Posts from — November 2007

So I’ve been sadly lacking for inspiration to train, but perhaps I finally did something inspirational. Before my wife left for Spain in the beginning of the summer, she had sent to my office as a surprise a 3 poster set of the Ironman World Championships in Kona. Well it took me 3.5 months, but I finally got the posters framed and hung in my office. Now when I walk into my office, I am reminded of the athlete I once was and how it would be nice to get back into that sort of shape.

On the night that I hung up the posters, I had my first desire in a while to get on my bike. It was only 45 minutes in my basement, but it was a start. I backed that up with another 1 hour ride this morning and then a 4000 yard swim this afternoon. My first double workout day in quite some time.

What it is though, is that I need something in my life beyond training. I need a closer and warmer relationship with my wife. The closeness I have with my children is great, but I am left feeling empty and lacking for adult companionship. My training took away that loss for quite some time, but 5 years into my training, I find myself wanting more. I just don’t know how to get it. Maybe as I walk into my office everyday, I’ll see those posters and the fire to be the best triathlete I can possibly be will come back. Training hard makes you too tired to care about anything else or at least makes you forget what you are lacking in other areas for a while.

Tomorrow I am going to do the Turkey Trot in Prospect Park with my friend Larry and his family. At least the one thing I have through my training is a network of friends that I can share my experiences with.

It is really possible in Las Vegas to go for days at a time without sleep and not know how many days have passed. You stay up so late at night, that your next day begins even before the prior evening has ended. I won’t say that is what I did, but it was almost. When I got in the night before, I was so wired I couldn’t fall asleep. It took two Ambien to knock me out and I didn’t wake up until late. When I checked my email the next morning, I had a message from the CFO asking me to join him for lunch. That is what I did to start the day.

After lunch, I attended a real estate conference. It was completely lame. They were talking about how to start a blog. Like who in the technology or marketing field doesn’t know how to start a blog at this point. It was an insult to be in the room; a room which happened to be in dungeon like conditions in the Flamingo Hotel. BTW, the Flamingo is a cesspool and I highly recommend that you don’t stay there. Fortunately, I am not staying there, but my colleague Matt is. He has welts all over his body from the chiggers and bedbugs. At least that is one of his primary complaints.

After the conference, Matt and I took a quick change into some casual clothes and to kill some time gambling while we waited for another coworker to join us for dinner. Matt killed the BJ tables again and I churned up and down for a while and eventually settled on a $48 loss for the night. I am just not aggressive enough gambling, otherwise I would be up much more. I just don’t have the stomach for it, I guess that is what happens when you have a mortgage to pay and two kids to send to college at some point in the future.

We ate at Joe’s Stone Crab. Needless to say, we had some stone crab and 20oz bone in rib eye steaks with creamed spinach, sweet potato fries and . While eating, we also continued our drinking spree which started several hours earlier. I am back to my old ways of downing Captain Morgan and Coke like it was water. For a change of pace I switched it to Capt. Morgan and Red Bull. I think I like it with Coke better, but Red Bull does give it a better kick. The steak I had was about the best I have ever eaten. There was no way I could get the whole thing down into my stomach. I left a good portion of it over and I felt a little emotional when they took the remainder away. I wanted to take it with me, but I couldn’t see carrying around a hunk of dead cow flesh with me while we hopped around from club to club and casino to casino.

The first place we went to after dinner was On top of The Palms Hotel at the Ghost Bar. The Ghost Bar is on the 55th floor and overhangs the building. To make it interesting it has a glass bottom floor. It was freaky taking a step onto it. The view of Las Vegas from there was fantastic. We had a bunch of drinks at this place and admired the hot girls walking around. The place wasn’t exactly hopping though, so we left to try to get into another club in the next building over. There was a big line to get in and the bouncers wanted 50 bucks a person to expedite our entry. We would have paid 50 for the 3 of us, but we just didn’t see the utility of paying so much just to get ahead of the line. So we ditched the place and eventually wound up back at the Bellagio. We gambled some more and then called it an evening. It wasn’t the greatest night, but it sure did beat staying home and watching CSI on TV.

Tonight was a great night to be in Las Vegas. Well, nothing was so great about this particular day, I just had a great time. It started out slow with a dinner for the top 200 real estate professionals in the US. Somehow I was invited to be a representative member from my company to help honor the number 1 real estate agent, also from my company. So the whole dinner was a lot of sitting around waiting for them to announce rewards for every ridiculous type of category. It was almost 3 hours of boredom. The worst part was that you couldn’t order hard liquor or beer. The drink selection was limited to two colors of wine or sparkling or still water. Those drinks were not among my alcohol consumption plan for the evening.

After this drudgery of a dinner finally ended; I and a couple of other managers escaped over to the Blackjack tables. I quickly hit on a good winning streak bring my up several hundred bucks. Even though I was winning I was a bit annoyed with myself, since I wasn’t following my planned betting pattern. Had I done so I would have been up closer to a grand. As it ending up, I won $150 dollars after giving $100 back to the casino. I said waking a away from the tables with a 150 profit was my bottom line and by gosh I was going to do it. I hung around with my coworkers while they continued to play, occasionally offering them playing/betting advice based on my handy BlackJack Pocket Reference card. The card was right on most occasions and my two colleagues both walked away from the tables winners.

As we were wrapping up on the BJ tables, I get a call from my friend Matt who is over at the Wynn hotel with two other coworkers. I walk over to their BJ Table just as Matt is coming off of a couple of thousand dollar win while another was already down for the count. You could see him and my third colleague almost outwardly rooting for Matt to lose as he placed each additional wager. Granted what he was doing was sick. Matt would just walk up to a table drop a 100 bucks, get a double down hand and walk away with 4 stacks for $100 chips. He did this time and time again everywhere he went. I thought it was hysterical while the other guys were getting disgusted. Once Matt cashed out completely, the 4 of us were standing around thinking about where to go and what to do.

I wanted to try out a Club called Jet at the Mirage. It was the type of club with velvet ropes blocking off the front entrance and only by being know in the club or armed with a special pass phrase could you get by. Matt and I went to check out Jet while my other coworkers elected to go pursue some other endeavor. Luckily I knew a name I could use, which was good enough to get us through the crowds waiting outside, but not good enough to get us comped entry or drinks.

Fortunately, I did run into the person whose name I knew, and once he found out how I knew him, he gladly bought us a round of drinks on the house. Having secured free liquor, we hung around and watched all of the hot young women dance around on poles. Lots of Lecherous and desirous looks were shown their ways. I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that the last time I was in a place like this that the current girls I was looking at would have been in diapers. Girls sure do grow up fast. I felt so completely out of place in the club and was wondering to myself had there ever really been a time when I did. I think the best way for me to enjoy myself at these VIP type clubs is to just sit back, relax, drink and take in the marvelous views. I sure as hell know that no one wants to see me dance. But perhaps, maybe it is not too late for lessons and a better club going look.

After Jet, it was a quick pit stop back to our hotels. We needed to get our cameras and warmer clothes in order to hang out and film the Implosion of the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas. To get a good vantage point for the demolition, we went onto the roof top parking garage of the Wynn Hotel. There were about 1000 likeminded people all waiting to see the building fall. They led up to the final moment with great suspense, by providing a rather long pyrotechnics show before the actual big bang. However, when it came it was definitely worth watching. One moment the hotel was there and the next, it was just a puff of dust. A rather large puff of dust that started to descend onto anyone that was in its path. Once the smoke got on top of you it was just about impossible to breathe. Bits of debris would rain down upon you and coat your hair, skin, clothes and eyeglasses in a smooth sheen of dust. I had to ball up a fleece I was wearing in order to take in some reasonably clean air. Standing in the fallout zone of the implosion was not a good idea; however, we got some fantastic photos of it. I’ll post them latter as I down size them for this blog.

After we made it back into the casino in the relative safety of filtered air conditioning, Matt decided to play another couple of hands of Blackjack. In a span of 3 minutes he took another 200 and turned it into 500. You couldn’t stop him. Not even on the walk back to our hotels where he quickly won 40 bucks on a slot machine while I was taking a piss. After I left map, I did manage to get lucky one last time on my own. A particularly attractive woman of color started talking to me and asking how I was doing, where am I going, etc. I told her back to my hotel, to which she explained that she is an Entertainment Girl and would I like to avail her of her services. In light of the fact that this was my only offer from a girl all evening, I considered myself lucky to even get one and a pretty good one at that. Any form of entertaiment I could think of. Ooooh the possibilities. But as it was a late hour after 3:30am, I felt it best that I turn this offer down for now and to think about it for some other day.

So I am not sure what I am feeling about this recent trip. I had decent time for a couple of nights and managed to get in a couple of swims. I tried to run a couple of times, but my leg was having none of it. The 60K that I have to do to for a NYC Marathon Qualifier is looking doubtful. I’ll try to do it anyway.

Not much happened while I was in Palm Beach. The weather was warm, the hotel was fabulous and the meetings ranged from boring to interesting. At one point I had trouble to stay away during the meetings because I was out past 3:30am the night before, getting drunk and acting foolish. I was told that one of the highlights of the trip for everyone was when I put on someone’s high heeled shoes and raced one of my gay colleagues down the hall. Some of the gay guys then started to wonder if perhaps I was bisexual. Fortunately, none of them started to hit on me.

A couple of other things happened that I will not recount here, since certain people from work that read my blog should not be exposed to it. My only real disappointment for the trip was not getting in a swim on the last day I was there. I wanted to swim in the ocean at least one time, but I never made it. I thought I would on the last day, since my flight was not until 8pm in the evening, but my last meeting ended early and I was able to make an earlier flight. I decided to give up the swim in order to get home to my children before they went to bed. As it turned out the earlier flight was an hour delayed and the limo service I booked to pick me up from the airport took an hour to make it from the JFK parking lot to the terminal at which I was waiting. But my kids were still awake so all ended well. I got home around 10:35 which didn’t give us much time to stay up, since my son had an 8am soccer game the next morning. This was pretty brutal as it was freezing cold outside in the morning and a stark contrast to the breezy high 70’s I was experiencing just a few hours earlier.

This will be my last entry for this blog. The time has come for me to move on and start anew. It has come to the point where I can no longer write what I want to say for fear that those who should not be viewing it will see it. I’ve censored myself enough, and I’ve had enough of that.

If you would like to know my new blog address, please send me an email or leave a comment on this entry. I hope my long time readers will reach out to me for the new address.

This is a continuation of a previous blog. All will be explained later.

It was a long day. Where do I even begin with it? I suppose I should start with waking up an hour too early, since the only clock in my house that I forget to set back was my watch which serves and my alarm. When I woke, I had a migraine headache and felt like shit. I considered just rolling over and going back to sleep. I wasn’t even sure if I could to the full distance of the marathon and at this moment I was wondering what the point was of going if I wasn’t sure I could go the distance. The fact that I awoke feeling terrible was an affirmation that I should stay in bed. I got up though and after some Excedrin and a bowl of cereal I started to feel better and got on with the process of getting ready. I hadn’t packed the night before and I needed to get moving if I was to make the bus to the marathon start.

I was already 5 minutes late by the time I finally left my house. I had to walk about a half mile to get to the bus and I was halfway there when I realized I forgot my HR monitor strap at home. I ran back to get it, but was now very late for the bus. I tried to call Larry to tell the bus organizer I was coming and not to leave without me, but my cell phone crapped out. Fortunately, my wife was amenable to driving me to the bus location. I just made it. The bus doors were about to close just as I got out of my car.

The ride to the start was quick and uneventful. The sun was just starting to peak over the horizon and we walked into the Marathon Village. All of the runners were separated into three color groups; Orange, Green and Blue. Larry and I made our way to the Blue staging area. It was definitely the low rent area. Where the orange and green had lots of grass to sit down upon, the blue area was mostly paved asphalt with a few patches of grass which served as parking lot medians. We staked a claim on a small patch of grass and began the business of waiting the 4 hours before the start.

I don’t know what the organizers were thinking in regards to staging the luggage trucks. Thousands upon thousands of runners had to make their way in and out of a narrow gap to get to and from the trucks. It took over an hour to move about 50 yards necessary for reaching your truck and getting back out. It was the biggest cluster fuck I’ve ever seen at a race. I think Mary Wittenburg of the NYRR is going to get a lot of email complaining about the situation. It was a very dangerous situation and I am glad no one yelled at “Bomb” otherwise there would have been a lot of dead or maimed marathoners from trying to get away.

Larry and I did finally make it out of there and we headed to the start. Even this was poorly organized. In past years it was possible to just walk onto the highway leading up to the Verrazano Bridge, but this year we almost didn’t get out of the village when the gun went off. In any event, I was happy to be running. Running over the VZ is always a thrill. This year for some reason the bridge wasn’t bouncing to the cadence of the runners. That was such an odd feeling. They must have done something to the bridge to eliminate that. In any event we set out at a leisurely 9 minute mile pace. I was feeling ok at first and felt like I could hold the pace for the entire race.

When I started to approach the 6 mile mark, I began the lookout for my family. I grossly overestimated the time that I would arrive (I thought it was at the 4 mile mark) and hoped my wife and kids would still be there. I was afraid that they would have thought they missed me and would have gone home. When I passed the block where I expected, but didn’t see them, I felt very depressed. I was looking forward to seeing them and giving my kids a hug. To my surprise they were just 2 blocks further down the course and I was very surprised and extremely happy to see them.

The race was pretty uneventful for the next 7 – 8 miles. I slapped a lot of kids hands as I ran by and took in the pleasure of running in one of the world’s largest marathons (is it the largest?). Just before the 59th Street Bridge our friend Willy had jumped into the race to run the final 11 miles with us. We were both supposed to run home with Larry along with several other friends, but that was not to be. By the time I got off the bridge I began to fade fast. My 9 minute miles turned into 10’s, followed by 11’s, 12’s, 13’s, 14’s and finally 16 minutes for the last two miles.

The last 10 miles up First Avenue, into the Bronx and back to the finish were torture. The thing I hated most about it was that I couldn’t predict what my next mile would be. There is something comforting in being able to predict your splits. It gives you an idea how much time you have left and how long the suffering will last. With each mile coming slower than the previous, I had no idea how long it would eventually take me. All I knew was that I was going to finish it, even if I had to crawl across the finish line.

The entire race was the complete opposite of last year’s. In 2006, I ran with Larry until the 59th Street Bridge when I told him I was too cold and needed to speed up. I had left him and passed 1000’s and 1000’s of runners as I started to run 7:30’s. This year, Larry left me on the 59th Street Bridge and 1000’s and 1000’s of runners passed me to the finish line. I wasn’t sure how I was feeling over the way this was turning out. On the one hand, I figured a measure of pride for even doing the race since I only did two small runs and two bike workouts in the past 1.5 months. I am completely detrained and probably should not have chosen to do a marathon as my first real run after recovering from injury. I think I should be proud of the fact that I was even able to do it. On the other hand I was feeling a bit embarrassed. This marathon was going to be my personal worst by far. It was hard to stomach the fact that I once ran 3:13 in a marathon and had aspirations of breaking 3 hours. I was like all those newbie marathoners who went out too fast and had to walk to the finish. It’s not right that our physiology takes us a long time to build up fitness, but becomes so totally detrained in such a short period of time.

After doing my death shuffle across the finish line, I was faced with an even larger and slower moving crowd to claim my baggage. It took over an hour to finally make my way to the UPS Truck that held my bag. I was feeling horribly nauseous and just wanted to lie down. I considered faking a collapse onto the ground so I could have the medics rush me out of the crowd. I was pretty close to doing that in fact, possibly not even because I was faking. After I finally got my bag, I sat on the ground to change into some dry clothes. As I’ve said before, the post race food at the NYC Marathon is without a doubt the worst you will encounter. Nothing would even be better so you don’t wind up carrying a bag of junk.