Month: May 2011

A Little Trip

May 27, 2011 / DB

By the time you read this, we should be several hours from home in the Family Truckster – a.k.a. Swagger Wagon a.k.a. Daddy’s Blue Van – heading south. We will pass near Cincinnati, go through Lexington and Knoxville, then turn east towards Asheville. We will spend Friday night visiting with friends there and then continue southeast Saturday until we can continue no further. Our final destination is Hilton Head, South Carolina, where we will be spending a week with the kids, three aunts, one cousin, and two grandparents.

If the girls were any more excited they would burst. They cannot wait to make their first trip to a real beach and enjoy our own, personal pool for seven days. We just hope they can contain their excitement in the 12+ hours of van time each way. If the DVD player, DS and Leapsters, books, and other distractions do their job, we’ll survive the trip down. The trip home, which we plan on doing in a single day, could be interesting.

Usually when I travel, I like to take a book that relates to the place we’re visiting. South Carolina presents some interesting opportunities. Should I pack a Civil War history? Perhaps something about the Civil Rights movement or the Johnson presidency? Or why not go all out and reread Malcolm X’s autobiography?

I kid, of course. I plan on working through a couple novels that have been sitting on my shelf for a bit, one a recent Bond novel the other a dark mystery. And I have a bunch of long articles loaded up on my Kindle to pass time, as well.

While this is a vacation, I am a blogger. And I can’t survive without my MacBook Air. So I will try to post some stuff as time allows.

Wish us luck.

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Storm Chasing

May 26, 2011 / DB

A long-winded, semi-diary of last night’s storms in Indiana.

Crazy week. If I’m not mistaken, the bulk of my regular readers have heard tornado sirens and taken cover at some point in the past 72 hours. Hopefully all of you made it through this insane weather safe and sound.

Last night was our turn to get Mother Nature’s hammer. To make it even more fun, S. was working, so it was just me and the girls. It had the potential to be an awful night but actually turned out ok.

The first two waves of storms wrapped around us, skirting us but never hitting. The skies were dark and ominous from about 4:00 on, but other than rumbles in the distance we didn’t get any real action. I was supposed to cover a tennis regional final, and the county where the match was to be played was completely covered in bright red on the radar for most of the evening. They were smart enough to postpone it well before the match began. There were huge storms just to the east and south of Indianapolis. But we kept missing the worst of it.

I put the girls to bed at 8:00. I warned M. and C. that we would probably need to go to the basement later on, and they both understood that they had to be my big helpers. I decided to just put L. in our bed, knowing if I laid down in her bed I would fall asleep and the last thing I wanted to do was sleep through a tornado warning. I was watching the one local TV station that was streaming their storm coverage online while she snored next to me. ¹ Storms kept spinning up to the south and east, but we remained dry. To the west, though, the entire Indiana-Illinois border was covered in red. There was a stack of tornado warnings from Chicago to Evansville. I knew the night would eventually get interesting.

I decided to preempt things and get the girls downstairs before the sirens went off. I figured it better to get them settled on the couch and back to sleep before then so they would hopefully sleep right through it. That worked perfectly. I took them downstairs around 10:15. I could hear the sirens from Marion County, which is just a mile away, go off at 10:30. Ours went off about 15 minutes later. The girls did not stir. The winds picked up around 11:00. I finally heard a big rumble of thunder a couple minutes later. Rain drops smacked the windows shortly after that. To our north and east there were possible tornadoes, but we never got more than some stiff winds and heavy rains.

I let the girls sleep until 11:40 or so and then carted them back upstairs. They all settled right back to sleep. I drank a beer to take the edge off and soon followed.

Obviously I’m most thankful that we avoided the worst of the storms. But I was also grateful that the girls got through the night without any drama.

In addition to a live stream of their storm coverage, the station I was watching had a severe weather chat room next to the video. At first I covered it up with my Twitter window. But eventually I read through some of the messages. I understand people get nervous when there are storms, especially after what happened in Joplin last week, but much of the conversation in the chat room was just dumb. A couple of the meteorologists were monitoring in the room, so many participants decided to request specific information for their location. There were as many as 2000 people in the chat, so, as you can imagine, it got a bit ridiculous. I’ve left the grammar and punctuation as they were entered, for added fun.

“What is the weather condition in Indy right now? I live in Michigan but have friends in Indy.” There were a surprising number of messages like this, people in other parts of the country asking for updates on specific cities.
”I am scared what should I do?” Probably get out of the chat room, for starters.
”Do you think there will be school or no tomorrow” Priorities!
”Could you please have Angela NOT stand over the eastern part of the state?” There were also tons of messages from people who live well away from Indy complaining about their area not getting enough attention from the meteorologists. And for the record, <a href=”http://www.wishtv.com/dpp/about_us/personalities/Angela_Buchman”>Angela</a> can stand anywhere she wants.
”Alicia, when is (my city) getting hit??? Please help me!!” This popped up every 90 seconds or so, with roughly every city in Indiana mentioned at some point.
”Why must this happen? It has already hurt so many people.” Why does the sun rise in the east? Why is water wet? Why do birds suddenly appear, every time, you are near?
”Are you not answering my questions because I’m German?” My favorite comment of the night.
Finally, there was a lengthy argument late in the evening between a chatter who was castigating the station for quoting a county sheriff statement that there were “mass casualties” in Bloomington. Lots of people have friends and relatives in Bloomington, he said, and the station was scaring them needlessly. The meteorologists pointed out that was the official wording the sheriffs used, and casualties simply means injuries. He responded that they should do better reporting and not just repeat what the sheriffs were saying, then called them irresponsible. This went on for a while and finally someone shouted him down: “Maybe you should watch another station.” Indeed.

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I forgot to mention I listened to the National Weather Service amateur radio storm network on my iPhone for an hour before the girls went to bed. I can’t help it, I’m a native Kansan. When there are storms, I get geeky. ↩

Sounds Of The Game

May 24, 2011 / DB

Piggy-backing a bit on my post about cloud-based music systems last week, my baseball post for this week will focus on the changing broadcast technology of the game.

I first became a baseball fan in 1978. But I really went head-over-heels for the game in 1980, when we moved to Kansas City. Suddenly I could listen to every single Royals game. Every week or so a couple road games were on TV. When I opened the paper each morning (and afternoon!), the lead story was about George Brett’s hitting streak and his flirtation with .400, the Royals’ lead in the AL West, and if this was the year they could finally slay the Yankees dragon in the playoffs.

It was a pretty great time to be a Royals fan.

My other early memories of baseball involve my visits to my grandparents’ homes in central Kansas. Out there, the house radio was pretty much always tuned to the local station, which just happened to be a Royals affiliate. My mom’s parents weren’t big sports fans, so often when the Royals would come on, they turned the radio off and I retreated to my room to listen. My dad’s parents, however, were big fans. There were always at least two radios tuned to the game in their home. There was the main radio in the kitchen/eating area, which was on approximately 23 hours a day. And Grandpa always carried his own radio around with him while he was working in the yard or on projects around the house. When he took his afternoon nap, he would place the radio on the coffee table and turn it just loud enough so he could hear Denny Matthews and Fred White while he dozed. I loved walking through their house on Sunday afternoons, never being out of earshot of the game.

I think most baseball fans my age, and older, have similar memories about baseball on the radio.

The rise of ubiquitous, high-speed Internet access has made the entire country like my Grandparents’ home. For the third straight summer, I have the fantastic MLB iPhone app. This year I purchased the MLB.TV package as well. Between them, I am never out of earshot of the Royals.

Each time I’m lying in bed with my two-year-old trying to get her to sleep, sitting in the driveway monitoring the girls playing, or doing something else with a game streaming through my iPhone, I’m amazed at the magic of modern technology. No longer am I restricted by the range of AM radio signals or broadcast territories or the Royals sucking and never being on national TV. I can live 500 miles away from Kansas City (or more) and still hear the game just as if I lived in the KC suburbs and was sitting on my back deck, drinking a beer while the girls played on their swing set. I can sit anywhere in my house and watch the live broadcast of the game on my TV or on my computer, as if I was plugged into a KC-area cable provider. And going on vacation does not mean losing contact with your team for a week.

Thirty years ago, you would have relied on morning box scores to follow your favorite team. Twenty years ago you could catch highlights on Sportscenter or CNN. Ten years ago you could follow text play-by-play of games on Yahoo! or stare at the ESPN ticker all night.

Today, thanks to broadband pipes, 3G networks, and incredibly powerful handheld devices, we can control what game we watch and when and where we watch it. For those of us who grew up listening to baseball on the radio, having the audio option is especially sweet.

Once upon a time, being a fan of an out-of-market team was a difficult and tenuous thing. It was easy to lose touch with the teams of your youth when careers and family took you to other parts of the country. But thanks to MLB’s embrace of technology, it can feel like you never left home. At least while the game is on.

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Smoke And Fire

May 23, 2011 / DB

I’ve wanted to believe Lance Armstrong for a long time. I know I’m not the only one.

Each time there was a new allegation claiming Lance had, in fact, benefited from various banned substances and procedures during his Tour de France reign, I held the company line: He had been tested over and over and over again through his career and never been caught. He operated under as intense a microscope as any athlete in modern times, with seemingly the entire European cycling community focused on nailing him for doing something wrong, and was never caught.

They were just jealous an American came and made their race look like a joke for seven years. They hated his arrogance. They couldn’t tolerate how every rider who seemed poised to challenge him ran into PED issues of their own. It became an obsession, a witch hunt, and they would stop at nothing to finally nail him.

I’ll admit my view has changed slowly in recent years. I always subscribed to the where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire theory. Despite believing his main defense, that he had never failed a drug test, I was not so blind to think there was no chance he hadn’t put something into his system over his career.

But still I believed in the man and the myth.

I didn’t watch Sunday’s 60 Minutes feature in which former teammate Tyler Hamilton became the latest insider to assert that Lance had never been the pure rider he claimed. I did read enough summaries and reactions to the piece, though, to feel like something was different this time. What, I’m not sure. The straw that broke the camel’s back perhaps. There comes a point where, to continue to believe in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, becomes impossible.

I’ve said many times that PEDs in sports don’t trouble me much. So if Lance indeed was cheating over his career, what does that mean for his legacy? I’ve read reactions this morning that mirror those that have been around for a decade. “Well, everyone else was doing it, so why should I hold it against him?” Or, “He’s done so much good with his fame and fortune that I don’t care what he put into his body.”

I can’t buy into either of those arguments. Lance was different. He was the good guy who appeared to be the target of a campaign to frame him. He constantly said not only did he not cheat, but that he didn’t need to cheat. He reminded us that he had been through cancer, on the verge of death, and he would never do something like that to a body he worked so hard to repair so he could race again. We bought into it because his story was so compelling, so inspiring, and so American.

I still hold out hope that Lance was clean, that this is about jealousy and people with power leaning on those close to him to change the stories they clung to for so many years. It’s a tiny hope, though, and I admit at my core I’m not sure anymore. If a positive test comes up, if Lance were to tearfully admit that he did put something into his system, or if the evidence against him simply becomes so compelling that I can’t believe otherwise, I won’t be surprised. I will feel a little guilty for believing him and buying into his myth. But I long ago shed the belief that most elite athletes are clean. I’ll chalk him up as another athlete of his time who couldn’t resist the temptation to give his natural abilities a boost. Like Pete Rose, Mark McGwire, and Barry Bonds, all future discussion of his career will be tempered with that knowledge.
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The Cloud

May 19, 2011 / DB

In recent weeks both Amazon and Google have launched cloud music services. Persistent rumors have it that Apple will follow suit sometime soon. Throw in a wide-range of independent streaming services and we may be on the verge of the next digital music revolution: the age of cloud storage, high speed broadband access, and the ability to stream our music wherever we want it.

I’ve been a loyal iTunes user for almost seven years. It made sense to me. I acquired music, placed it in a convenient storage location, and accessed it as needed. It was basically how I had been listening to music my entire life, just using hard drives and digital files instead of physical media and stereos.

I was suspicious of streaming services for a variety of reasons. I believed in the “I want to own my music” argument. When I buy or download something, I want to control my access to it. I don’t want to be dependent on an Internet connection to listen. And I didn’t want to invest in an industry that seemed to change every six months or so. If I selected a service and it went out of business, I would have to begin building my library from scratch again.

For the past couple months I’ve been using the Rdio service. I still download a ton of music each week and listen to it through iTunes, but I’ve been spending more and more time in Rdio. Why the change?

For starters, it feels like the streaming services are more mature than they were five years ago. There are fewer holes in their collections, new music generally pops up on Tuesdays when it should, and with media-friendly mobile devices I’m no longer tied to the desktop to access the service. Rdio, and most of the other streaming services, have put together user friendly interfaces, as well.

I see three big benefits in streaming services. First is the price. For $10 a month, I can access my Rdio account from a computer, my iPhone, our Roku box, or a number of other devices. I imagine I spend in the range of $50 each month on music as it is. Reduce that to $10 and access a lot more music is an easy win. When I need to own a file, I can still go through iTunes or Amazon and add those to my hard drive.

The second is the broadness of access these services provide. In the digital age, I’ve generally read reviews of new albums, noted the tracks that get the highest marks, then scoured the internet for sites that have those songs. Next I would go to iTunes and fill in the holes. It’s been rare that I purchase/listen to an entire album by an artist I wasn’t excited about. But with Rdio, each Tuesday I fill my queue with every new album that interests me and work through them over the following week. I weed out the songs I don’t like, keep the ones I enjoy, and by the weekend I have a nice new collection of brand new songs.

Finally, as we add more and more digital media to our collections, the space requirements increase. As Solid State Drives become more common, that extra space can be precious. And it opens up uses for older computers. As long as you can run a modern browser, you can be rocking a tiny hard drive and still listen to thousands of songs.

The service is not perfect, though. While I can sync music to my iPhone, that music stays on the iPhone. I can’t sync it across to my MacBook Air and then on to my iPod. I don’t run with my iPhone, so there is a disconnect between what I’m listening to on Rdio and the music on my iPod. That’s a minor quibble, but an issue nonetheless. I still download a lot of music I find on blogs and would love a way to keep that stuff in sync with my cloud library. Except for music I sync to my phone, I’m reliant on an internet connection to use Rdio. Outages are less common than they used to be but do still occur. And it’s annoying to have a song freeze for 10 seconds if you lose your wireless signal momentarily. There remains the uncertainty of Rdio’s future. Will I need to shift to another service in six months or a year?

For the most part, I enjoy using Rdio. It’s changing how I listen to music and what I listen to. But it definitely feels like a middle step on the way to something bigger and better.

Most reviewers say that Amazon’s service is a little clunky at this point, but has it’s useful points. Google’s is a mess, but is brand new and should, hopefully, improve. What Apple will do is the big mystery. Rather than just launch, as their two rivals have done, Apple is allegedly working with the record labels to make sure everything is licensed to their satisfaction. A solid integration between your hard drive’s iTunes library and the cloud iTunes library would put Apple ahead of everyone. The most recent rumors make it sound like anything you buy from iTunes, you’ll be able to access and play through the cloud as well. But Apple has traditionally had issues with online services, so I’m not getting too excited about it just yet.

These are the first moments in the next music technology revolution. Five years from now, we may look back on the iTunes decade and laugh, the way we look at 8-tracks, cassette singles, and other antiquated music delivery systems. Regardless of what happens, you know the music industry is praying someone finds a way to make us pay again for music we’ve already paid for many times.

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Five

May 18, 2011 / DB

We are in the midst of some crazy times in our house. S. was away at a work conference for a couple days. She now works eight straight days. I have a couple work assignments coming up, and really could be working almost every night if S. was not. C. finishes school this week, M. next week. Next Friday we’re off to South Carolina for a week.

Oh, and C. turned five yesterday.

Like I said, a lot of stuff going on.

C.’s birthday was fairly low key, but she’s getting to stretch it out for awhile to make up for it. She got to celebrate in school on Monday. We had balloons, she opened presents (A Razor scooter and a new game for her Leapster), and had cupcakes yesterday. And Friday she’s having a group of friends join her at a bounce place for a few hours of jumping around, pizza, and cake. Five does not suck, at least for her.

So how is C.? As I seem to always say, C. is C.. She’s our Most child. She’s the most sweet and the most maddening. She’s the most focused when in the right mood, and the most easily distracted the rest of the time. She’s the most girly and the most tomboyish. She’s the most emotional. She’s the most silly. The most likely to be doing something she shouldn’t. Whatever she does, chances are it’s going to be off the charts in one direction or another.

She’s come a long way this year at school and we’re excited to see her blossom when she hits kindergarten next year. She will do the same thing M. did: go through kindergarten at preschool then repeat it the following year at M.’s current school. That worked well for M., and while C. isn’t as young in her class as M. was, it feels like she could use that extra year even more than M. did.

I remember just before C. was born being worried about how I would learn to love a second child as much as I loved my first. Turns out it was easy, as it was easy to learn to love #3 when she came along. C. doesn’t always make it easy for us 1, but I’m quite proud of our little five-year-old.

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Yesterday she nearly ran off the sidewalk in front of a car, sprayed Pledge all over the kitchen floor, soaked two towels while “getting a drink of water”, pouted the entire time we were walking through the mall, left the house without a jacket, took one of L.’s toys from her. I blame her for my slightly elevated blood pressure. ↩

Bond

May 17, 2011 / DB

Did I jump off the Bond Bandwagon? Nope. Between watching the Royals most nights and keeping up with my Thursday shows, it’s been tough to watch movies lately. My slight reluctance to tackle the next Bond movie didn’t help.

I remember hearing, when I was a kid, that some people thought George Lazenby was the best Bond ever. Back then, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was rarely, if ever, shown on TV. So I had no opinion. I thought it strange for people to say that when he only did one Bond movie. But what the hell did I know, I was a kid, right?

Despite that, I wasn’t thrilled about watching Majesty. Probably because pretty much no one says that about Lazenby anymore, and it’s tough to find anyone today saying much good about the movie. Throw in it’s nearly 150 minute run time, and I struggled to push the play button on Netflix. But finally I did, and broke the movie into two nights.

I don’t want to say it’s a terrible movie, because it’s not. It’s not good, though, either. It’s certainly the weakest of the Bond movies I’ve watched so far. It’s also the most different, and I give it credit for attempting to break the mold in some ways, even if it failed in those attempts.

You know it’s going to be a rough go from the opening scene. A woman passes Bond on the road and he takes off after her. She parks at a beach and walks into the water, for reasons we don’t know. Bond races in to stop her from her slow, apparent suicide attempt, and is then attached by a couple men. After he defeats them, in a fight scene full of cartoonish camera work, the woman escapes and takes off in her car. Lazenby shrugs, looks at the camera, and says, “That never happened to the other fellow.”

What. The. Fuck?

Sure, it’s the first non-Connery Bond film, but Lazenby is still James Bond. Yet he has both acknowledged another actor playing the role and completely undermined Bond’s sense of cool five minutes into the movie. Again, I ask: What. The Fuck?

Where the movie attempts to break into new ground is by being a story about a relationship at its core, rather than a pure action/spy movie. It’s kind of a dumb love story, and one that operates on some very flimsy logic. But hey, they tried. I can see how people in 1969 might have been surprised and interested in a Bond movie that was unlike any other.

Our old friend Ernst Blofeld shows up again, this time played by Telly_Savalas. Blofeld’s latest plot is to destroy the human race through some potion he’s concocted that will render people sterile. Not terribly ridiculous when you think about some of the other dumb things Bond has chased. What is ridiculous, though, is that Bond and Blofeld, upon their first meeting, act like they’ve never met before. So we have two new actors playing recurring roles, we’ve established links to the franchise’s past, and somehow these two arch rivals act like they’ve never seen each other before?

Just dumb. I give up.

OK, Lazenby has his moments, but most of the movie is jarring when compared to Connery’s easy mastery of the role. That was bound to happen to the first actor who attempted to step in, but Lazenby feels out of his element here. Interesting to note that Timothy Dalton was the first actor offered the role, and he turned it down thinking he was too young for the part. 20 years later he indeed became Bond, for a short and controversial stint.

Bond Girls:

Lazenby got the shaft. I hate to sound shallow, but Bond Girls are supposed to be smokin’ hot sex kittens. Diana Rigg, who plays Countess Tracy di Vicenzo Draco, ain’t that. She’s not ugly, but she’s certainly no where near Ursula Andress or Claudine Auger’s class.

Even the secondary Bond girls are nothing to write home about.

Strange story, awful directing, poor acting, sub-par Bond girls. It’s as if they wanted Lazenby to fail. In hindsight, with it being his only Bond movie and Connery returning for Diamonds Are Forever, maybe that’s exactly what they wanted.

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The Future Is Now

May 12, 2011 / DB

You would think I learned my lesson already. I was unreasonably excited about Josh Selby’s arrival at KU last fall, and downright giddy the day he debuted against USC. That didn’t work out so well, after the first five games or so.

Four years ago, I was pumped for Alex Gordon’s arrival in Kansas City. That excitement quickly disappeared and did not return until this season, when Gordon seems to have finally figured things out. ¹

Yet, there I was Friday night, giddy again over a young kid with a lot of potential. This time it was Eric Hosmer, the first baseman called up by the Royals on Thursday. We’ve heard the raves for months and now, at least a month ahead of schedule, here he was in the Majors.

I wasn’t the only one. 10,000 people bought tickets to Friday’s game after Hosmer got promoted. The crowd stood at saluted him during every at bat that night. Each time he made contact over the weekend, the anticipatory roar was a little louder than normal. When he cracked a deep drive off the top of the fence Sunday, radio announcer Ryan Lefebvre’s voice rose an extra level or two, conveying the drama of the moment. One Royals blogger even wrote that Hosmer would “probably” hit his first home run this week, into the short right field porch at Yankee Stadium. Imagine that, assuming a rookie up less than a week will go to Yankee Stadium and hit his first homer, and it doesn’t seem completely crazy.

You can excuse us for being excited. It’s been a long, slow, well-documented slog from the 1985 World Series, Bo Jackson’s arrival in 1986, and those last few years of contention before the 1994 season ended early. There have been few moments of hope since then.

Johnny Damon arrived with some hype, and even did a famous commercial with George Brett. But I don’t remember people thinking he would turn the franchise around by himself. The Royals did all they could to get rid of Mike Sweeney before he finally earned a chance to play. Carlos Beltran arrived with Carlos Febles, and it was more about Dos Carlos than Beltran that season. Alex Gordon was the Can’t Miss Kid and people were excited about him, but he was a singular talent rather than the beginning of a wave of prospects like Hosmer. And Gordon sucked from his first at-bat.

Thus, I think it’s safe to say no Royal has ever arrived with as much hype, with as much anticipation, with as much pressure as Hosmer. It’s asking a lot for a 21-year-old to immediately become the face of the franchise, it’s best player, and the leader in the clubhouse. But it feels like that’s what is expected of him.

Based on his first few games, it looks like he’s both worthy of the hype and capable of dealing with it. His approach at the plate is unlike any Royal prospect I can remember. The guys who came up under Tony Muser were famous for hacking at the first hittable pitch they saw. Gordon had gigantic holes in his swing and couldn’t help but swing when the pitcher attacked those spots. Tuesday night, Hosmer watched six pitches go by without swinging, calmly earning a walk with a runner on late in the game.² No way would Damon, Sweeney, Beltran, or Gordon have been patient enough to keep their bats on their shoulders in that situation.

I think Hosmer is indeed different than all those others. And it helps that he will be joined by more hitters and a lot of pitchers in the next couple years. It isn’t just up to him, or the offense, to turn the franchise around. Based on his demeanor, I think he’s prepared and comfortable to be the first one up.

I just hope my giddiness isn’t misguided. Again.

Update: I wrote most of this during the day on Wednesday. Wednesday night, Hosmer did what was expected: crushed a pitch into deep right field for his first Major League home run. A few hours later his sacrifice fly plated the winning run in an 11-inning win over the Yankees. So far, so good.

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Although he’s in the midst of a cold streak and is getting the night off as I write this. ↩
The Royals being the Royals managed to load the bases and still not score in that inning. ↩

2:21

May 8, 2011 / DB

In case you missed my recent ramblings about my training schedule, I ran 13.1 miles Saturday. It went pretty darn well, all things considered.

First, the important thing. Not only did I finish but I did so in 2:21. So I was slow, but that was expected. I was pleased to break 2:30, although it was another sobering reminder of my age. When I ran a half-marathon 11 years ago with a sore hamstring in pouring rain in hilly Kansas City, I got in in 2:05. The good thing about my time Saturday is I feel like I could have gone a little faster. It’s always better to feel like you could have gone faster than go too fast and limp to the finish.

It was a perfect day for running. Mid-50s when the race began, with a little bit of sun but lots of clouds on the western horizon. The clouds moved in quickly and we were running in rather dreary conditions. At roughly the halfway point it began to drizzle, which turned into a light rain that continued until I finished. If you have to run in rain, this was the kind of rain to run in. No downpours, no gusts of winds. Just a steady rain that kept you cool.

Much like my experience in the Chicago Marathon in 2001, a lot of the Mini Marathon was about dealing with the congestion on the course. With 35,000+ people running, there was never a time when you could just run flat out in a straight line. The first 2-3 miles were especially tough, with lots of people who started before me walking in groups. I had to pass one group of seven people who were walking, stretched across the street. Come on, people!

Perhaps the coolest thing about the Mini is that you get to run a lap at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. You start downtown, run almost six miles to Speedway, cross into the infield, then work your way out to the main track. I have to say, it’s pretty cool. And I was struck, again, by the vastness of the speedway and the narrowness of the racing surface. It’s hard to believe three Indy cars can race side-by-side at 220 MPH on a space that narrow. The other cool thing about the track is, once you exit, you’ve knocked out about 2.5 miles.
I was struggling a little when I got to the track. I had some tightness in the back of one knee and pain in the other knee. But but the time I got through the tunnel and onto the track, everything loosened up and I felt great. I didn’t wear a watch to do splits, but I would imagine I had a few 12 minute miles in the first five and was closer to 10 minute miles from 6-11.

My big worry, of course, was how my training would carry me through race day. Would my muscles and joints rebel at being pushed well past the eight miles I completed on my longest training run? Would I run out of energy? None of that happened. In fact, I felt great in the second half of the race. Lots of energy, legs felt good, and really cruised along. I wanted to run faster but didn’t push it because of the rain, which made the roads slippery, and some slight barks from my hamstrings that I shouldn’t go much faster if I wanted them to cooperate for the rest of the race.

I kicked it in for the last quarter mile, got my medal and bag of food and had my picture taken, then suddenly the sun burst out. It turned into a gorgeous day. S. and two of her sisters came in about half an hour behind me. No injuries in our group. Just some sore muscles and maybe a blister or two. We spent most of the rest of the day on the couch and went to bed early. Sunday I felt better than I felt after my previous two long running events. I remember not being able to walk down stairs after running a full marathon because my quads were so sore. This time, it just felt like I had run hard the day before.

So another entry for the back of my lifetime baseball card. That’s two half marathons, one marathon, two triathlons. What’s next? I thought about running a very nice fall half marathon here in Indy, and in fact this year there are two different ones to choose from. But when I looked at how a training program would line up, I’d pretty much be starting up again right after we get back from our family vacation next month. Suddenly doing a second long race this year didn’t seem nearly as tempting.

Rather than train for a specific event, I think I’m going to begin a 5K training program in early June. I won’t aim for a particular race, but will go through a 12-week program and hope to see some improvements in my speed over shorter distances. I’m not sure what a realistic goal is since I haven’t run a 5K in a few years. Really it’s more about committing to a program so I’m always thinking about what my next run is, instead of just telling myself “OK, I need to run three times this week.” If I’ve learned anything from the past six months, it’s that I need to stick to some kind of cardio program and can’t just rely on going to the gym to burn calories.

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