came through and has been an unbelievable opportunity and experience.

There really is something to this positive thinking thing. I've specifically been applying it to the Yankees recently (so sue me), and it's been working remarkably. As you may remember, it's been a pretty dark five years in Yankeeland. I spent much of that time just waiting for the next thing to go wrong, and it never missed a beat. Something always went wrong.

This time, I decided that was unproductive. And look where that's got me? I'm going to go home tonight and watch Game 1 of the 2009 World Series!

LET'S GO!

That's all I've got for now.
-BG

He's racing and pacing and plotting the course

So here's the deal:

I ran 10 miles yesterday. My knees feel like they now lack cartilage, ligaments and tendons, and, instead, are filled with jelly. Don't be alarmed. The same thing happened last week after I ran nine miles. Things returned to normal with a day or two, and I was fine.

The half-marathon is now less than a week away. Incredible. I started training in the beginning of August, and I remember struggling to get through that first three-mile run. Well, not really struggling -- I could definitely complete it. But I walked more than I wanted to, and I took longer that I hoped.

And yesterday I finished 10 miles in 115 minutes. I'm slower than a 10-minute mile pace, but I don't feel too badly about that because on the usual three-mile trails I run, at least a mile of it is straight up hill -- steep hills, too -- which means probably close to 3.5 miles of the 10 I ran on Sunday was all up hill.

So I feel good heading into the race on Sunday. It's my first (and doesn't saying "my first" clearly imply the presence of a "second"? I'm not sure I'm ready to think about this yet, *sigh), and I've read it's not a good idea to set up a strict time goal for your first. With that said, I really want to finish in 2.5 hours. Obviously, I'd love to be faster than that, but let's be realistic. Before this training, the most I'd ever run with any regularity was between two and three miles.

I'm excited though. The past few weeks of long runs really showed me I could actually do it, so that was nice.

This week though, rest. I don't care if the training calls for four-mile, three-mile and two-mile runs this week. NOT GONNA DO IT. Wouldn't be prudent at this juncture.

I'd rather my legs and knees be fresh for Sunday, so I will be doing my usual twice- to three-times-a-week strength training and plenty of stretching and icing -- just in case.

Less than a week to go, and I'm pumped! LET'S GO!

The World

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

~Carl Sagan