The Triathlete Blues

First off, I’m quite late but hope everyone had a happy thanksgiving! And I hope you got sauced!

LET'S GET SAUCED! (wow my forehand was shiny from the light lol)

Carrying on…

Ho ho ho!

Haven’t had too much going on in Seanland over the past couple of months, but I did just get home from a nice little mini-vacation in Vegas! Kelly and I flew (ugh) over to Vegas for a few days to meet up with her parents. It was a trip to celebrate his 60th birthday! We stayed at the Monte Carlo.

Well, of course, there has to be a catch to get me onto an airplane. (Hey, I’ve driven 9 hours to Vegas twice already) We got to participate in two different running events – The Las Vegas Great Santa Run and the Rock And Roll Las Vegas Marathon.

The Great Santa Run was a blast. It was a run to break the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest gathering of running Santas. (I think.) We ended up breaking the record with over 13,000 people dressed as Santa participating. It was in the Las Vegas Town Square and there was about 8,000 more people there than I think it could reasonably support. We couldn’t even do the 5k ‘run’  because of the sheer amount of Santas. Plus the organization was terrible – nobody ever told us how many laps around the parking lot it should have been. Either way I can’t complain since it really wasn’t a race in the first place. Here are some photos – I should have taken much more.

Us and the in-laws. Love this photo

Hard to capture the amount of people there

I swear it doens't do it justice!

Even our four legged friends wanted to be involved!

This girl gave me a big sloppy kiss and sat on my legs because she wanted to be petted. Loved this dog

Anyway, we did the normal touristy stuff and some light gambling while there. And of course I took advantage of all the buffets since I was in Vegas and that’s the only time I allow myself to eat into a food coma anymore. I didn’t really take any photos there though. Not really sure why!

Happy chocolate and marshmallow

Saturday afternoon we had to go to the mandatory expo for the Rock And Roll Marathon to pick up our race packets. The bib numbers for the race were humongous! The expo was insanely large too – much larger than the cramped San Francisco Marathon expo. I think there was about 28,000 people doing the race. It was at the Sands convention center. Yes I requested this photo to be taken:

roar!

The race started at 7am and the strip was closed off because the half marathon (and the first half of the full marathon) was on the strip. It was pretty surreal running down the middle of the strip without all the taxis, buses and escort mobile billboard trucks going down it. The survey hints that they may try to do a night race for next year – that would BE AWESOME!  I think it was a bit too early for the real Las Vegas to be out in full force.

The race itself was nice for the first half, but the second half was a bit of a downer. The scenery wasn’t that great since it left the strip and had us looping around some other part of Vegas. Yeah, we even passed Larry Flynt’s Hustler Gentleman’s Club. Classy. There was plenty of water and sports drink stops. They used Cytomax, which I’m not exactly a huge fan of, but it got the job done I guess.

The race did not go well for me. I was hoping to break 4:20 but would have been happy with a 4:30. I fell apart after like 6 miles in and ended up over five hours. I could not control my heart rate at all – I would run and it would go up to 181bpm which is my 10k pace and I can’t sustain that. I would walk a bit and it would drop down. Start running and bam right up there again. I slowed my pace down to a 11 minute mile and it was STILL going to 180bpm. Needless to say I spent the majority of the race run walking. I don’t know what really went wrong – my training lately was not that great but I should have had enough fitness to not suffer as much as I did. I almost didn’t want to take the medal when I crossed the finishing line because I felt I didn’t do what I should have done. Hell I probably spent the 2nd half of the marathon with my head down – but that was probably for the better since there wasn’t much to see anyway.

I tried to avoid the photo takers since I looked and felt like utter crap but they got a few of me:

I know I shouldn’t be so down on myself, but I really expected better of me. I felt stupid when people were yelling and encouraging me that there was only a couple miles left, etc. (That especially sucked when it was nearing the half marathon finish and everyone kept yelling only 1 more mile!)

Anyway – I have to use this as a lesson and motivation to not slack on training. I hope I can whip myself back into shape.

The medal is gorgeous.

One last thing – Kelly’s birthday was yesterday. Happy Birthday!!!

I’ve been neglecting my blog way too much lately. And I’ve been neglecting my health a bit too. I need to change that. Stat.

Here are some photos of the US Half Marathon in San Francisco. I uploaded these almost 4 weeks ago but never finished the blog post! Bad, Sean, bad.

The half marathon didn’t go very well. It was raining hardcore and I was soaked and covered in mud. It also didn’t help that I bought new shoes the week before and stupidly wore them! Ran into some traffic (at like 5am!?) on highway 101 so we ended up being late to the start too and had to find a bathroom on the course.  Kelly and I ran it together and we didn’t care about time since it was just miserable outside and we were treading it as a slightly longish run for the upcoming Rock And Roll Marathon in Vegas. But it’s hard to be blah when you’re running over the golden gate in my favorite big city.

The medal is pretty unique – there are 2 half marathons – This one and “The Other Half” in April. You can put both medals together to make a super medal.

I promise I will get a recap of my little mini-vacation to Vegas up either today or tomorrow. If I don’t please harass me (@haydez) via Twitter.

Here are a few photos:

The first half medal!

1 + 2 = Optimus Prime Medal

What's up with the dude behind me?

A miserable day for the Godlen Gate bridge trot.

Hope everyone had a happy Halloween weekend! I spent it at home watching the Giants in the World Series! It is now 3 games to 1 so one more win and the Giants will take the title. I live in the San Francisco bay area and it is great to see the area going insane over the game.  Kelly and I are racing the US Half Marathon next weekend in San Francisco so it will be awesome to be there if the Giants win and the parade is going on!

We were allowed to wear a costume at work on the Friday before Halloween. I actually forgot about it until I saw people setting up decorations on their cubicles on the way out Thursday night. I’m not one for dressing up in costumes but I really like to wear shorts and comfortable shoes. My brainstorming came up with throwing on a pair of shorts, vibram five fingers and a San Jose Earthquakes jersey and hat. Perfect!

My "costume"

Kelly’s department actually appears to care about Halloween and their theme was something like the dark angels or something? Anyway, she looked cute with her wings and halo.

the wicked wire witch... yeah... okay there...

We had an exciting adventure race to go to on Saturday morning called the Warrior Dash! There was supposed to be a few people from work doing it but it looks like they flaked out on it. It is a 3.5 mile run and had 11 obstacles to do on the course.

Obstacles:

• a bunch of junked automobiles blocking the path
• “Hell’s Hill” which was just a very steep but not very long hill
• cargo net climb
• a small tunnel you had to go through on your hands and knees
• a plank over a gap
• tangled ropes
• a wall of hay you had to climb over
• a slip and slide!!!
• 3 short walls
• fire
• a tremendously thick mud pit!!!

Because of the mud pit there was no way I was bringing my camera with me… but I stole some photos people posted on their facebook walls.

I took the route over the trunks!

The fire pit, wasn't as scary as they made it out to be

Aww the cute butterfly is now dirty

The mud pit was insane. I don’t know how they got the mud as thick as they did… it made the Muddy Buddy’s pit seem really easy to get through. The mud caked to my mesh shorts and made them very heavy and the second I stepped out of the pit my shorts fell down. Yep, standing there in my boxers. I pull them up and run and bam, down to my boxers again. So I said screw it and ran the last 15 feet in my boxers with my shorts around my ankles. People were cheering me so it wasn’t that bad I guess. Maybe I’ll post the photo when they put them on line if it’s there.

I finished the 3.5 mile course in 29:40.85, so about an 8:29 mile they calculated. Happy with that since the obstacles took up quite a chunk of time!

We headed to the fire hose to get washed off and changed. Then we celebrated our victory with a BBQ turkey leg and our viking hats:

om nom nom nom

She's probably going to kill me for posting this.

There was over 5,500 people there… much larger than I expected. Hope to do more events like these in the future.

Unfortunately we couldn’t hang around because we had tickets for the San Jose Earthquakes vs the New York Red Bulls playoff soccer match that evening. San Jose lost 1 – 0 but it was still great to be out at one of the games.

It has been five years since I went ‘home’ to visit friends and family in Scranton, PA. A little over five years ago, as a newlywed, we packed up all our belongings into a rented Penske truck with my rotting 1993 Subaru Legacy on a car porter towed behind it and made a long drive from State College, Pennsylvania. The final destination was Sunnyvale, California. Only a 2,732 mile drive. Oh yeah, did I ever mention I’m afraid of heights?

The last time I flew on an airplane we had a really rough landing at the Wilkes Barre/Scranton Airport. That experience made me avoid airplanes as much as possible. I promise I wont let five more years go by without visiting but I’m not quite over the fear yet!

Moving onto the epic journey: I’ll be the first to admit it: I really like mass transit. My journey home involved everything except a boat. I would have liked to ride a boat though so I’m not discriminating.

Here is what it looked like:

I took the bus to work, worked 8 hours, got on the light rail right outside, transferred to Caltrain in Mountain View, transferred to the Bart at the Millbrae Caltrain/Bart station, transferred somewhere (San Carlos?) to the Skytrain to the San Francisco airport. Then after a long 3 hours of sitting around we boarded that Airbus… and somehow I managed to make it to Philadelphia where my in-laws were waiting for us. What a travel day…

The main “excuse” I had going to Scranton was to run in the Steamtown Marathon. The only experience I had with the marathon during the time I lived there was playing for the runners when I was in the Scranton High Marching Band. I never thought I’d be one of those people running it.

It started very early Sunday morning in almost freezing temperatures. I know I’ve finally adapted to the California weather standard and it felt like -50F there! The marathon was unreal. There was actually more volunteers than runners. 2500 runners and over 3000 volunteers… and that is not counting all the people who came out to support the runners. It was unreal running through all the small towns that I never even knew the name of when I lived there!

Not sure why I was smiling. Maybe it was after I finally got to that much needed porta potty at mile 13!

That lady in the background was totally checking me out.

Running down the finishing chute... I had goosebumps!

I cherry picked this image becuase Kelly isn't smiling for a change

Exhausted but very happy with the results!

During training I basically kept the same structure before with the long runs on the weekends and short runs during the week. The one thing I did change was introducing some short speed work in one of the shorter runs and the results paid off. I came in 57 minutes earlier than I did in July at the San Francisco Marathon! So my new PR is 4:23… so I only need to take another hour and some change off before Boston…. yeah right!

The other days I spent catching up with family and friends. Since it was five years I had a LOT to catch up on. I wish I could pack some of them up and ship them out to California. Here are some photos of some of the fun and strange things we did.

Scranton Farmers Market - lots of apples!

And a ton of peppers!!!

Locals are probably saying "WTF" that I posted this and chips, but it has been 5 years since I have seen this many pierogies in one place! I've seen 3 boxes of plain Mrs. T's at our local grocery shops! haha

Middlesworth Chips!!!! These are missing from the west coast, although my bodyweight is thankful for that.

I used to work here! No, not playin baseball... I was a "beer man" walking in the stands!

I never thought I would eat at a place with "lube" in the name, but their chicken wings were pretty tasty.

I ended up getting a cold that put a big damper on things but we still drove down to State College, PA to see the alma mater… Penn State! We walked around the campus looking to see what has changed since we left in ’05. We even walked past the spot where I proposed to Kelly.

Probably the best thing at PSU - creamery ice cream!

The required Nittany Lion Photo with Kelly.

and of course, me!

The trip was fantastic. The marathon was just the sprinkles on the chocolate fudge sundae. It was great seeing family and friends. I *promise* that I won’t take another five years to go back and visit.

…

How do I know, you ask?

Well…

Kelly and I signed up for this:

It is only a little over an hour drive away from Scranton and makes the perfect “excuse” to come back in next year. It may be Kelly’s first 70.3 (although I doubt this, I can already feel the Vineman vibes coming from her!) and the Steamtown Marathon is the week after… sounds like a plan!