Archive for the ‘ Running ’ Category

Right this moment there are more people on the planet running than were living a thousand years ago.

There’s a website called reddit – you may have heard of it.

At any rate I read a comment about running that resonates and I thought I’d share it:

This is sort of how I started running too. When my life was falling apart and I thought nothing else could go right I started going to the gym to force myself into something social everday. Just to interact with people. Just to do SOMETHING.
And then I started running. And then it started being about me. And that feeling. And the act. And how free it was. How independent. How strong. How I didn’t have to hold back anything like I did with the rest of the world. On the treadmill, on the trails, on the track, in my running shoes I was allowed to be raw anger and pain and frustration and loneliness and strength, too, because fuck the world that doesn’t think it takes strength to be alone.
Fast forward six months – my first 5k. Six more – half marathon. A year – marathon. I’m still the only one I know who’s done it. I’m about to start training for the triathlon. And yeah, I like my body a lot better now, not so much because of the way it looks but because it is a powerful, independent, free extension of the strength I carry and I can show that any time.
So you, more power to you. Run. Run for as long as it makes you happy. There’s nothing like that first ten miler that you take in the middle of the night without your phone or telling anyone where you went and you think it’s never going to end and when you finally finish your legs are fucked for the next three days, but fuckitall if it wasn’t worth it.
Running’s like that. Welcome to the family.

Actual post on reddit with comment.

A little off-topic but ever in my heart and thoughts – to my best friend holding down that bar, keeping my seat open: I’ll see you again someday buddy, but not yet.
David R. Greenslade
Kandahar City, Afghanistan
04/08/07

Advertisement

Running from/with injury.

“The modern world is not necessarily a runner’s world. Many other physical variables affect our ability to stay healthy. We detrain our glutes and tighten our hamstrings sitting at our desks for hours, grow tight in the shoulders from stress and eat genetically modified foods with consequences we don’t yet fully understand. The variables are as different as the circumstances of our lives, with one thing in common: They all hamper the body’s ability to deal with the forces of running.”

-Philip Latter, April 2013 Issue Running Times

That pretty much sums it up, I have no problem quoting when someone else can say what I’m trying to say more eloquently than I can.

Tears or Tears (read, read – both ways)

I can honestly say that I don’t know if it was sweat or tears in my eyes for that last mile – but I hit both my goals and I feel absolutely exhausted/amazing.

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Run

Running, again, finally.

Last year, I tore a muscle in my lower back. March fifth, to be exact. It’s taken over a year to rehab it back to running strength. It took several months before I could walk without pain, it still bothers me but not enough anymore to keep me from the runs I’ve missed so much.

Much worse than the hamstring I tore back in oh-six.

At any rate I’ve run a bit under forty miles in the last eight days. Longest run so far has been a seven-miler Friday night, I’m hoping to break that PR later this evening.

I’ve had to completely restructure my stride and I’m still learning how to use it to its fullest potential.

I started a new Nike+ account since I’m no longer the runner that put those old numbers up. All new PR’s to be made and broken:

Actually rather refreshing, I’ve got new all new mountains to climb.

Where do I begin?

As the title says…at any rate 2012 is almost gone and it has been a year filled with both normalcy and insanity.

I rather like that.

I deleted my Facebook. Absolutely liberating that.

I dissolved the LLC I was partnered in, the short of the long – my partner never held up anything remotely resembling a fraction of a portion of a workload.

But out of that experience came my company. I’ve begun to build it ground up; bootstraps firmly held. Only gravity holds my feet on the ground these days it seems.

I’m learning several new programming languages concurrently…I wish I could say that it were easy to do so, but it’s real work.

I’ve thought rather intensely when I’ve got some free time about the major events of my life, many of which have been the kinds of things that can break people.

I tend to jump back and forth on the idea that things happen for a reason. If you asked me today I’d tell you that they do, and that they have built me into something that can take almost any hit right on the chin and grin through it.

Somedays I feel it more than others but I’m still looking up and that is pure encouragement.

I’m building worlds, some with words, some with pixels but I’m making dreams real, my own for the moment and hopefully someday I’ll be able to build it into something so big it can make other people’s dreams become real and tangible – to make those secret hopes they cling to in the deepest hidey-holes in their hearts become their lives.

I know that in person I can “come off” as arrogant, egotistical, hard, irreverent and sometimes (more than) a little crazy.

I am wild. I am unapologetic. I am the me I am because I was molded by time and experiences: in that I am just like you.

Underneath all of that still lives the little boy that looked up into the night sky and dreamt of setting foot on the planets that orbited those visible stars.

Well, failing that, the man that encapsulates that boy will do his best to bring those stars down here where we can all marvel at them.

Today is…

“Today I will do what you won’t, so that tomorrow I can do what you can’t.”

Clarifying

Insomnia.

When you have insomnia you’re never really asleep but you’re never really awake either.

I don’t sleep well, I never have. I don’t keep what one might call regular hours and I’ve learned to function productively on very little rest.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I can sleep for more than a few hours at a time.

I think that this post is going to be a bit more about the mundane parts of my life. I’ve got a headache and that’s not really conducive to exploring the things I generally like to discuss here.

I still feel compelled to write though, even when my thoughts are moving at the speed of cold sap. That’s actually weirdly encouraging.

My back hurts. I pulled a muscle in my lower back a week or so ago. Pretty much awful, I’ve never had back problems so rather naturally I was unprepared for just how limited your world becomes when you can’t tie your own shoes.

I’m stuck at the dividing line between the end of one novel and the beginning of the next. Foggy, gray area you have become my home.

My poor beaten up civic has been acting oddly all week, maybe it’s sympathy pangs, that car and I have been through a lot together. Side note on that: I have, since my first ride at sixteen, named my cars after early twentieth-century starlets.

Strange? Maybe.

That scene in the first matrix movie when Smith is having a bit of a breakdown interrogating Morpheus is close to the surface. I must escape this place and in this mind is a key, my key.

I am seriously going a little crazy since I can’t run. I need to run. It’s something that I don’t think I can really live without.

This annoying injury makes me feel old. I’m not a fan of that feeling in any way. I will say this though; still no gray. Not much leaves marks on me, yeah I’ve got some (fairly serious) scars but I’ve earned every single one of them.

I think that my blog has been far too serious and somewhat depressing for a while now. I hardly ever write down the things that make me happy, or any of those things that make me laugh. When there are days between posts you can be certain that I was smiling enough that I didn’t need to write through anything.

I think that I need to change that.

Here’s something. Sandwiches. I freakin love sandwiches. Probably my favorite food. I love bread, and cheese, do not get me started on cheese. Sandwiches have an endless variety in terms of fillers and condiments. One can never be bored with a sandwich if that sandwich has been properly made.

This is from a conversation I had today about cheese and sandwiches, it illustrates my views perfectly:

Cheese is the most important part of a sandwich – adding both flavor and texture and also getting another food group into your hand…that being said, I think it’s chief virtue is that it provides a stable platform for condiment deployment.

I tend take an engineers view on sandwich construction. Probably because my undergrad/grad roommate was an ME guy. And handy with a grill.

But I digress, I’m quite happy right now. I want to get back out of Ohio like no other, (why did I ever come back here again?) and I really really want to tie my shoes again but other than that life is quite good. I do like to explore some serious concepts here, but a large percentage of the time I’ve already worked through it by the time I finish a post. Sometimes I don’t even post them, unless it’s something I think might help someone else or provoke some discussion. I just delete them after I’m done because the act of writing it down solved whatever it was that I was dealing with and I no longer have a need to share it. For example there is a post sitting in my upload cue dated February twenty-eighth.

As for the concept I brought up in my last post, I’ll get to that after I’ve gotten some sleep. I will say this though, right at this exact moment my heart sleeps under a starlit sky, the beat of a desert night keeping its rhythm.

Def(ine)[d]

Sometimes the moments that challenge us the most come to define us.

A physical and mental struggle, you’re going to have hiccups, you’re going to hit rough patches.

When you cross that finish line, no matter how slow or fast, it will change your life forever.

Yep, I’m talking about running marathons. A marathon. A marathoner.

Me.

Realities

“She was cheating on me, ripped a hole in me through which you could see tiny angels weeping.”

– Weeds

I like that quote, last year on this day I had an eerie feeling, a not-quite suspicion that something like that was looming. I was right.

Sometimes being right isn’t much fun, but my life has improved immeasurably since that day.

In other news my twenty-twelve marathon-training shoe decision has been made:

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My Nike tweet-pledge:

(@rymclovin)
1/1/12 7:29 PM
I will: Run more. Run harder. Run longer. Run stronger. Run as if my life depends on it. Because it does. #MAKEITCOUNT http://nike.com/makeitcount

Runner’s guilt

I have been incredibly slack with regard to my running schedule…for months now.

This is unacceptable. I hate it when I do this to myself because it will take an equal amount of months to get back into shape.

I can rationalize all I want to about the many, many demands on my time. This is pure sophistry. Equivocation in its most elemental form.

I must make the time to run, yes it’s cold out, yes I’m usually dead tired every night, yes my weekends always feel too short.

I can sleep when I’m dead.

Back at it, with a vengeance.