Andy Gapin

Monday was the annual running of the Tour of Somerville Cycling Series, an event that is referred to as the “Kentucky Derby of Cycling.” Though I used to be an avid mountain biker, I’ve never really followed cycling in any manner and had actually never even heard of the Tour of Somerville until earlier Monday morning. With no real plans for the day, I grabbed my camera and took a ride over to downtown Somerville to check out the action.

The Tour of Somerville is actually a series of races throughout most of the day. We got there to see part of the Women’s Kugler Open and the main race, the Kugler-Anderson Memorial. The races are varying distances, but are all made of of laps around the town which is great for spectators.

I wasn’t planning on taking many photos so I didn’t set up in a great spot light wise. The men’s race was around 4pm, so the sun was strong, but the riders were mostly coming up in the shade while there was strong light for everything in the background. Metering was a bitch and I think I failed mostly. I also didn’t have my 70-200mm lens with me which was another fail. That lens would have been perfect, but since it was a spur of the moment kind of thing, I didn’t really plan ahead. I probably could have moved to a better spot, but considering the heat, I was considering standing in the shade to be more important than good photos. Hah!

Here are my favorite ones.

Finally, after over two months of not being able to run, I’m getting ready to start again. My last run was the Disney World Half Marathon in early January, which while being a huge success, I was in a bit of pain during due to tendinitis in my ankle. Since that run, I’ve been to the orthopedist twice, rested a lot, and been visiting a physical therapist. Sadly, I’m not pain-free yet. Instead, I actually have pain in places that I didn’t have pain in before I stopped running. I don’t know what happened or what to make of being in arguably worse shape than I was before I stopped running, but I do know that I ran for four months with the pain in my ankle and it didn’t get better or worse during that period. Based on that and the fact that I’m no better than I was before I stopped running, I’m just going to start training for the Rutgers Unite half marathon next month. Screw it, right?

Some may say that this isn’t a smart idea, and it may not be, but I’m hating this no running thing. While I’ve enjoyed the extra free time, I do miss running a lot. I feel like something’s missing and when I see other people running outside, I get jealous. And let’s not forget the fact that I am signed up for next month’s race already, so I’d really like to run it rather than have that go to waste (yes, I realize that injury could be much, much more costly than a single race).

So the plan is to start running again this weekend with a very short run and build up quickly. I’ll train for a month, run the race, and then take off time again for my ankle if it’s still hurting. At that time, I won’t have any races I’m signed up for, except for maybe the Philly Marathon in the Fall. Before my ankle decided to start being stubborn about healing, I was hoping to run my first marathon in mid-May, but clearly barring some miracle, that’s just not going to happen, so November it is!

While training for the Disney half, I had been targeting to break under an hour and a half for this race (1:35 was my target for Disney and I beat that by two minutes), but I’ve come to terms with that not being realistic now. With only a month’s training after two months off and with what may be slightly more pain, I’ve accepted that this race will be slower instead of faster. My only goal is to not be slower than my previous time for this race, 1:47:11. That should be doable, but we’ll have to see how I feel throughout all of this. I am going to be very conscious of how things feel and I’ve promised myself that if things don’t feel right, I’d stop and not make things worse.

As usual, you can follow my very uninteresting running log, but that doesn’t show up on the main page of my site.

So, uh yeah, wish me luck?

If you read this blog or know me personally, you know that I don’t talk about sports much. Well, professional sports anyway. I do talk about running, snowboarding, and occasionally mountain biking. The reason I don’t talk about professional sports is because I rarely care about them. I used be a huge football, hockey, and baseball fan when I was a kid, but that kind of went away around age 16. Since then, I haven’t cared too much. I don’t really follow anything, but if and when it does come up, I’m still a Philly fan. That will probably never change.

All that being said, every now and again, I get sucked in around the end of the season. I did for the Eagles a few years ago and now I am for the Phillies this year. Yeah yeah, I know, I’m just following for the playoffs and not the regular season or through the bad times. Whatever, call me a fair-weather fan if you want, but I’m not getting sucked in just because they’re doing well. The Phillies have been great for a few years now, but this is the first that I got sucked in with them in a much longer period of time. I don’t know what does it, but every now and again, it just happens.

Now, what I want to bitch about is Cablevision and Fox/News Corp. News Corp wants more money from Cablevision and Cablevision doesn’t want to pay it. So what happens? They pull Fox from Cablevision. Awesome. They also pull their Hulu channels for Cablevision customers. Thanks, dudes.

What does this have to do with baseball and the Phillies? Well, Fox is the channel broadcasting the games. So, I can’t watch them. I watched game one of the NLCS at my fiancée’s parents’ house since we were there anyway and, last night, I had to follow mlb.com’s play-by-play online. Their play-by-play Flash application on their site is pretty decent, but you’re not actually watching the game which sucks. I tried listening online to the radio coverage from Philly, but they didn’t broadcast the game on their stream. And mlb.com charges to watch/listen online. Awesome.

Figures, one of the rare times that I actually care about sports and I can’t even watch. It’s not even that big of a deal, I’ll survive. What is ridiculous though is that News Corp and Cablevision have no problem screwing their customers. We are the ones that pay Cablevision directly, without us, they don’t make any money. Letting this happen is a slap in the face. News Corp makes most of their money from advertising, but without people watching, no one is going to pay to advertise. Now, Cablevision’s 3 million or whatever subscribers barely makes a dent for Fox so they’re advertising revenues will be 100% unaffected, but that’s not the point, it’s another slap in our faces.

While Fox and Cablevision are duking it out, it’s the rest of us that get screwed. In the end, they’ll reach some agreement and that’ll be that, they’ll both be fine, but those of us that just want to watch the TV we’re paying for are the ones losing out and there isn’t really anything we can do about it. It’s just greed.

So thanks, guys. You both suck and you’re both at fault. Quit blaming each other and quit screwing the innocent customers.

I just want to watch some baseball for the next two weeks while I still actually care about it.

I did it! After months of training, today was the big day. I spent the last week doing a taper and rested up yesterday, doing little more than a nice walk through my town to stretch out my legs. My fiancée and I set out our clothes and devised our game plan for the morning so all we had to do was wake up, get dressed, and head on over to the race.

It was pretty cold this morning, in the 40s, and the weather forecast wasn’t predicting it to get all that much warmer doing the hours of the race. This threw me off a bit, I generally prefer to run in shorts and a t-shirt, but it was seeming like that was going to be a bit under-dressed for the start of the race. I made a last minute decision to throw on some spandex under my shorts. I also grabbed a long sleeve t-shirt to throw on over top. Unfortunately, I don’t have many long sleeve t-shirts so it was hard to find one that I was okay with potentially ditching on the side of the road. After that, I ate a small breakfast, half a peanut butter sandwich and a bowl of fruit. It was only two hours until race time so I didn’t want to eat too much, but I knew I needed enough to sustain me throughout the race.

When we left the house to head over to the race, it was definitely cold out. Not the kind of cold that’s unbearable on a normal day this time of year, but the kind of cold that I hate to run in. We got over to where the race started about an hour beforehand and tried to walk around as much as possible and hydrate ourselves as best we could without the potential of having to pee mid-race. Through all of this walking around, I started to get more and more nervous about the weather. It was beautifully sunny, but I was worried that my hands were going to freeze while running since I didn’t have any gloves to wear. There wasn’t much that I could do about it at this point, I was going to have to run with what I had so I went to the bathroom one last time and my fiancée and I wished each other luck. Then we headed on over to our respective starting groups, which we later found out were too slow for us.

While standing behind the pacer, waiting for the race to start, I started to warm up a ton, probably a combination of the sun coming up more and standing around very close to a large group of people. I started to get more comfortable with the temperature as I warmed up my legs by jumping up and down in place a bit. I realized that I had been worrying too much about the coldness and that the long sleeve shirt was a huge mistake. I didn’t want to have to ditch it, so I decided to tie it around my waist like a total goober. I thought I had my mind all set and was ready to go, but then at this very moment, my mouth went completely dry. I had complete and utter cotton-mouth and there was nothing I could do about it at this point. I was stuck and it never got better. I ran the entire race like this.

Finally, it was time for the race to start and much to my surprise, it started quickly. It did not take long at all to actually get up to the starting point, less than 50 seconds, much less than many of the 5ks that I’ve done. Unfortunately, there were a ton of people though and just like any other race I’ve run, I had to carefully make my way up through the pack and find and open spot at a comfortable speed. I almost immediately regretted wearing the spandex under my shorts, I couldn’t believe how quickly that happened, it was less than a half of a mile. But unlike the shirt, I was stuck with this.

Through the first couple of miles, I was feeling very good. I felt comfortable with the pace I had chosen and felt like I could keep it for a long time. Unfortunately, this pace was much faster than the group I started with so I had to do a lot of weaving to get up to where I needed to be. I was surprised to see that within the first 2-3 miles, there were already a bunch of people running off the side to go to the bathroom. How did these people have to pee so quickly? Poor planning.

Up through the first five miles, I was feeling amazingly great. I got settled into the run–this generally seems to take me at least three miles for most of my longer runs–and was keeping a pace much, much faster than I had trained with. I managed my pace based on my breathing and as long as I was able to breathe comfortably, I kept upping it until just under the point where my breathing would have started to get heavy. This was a tactic I’d never used before today, but it worked great.

My goal for the day was to finish in under two hours, which up until race day seemed like it would be a challenge for me. I really didn’t know what to expect from my body. I think I was more worried about sustaining this pace for two hours rather than worrying about the overall distance. So here I was at the fifth mile keeping an amazing pace, completely blowing away what I was even hoping to do, and feeling very great with it.

Some may call this cheating, but I like to run with my iPhone, both for music and for the IMapMyFitness app which uses the GPS to track your time, speed, and course. It’s a great app and I’ve been using it for almost as long as I’ve been running. It’s really nice to receive the audio updates of what your time, distance, and pace are, but if you’re not careful, it can kind of kill your run too. You have to be very careful not to focus on that and think too much about it. This is something that I often do when running, but it also helps me to be able to push myself a little more than I otherwise would. But for today, I would say it ended up helping me quite a bit. I found that I was barely paying attention to my music, which is rare for when I run. Today, I was much more focused on the running.

Anyway, back to mile five, IMapMyFitness was telling me that my pace was way ahead of where I wanted to be, but again, I felt good about it, so I decided to change my goal. I bumped up my time quite a bit and set aim to keep this pace throughout the race. I knew that later in the race, it would be difficult, but it felt doable to me. The only problem was that less than a mile after deciding this is when my knee started to hurt. The left one, the one that’s always been a problem for me. It was tolerable, but I didn’t know how much worse it would get. I ran through it and said to myself “screw it, this is the day you’ve been training for, you’re not going to do any new damage to your knee today, deal with it.” So deal with it, I did. Luckily, the pain was short-lived and ol’ Lefty fell in line within less than a mile.

So I was back to feeling good again as the course continued onto the first part where it switched back on itself. This was particularly annoying because there was a complete 180° turn and not a lot of room to do it. I tried to take the turn as wide as possible, but it was still tough. Running back up along the stretch I just came from, I kept an eye out for the fiancée and when I finally saw her, I got a huge bump of optimism as I could see that she was clearly killing it. She was just slightly behind the nine minute mile pacer that I was originally lined up behind and I could see it on her face that she was feeling good too. This powered me through quite a bit up to mile eight. But this is when I really started to feel fatigued. It came on quickly too, but I was feeling it now. I knew I could keep it going for a while still, but I was starting to worry about the entirety of the last five miles.

As I approached mile nine, things started to feel even worse. I was starting to struggle to keep my speed now and then, mid-update, my IMapMyFitness crashed and took out my music too. I actually thought my battery had died since the GPS is a huge drain, but it felt a little quick for that. I had run with it much longer than this a few times and it still didn’t come close to dying. I didn’t worry about it though, I didn’t need to know my pace anymore, at this point, I had to just continue to give it all I had. I was feeling it though and for the first time all race, as I came up to the aid station, I decided to grab a Gatorade instead of water. It didn’t really do too much to help me and my body was really telling me that it wanted to stop, but I resisted the urge to slow down and knew the rest of the race was going to be tough.

The course doubled back on itself again with another 180° turn which was just as annoying as the first, but this time, I knew that the section that I had to run back up was much longer than last time. I started to slow down just a bit, I was struggling even more now than I was before, but I was still powering through as best I could. I saw the fiancée coming up again so I ran closer to the middle and put my hand up for a high-five. She was looking good, not much pain in her face. We high-fived and kept going. I was hoping that would give me a bit of a mental boost, but it didn’t. I was tired as hell and as I ran by the ten mile marker, I thought to myself “seriously, I have to do a whole 5k still?” That realization didn’t help at all, but I tried my best to stay positive and remind myself that I didn’t have that much left. At this point, I was giving it almost everything I had to keep on pace with the other runners around me. A couple started to pass me, but I wanted to keep going as fast as I could without completely killing the energy I had left to make it to the finish line.

I made it up to the eleventh mile marker and started to push as much as I could, but this was really getting to be a serious struggle. I mean, it had been a struggle for a while, but my legs were not only fatiguing heavily, but they were starting to hurt too. From my thighs to my calves to my feet, it all hurt and my knees weren’t happy either. At the next aid station, I actually had to slow down to a walk for about ten seconds to drink a cup of water. I knew I needed to get the water in me instead of all over my face this time. I didn’t want to slow down, but it had to be done. My body was saying “Yeah! Yeah! Stop!” There was no way I was giving in though, I was too close. I tried to pick it up a little here, but my body wasn’t cooperating, every time I pushed faster, my body pushed back and said to me “hey, if you’re going to do that, I’m going to make sure you puke all over the place, don’t be ass. Got it?” I listened to it here, but I made a deal with myself that I was going to push as hard as I could once I hit the final stretch.

Then, my music came back on out of nowhere. I don’t know what happened, but IMapMyFitness finished the audio update it had started three miles earlier and my music started playing again. It was weird and almost threw me off a bit, but it was kind of nice to hear what the current time was at this point.

When the final stretch came, there was about half a mile left. I told myself that it was time to give it every last bit of energy I had and tried to do just that. I started to push hard, but my body wasn’t having it. I had to slow it back down or I was definitely going to throw up. This was quite upsetting, but I really didn’t want to throw up, so I kept it at just under the breaking point for as long as I could. As I approached the finish, I saw the fiancée’s parents cheering and as much as I wanted this to help, it didn’t do much. I was running a little faster now, but not a whole lot.

The course took a final turn for the last tenth of a mile. Why the course was designed to have a turn like that at the end, I have no idea, but it was there. I came down the final bit and started giving it more. If I puked across the finish line, I didn’t care anymore. I saw the clock and knew that I had done better than what I had set my goal to at mile five, but I still wanted to shave off every last second I could. A couple hundred feet from the finish line, I saw a girl out of the corner of my eye coming up about to pass me. I don’t know why I cared, but with only a couple hundred feet left, I wasn’t letting anyone pass me just before I finished. I broke out into a full on sprint. I don’t know where that energy came from, but it lasted just long enough to get me across the finish line.

My final time was great. So much better than I was originally hoping for. My official chip time was 1:47:11. At 8:11/mile, that’s a full minute per mile faster than I needed for my original goal. Overall, I finished #440 out of 2433 total runners and #334 of out of 1078 men. I couldn’t be any happier with my time, I blew away my goal and I know that there wasn’t anything I could have done today to shave even a couple of seconds off. My fiancée finished at 2:02:15 which also put her a full minute per mile ahead of where she wanted to be. But unlike me, she didn’t struggle as much at the end. Even as I watched (and videoed from my iPhone) her come down the last few hundred feet and across the finish line, she looked composed and like she could have just kept on going. I was impressed.

Afterward, I was definitely in pain. My legs were sore all over, my knees and feet hurt, it wasn’t a great feeling. We walked around a lot for a while before heading home to help keep from tightening up, but it was difficult. After a shower, I started to feel much better and was gaining some energy back, but then we went to Red Robin and devoured a ton of food. When we got home, I died on the bed for a couple of hours and when I woke up, my knees were sore as hell. Some of my leg muscles are sore too, but not like they were before. It’s mostly my knees. I’m seriously walking like an old man right now.

All in all, I think the training that we did helped a lot…at least for the first nine miles. Though, it didn’t do anything at all to prepare me for those last four miles. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that almost all of my training was at a pace around ten minutes per mile instead of what I ended up running today. My goal through that was to teach myself to be able to keep a slower pace for a longer period of time, which is something that I tend to struggle with. My body feels more comfortable at a bit of a faster pace, but it’s not a sustainable pace for thirteen miles.

So would I do it again? Probably, but it’s going to be hard, I had a great time and anything less than that will feel like a failure. I’d have to step up the training and build more stamina in my legs. They have a lot of strength thanks to all the mountain biking (this helps a lot when running uphill), but I need to train them to sustain this kind of speed better.

One thing that I’ve definitely learned through all of this is that a full marathon is probably a bit out of my grasp. I would love to be able to do it, but with the way my knees feel right now, I can’t imagine it to be a good idea. Plus, finding the time to do the training for this was tough enough, but to have to train for a full marathon would probably make for a bigger lifestyle change than I’m willing to make.

I like to run. It’s something that’s relatively new to me, as a kid, I was active, but I hated running when it wasn’t a part of doing something else. However, in the last couple of years, I’ve developed quite a fondness for running all by itself. Besides enjoying the activity itself, I like that I’m staying in shape and how it makes me feel about myself afterwards, I feel accomplished, energized, and all around much healthier. When I started, I didn’t have much of a goal other than keeping in decent shape, but in the course of the last year, I realized that I would like to try to run a half marathon. A full marathon may be a bit of a stretch for me based on the amount of time I can devote to training and the state of my knees–which actually don’t bother me when I run, only when I stand still for more than 15 minutes at a time. But a half marathon feels doable to me.

So I decided that I’d run the Rutgers Half Marathon next month and I started official training about a month ago. Since my normal run is usually about five miles and I’ve done a couple of ten mile runs for fun, I knew that my training didn’t need to be super intense. But the thing that I’m finding out, is that this half marathon is making me hate running. One of the blogs that I often read likes to mention that training for a marathon can have a huge effect of your life, both in your outlook and your attitude. The writer likes to mention how he learned a lot through the process and looks at life and situations differently because of it. But you know what? I’m just not seeing it.

Training for this half marathon is a chore. It’s taken all of the fun out of running. Instead of having fun and being able to run when I want and how far I want, I have to keep a schedule and work my life around that. I’m starting to find myself extremely stressed because of an overall lack of time in my life for a lot of the things I want and need to get done. Running can take up a lot of time and it also means that you need to have time to shower afterwards before doing something else. You also need to pay more attention to what and when you eat as well. It really messes with your whole schedule.

Additionally, I need to push myself sometimes when I really don’t feel like I have it in me to run an extra couple miles or so that day. Sometimes, at the end of the run, I’m glad that I was able to push myself a little more than I would have otherwise. These are the runs where I got past the block that was holding me back. But sometimes, I feel like I had to push too hard and afterwards I’m done for the day. I’m not energized after these runs and I didn’t have fun either. These runs do not feel worth it at all.

For an actual athlete, this is what you’re supposed to go through, but for something that I do just as fun, I don’t know that it’s worth it. I’m sure that at the end of the half marathon, I’ll feel accomplished and proud of myself for finishing the 13.1 mile run, but I don’t see gaining much else from this. I was hoping that if this went well, I would be able to do the Disney full marathon in January, since I’ll be there that week already, but now I’m debating even doing the half marathon there. I guess we’ll see how that turns out and it’s silly to make any decisions a month before this race, but right now, I’m feeling pretty negatively towards it.

I’m sure in the end, it’ll all seem worth it, but I worry that I’m not going to find running fun anymore after the race and I’m not going to want to continue doing it.

I think that the last time I played kickball was in the 5th grade. Before today, that is! This turned out to be a lot of fun. We played a very exciting game that everyone seemed to be into. It’s funny how a game like this can withstand the test of time and be a lot of fun to play as an adult.

We played on a poorly groomed grass field so the ball was bouncing all over the place. I think we all had at least one moment of looking like a total doofus trying to kick the ball as it took a last minute bounce over our feet.

Here are a handful (really, a handful this time) of pictures, but other than two, they’re mostly just us goofing around after the game instead.

This is my new baby that I totally should not have spent the money on, but I did anyway. While I don’t think that parents with kids on the slopes are going to appreciate her, I feel like she speaks to the horror movie loving part of me…even if she is quite reminiscent of an Alkaline Trio song.

I can’t wait to ride her tomorrow.