Andy Gapin

Since I’m not able to run this evening, I got up early to do six miles before work. I contemplated doing 8, but I wasn’t sure about the amount of time I had so I played it safe and stopped at 6.

Most of the run this morning was in the dark before the sun came up, but I made sure to not turn on any lights while getting dressed so my night vision was in full effect.

Early morning runs before work have been hit or miss for me in the past. It’s been a while since I’ve done them, but it looks like I’m going to have to start making this a regular thing again. A lot of times, I’m just not awake enough yet and don’t have anything in my stomach to fuel me. With only enough time to hop out of bed 10-15 minutes before actually running, there’s not much I can do to help that.

With that said, I was pretty happy to keep a good pace this morning. It seems like I’m finally starting to get back to running regularly around a 7:30 min/mile. I hope I can keep the pace relatively the same and just start upping the miles. We’ll see.

Pace: 7:36
Overall time: 45:45
Vibram Five Finger Bikila total mileage: 217.64

I wanted to do 10 miles tonight, but unfortunately, I ran out of light and by the end of the 8th mile, I was already putting each step down on faith that the ground was where I thought it was with nothing in the way. But to be honest, I was also running low on energy. I could have pushed out another two miles, but I was tired. Considering, I kept a nice pace of 7:28 min/mile, did a half hour on a stationary bike yesterday, and did 15.24 miles two days ago, I don’t think I’m in a position to be too upset.

Pace: 7:28
Overall time: 59:55
Vibram Five Finger Bikila total mileage: 211.62

Today was the long run of the week. I was scheduled for 19 miles, but I haven’t had a long run in three weeks because of the wedding and the honeymoon. And the long runs that I had before that stuff all fell short of where they should have been. This is actually the first time I broke 15 miles. I really wanted to go the whole distance and, up until about 14.75, I thought I could pull it off. I’m not too upset about not doing it though considering the time off, but it does mean that I’ll probably lose at least one 20 mile run from training. It was also really humid out and even though I took advantage of park water fountains, the weather definitely took an effect on me.

The tow path that we wanted to run on looked like it was still closed (though we later saw evidence that maybe it isn’t) so we ended up running around a park near the tow path and heading up into our old town for a lap around there and down into the park we used to run in before we moved. It turned out that there was a street fair going on in our old town so that sort of got in the way a bit.

My pace was definitely a bit slower than I would have preferred. I wanted to be closer to 8 minutes flat. I’m hoping that this weekend I can go somewhere between 18-20 miles at a little bit of a faster pace. I know that’s asking a lot, but I’ve got goals to reach.

I haven’t been mentioning the ankles too much recently because they haven’t been much of a problem. They’re not 100% pain-free, but they’re close. Even after this run, they didn’t really bother me. This is honestly the best they’ve been since I got tendinitis over a year ago.

Pace: 8:30
Overall time: 2:09:24
Vibram Five Finger Bikila total mileage: 203.60

I wanted to do another 9 miles today, but the wife wanted me to help her grill dinner and I’m not one to turn down a chance to man the grill. So I went for a shorter run of 6 miles instead.

I really felt last night’s run in my legs though. They felt tired and started to fatigue quickly. It was a good kind of feeling though, the kind where you know it’s from giving them a good workout. Because of this, I didn’t try to push my pace too hard though.

Pace: 7:44
Overall time: 46:29
Vibram Five Finger Bikila total mileage: 188.36

I thought I was flying for today’s 9 miles, but my pace was a little slower than my 8 miles from the other day. Otherwise, the run felt pretty good. My legs seemed to feel the workout a bit, but in a good way.

Pace: 7:43
Overall time: 1:09:39
Vibram Five Finger Bikila total mileage: 182.35

Today’s 8 miles was even faster than the 8 I did the day before my wedding. Not bad. The run felt good too. I wasn’t pushing super hard, but I did feel like I was working myself a bit.

Now that the wedding and honeymoon are over, it’s time to really kick the marathon training into gear. I plan to start running 5 days a week and hopefully hitting the bike on a 6th day. We’ll see about that last part.

Pace: 7:30
Overall time: 1:00:04
Vibram Five Finger Bikila total mileage: 173.33

Yep, it’s true. I’m a husband, I’ve been for a week now. And it’s the first time in my life. For frequent readers of this blog, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise, many of the posts here over the last year and a half have made mention of my fiancée…now my beautiful wife.

Being married isn’t usually one of those things that just come out of nowhere. The average engagement is something like 18 months, so there’s plenty of time to think and reflect about your upcoming life as a married person. Still, when it happens, it’s a bit of a whirlwind and, sometimes, it’s still hard to believe. It’s hard to believe that the day has finally come and gone. It’s hard to believe that we made this happen. It’s hard to believe how lucky I am to have found someone as amazing as my wife. And it’s hard to get used to calling her my wife, but it feels awesome.

Many who know me have heard me say this on numerous occasions, but I finally understand why people stress and fight so much over wedding planning. I’ve drafted multiple blog posts about this topic before, but decided to hold off on posting each of them.

It seems like it’d be easy to plan a wedding if you’ve got a year and a half to do it, right? Pick a date, pick a venue, book a photographer and DJ, rent a tux, pick out a dress, pick out some wedding bands and flowers.

Done.

Not quite. These are really only a handful of the things that need to be done and each one is surprisingly way more complicated than their existence as items in a list would suggest. Once we broke things out, the complete checklist of things for us to do was probably close to 200 items long. Maybe more. I don’t even know.

Picking a date is easy, for the most part, but you need to be a little flexible, especially if you’re doing a short engagement or choosing what may be a very popular date. We chose September 10, 2011…or 9/10/11. A rather popular date that would have been even more popular (not quite 7/7/7 popular) had it not been for the fact that it was the night before the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The first place that we looked at and really liked was actually booked already for this date. This was the third venue that we had looked at overall and we had put a hold on the first by this point. This venue being booked turned out to be a pretty big blessing for us and changed what we were looking for a bit. When we finally found the venue we chose, I knew it right away, even if my wife was a little hesitant because of the cost. I convinced her that we should at least try to talk them down a bit and we were surprisingly successful. I think this was our first win over the course of planning, but it set the tone for us for the everything else.

Now, I’m not going to go into detail about each and every step of the planning, but I will just take another minute here to drive home the fact that some of the simple things aren’t that simple. Choosing a photographer means meeting with multiple people to find the one that’s right for you, after you’ve already put some thought into what you want from the photos and what kind of style you’re looking for. Sometimes, the vendor you’re schedule to meet with doesn’t even show up. That happened to us once.

After you’ve booked a photographer, there will come a point where you need to come up with a list of all the shots you want to make sure happen. This generally means spending some time online looking at photos from other weddings to make sure that you don’t miss anything. Time consuming if you’re going to be thorough.

Every step of the way is similar to that, if not worse. Even things like save the dates, invites, dresses, and getting a hold of person at the hotel where everyone is staying can turn out to be mind-numbingly complicated. Sometimes you find yourself with a back up of things that you can’t do because they’re all waiting on you and your wife to do something that should be stupidly simple like finalizing the exact colors you want. We spent weeks trying to pick out the proper shade of green which held up flowers, tuxes, bridesmaids dresses, favors, invitations, and probably a dozen other things that I’m forgetting.

So I’ll stop there and we can agree that the work that needs to be done is absolutely insane and what I’ve told you so far still makes it seem far easier and simpler than it really is. For us, tack on the fact that we both work full-time, my wife was also taking classes, and we’ve both been training for various half marathons and a marathon. Oh yeah, we also moved. Time was at a premium.

Did I mention that in the midst of all of this, you also need to plan a vacation? Right. Don’t forget the honeymoon. This became the bane of my existence for months. I had my heart set on the Maldives. I couldn’t let it go, but I also couldn’t figure out how we were going to afford it. I tried and tried and couldn’t make it happen.

Eventually, I gave up on it and we chose a resort in Mexico, Banyan Tree Mayakoba. It is at this resort that I am relaxing right now and typing this (note: I typed this a few days before posting it) and it is absolutely amazing in every way, especially the food. It was another huge win for us, but it was also something that nearly caused dozens of fights, as I, the man, was being a huge pain in the ass about where we went. It had to be perfect. And it has been. But it’s a good thing we’re not the kind of couple that fights easily…or ever. If we were, it would have happened, a lot.

The point is, I now understand where all the fights people have while planning a wedding come from. There are so many things to fight over. But maybe that’s also kind of the point? Maybe the wedding planning is supposed to prepare a couple for their future life together and all of the tough things they’ll have to work through. If so, we’re golden.

I mentioned money in terms of the honeymoon, but let me not gloss over the monetary aspect of the wedding itself. These things are expensive. Insanely expensive. We set our budget a bit below what we researched to be the average cost of a wedding in New Jersey (which is higher than the national average). However, in addition to that, we set two additional stipulations on that. First, we could not touch the existing savings that either of us had at that time. Second, we could not end up even a penny in debt because of the wedding. So the entire wedding had to be paid for with money that we saved while engaged. This meant living like poor people for a year and a half, but we did it.

This was another area that we got a huge win in. Not only did we come in $60 under budget overall, but we got a lot more help from my wife’s family than we had expected, got more in gifts than expected, and saw the Apple stock that we own perform beyond our expectations. I’m still having trouble believing it, but we’ve actually increased our house buying fund significantly from just our initial savings that we said we wouldn’t touch. Even without any of those unexpected things, we kicked ass at saving and still would have come out with a little more in our savings than we had when we started.

I don’t mean to brag and I know I may be getting dangerously close to being tacky about it, but I’m still pretty excited by this and very proud of ourselves.

Overall, we were unimaginably lucky through everything. Our wedding day went off flawlessly. We had braced ourselves for something to go wrong, something has to go wrong with that much going on. Nothing did. The only thing that was even close to going wrong was that the limo was ten minutes late picking us up and we didn’t get to take all of the photos outside that we planned on. Not a big deal though, we still took a lot. There was one other thing that didn’t go according to plan, but it actually turned out for the better.

The weather forecast was calling for rain all week leading up to our wedding day. It turned out to be a beautiful day. Not a single drop.

For the last week, we’ve been trying to figure out how everything went so well and how the day was absolutely perfect. We can’t figure it out.

And it wasn’t just perfect, it was the best day of my life. The feelings I had as I watched my wife walk down the aisle toward me were unlike anything else I’ve ever felt. Even though we had already seen each other because we did photos beforehand, I wasn’t prepared for it. I couldn’t tell if my heart was going to explode out of my chest, I was going to puke, pee my pants, or cry uncontrollably. It was an amazing feeling.

With all of that said, I’m still a bit on Cloud 9 about everything.

Photos of both the honeymoon and our wedding day will come soon. Probably.

We had planned a couple runs during our honeymoon, but it looks like this will be the only one. The weather here in Mexico is way too hot for running outside so it was off to the fitness center at the resort today. I was going to run 6, but apparently, I didn’t tell my wife that and she stopped at 4.

Pace: -
Overall time: -
Vibram Five Finger Bikila total mileage: 165.32

Pace: 9:05
Overall time: 2:14:25
Vibram Five Finger Bikila total mileage: 151.80

Given my obsession with Zooey Deschanel, checking out Our Idiot Brother was obviously a requirement for me, even if it took an extra week. But Zooey aside, the cast for the movie is pretty stacked. And for the most part, that’s what the movie became to me, a showcase of actors and actresses that I enjoy.

Our Idiot Brother isn’t a strong movie in any real sense, but Paul Rudd makes it work in the way that he pulls most things off. The story is just average and doesn’t really progress along too much. It feels as though it’s trying to tell a little too much at once. While most of the film tries to focus on the relationship between Paul Rudd’s character and his three sisters, a lot of time is still spent developing the individual lives of all four characters before everything can really culminate in Rudd ruining each of his sister’s lives–or rather exposing how they’ve ruined their own lives. Because of the three sisters, each of with coming with a male (female in Zooey’s case) counterpart, there was a lot of Rudd to spread around. Three may work well in theory, but I felt as though there were too many relationships to build.

Like I said, the movie itself is mostly average, but I walked away from Our Idiot Brother with a few other thoughts:

• Zooey Deschanel and Rashida Jones as a lesbian couple is almost too much to handle.
• I’ve said it a thousand times before, but Steve Coogan needs to be in a million more things. Everything, really.
• I’m really glad Adam Scott is on Parks and Recreation now and I’d also like to see him in a million more things.
• Elizabeth Banks looks even better with as a brunette than she does as a blonde.

Despite having a thousand relationships to build out, if you need a few laughs and are interested in any of the things I’ve just mentioned, Our Idiot Brother could be well worth the cost of an AM cinema ticket on a rainy weekend morning.

Rating: B-