C25k Week 5

This week's intervals are 3 min run/90 sec walk, then 5 min run/2.5 min walk then repeat.

Week 5, Day 1 - Wow, talk about stiff... I felt like the tin man for the first interval. I could practically hear my joints creaking when I started running. It didn't help that I didn't check to see what the intervals were before I started, so I had no idea what to expect. The first 3 minutes felt like an hour. I also didn't change my route to account for the longer run intervals  so I wound up finishing on a 1/4-mile-long uphill stretch. I thought I was going to die.  Distance: 2.11 miles

Week 5, Day 2 - Still stiff on the start, but better than yesterday. Changed my route, too. First interval time was terrible, so I tried to pick up the pace on the rest, but just couldn't make up the deficit. Distance - 2.08 miles

Week 5, Day 3 - Much better today. I didn't let myself slack on the first leg and managed to maintain my pace throughout the run. Got my overall pace, including the walking, down under 10 minutes. Now, is it wrong to tweak my route so that I finish on a downhill stretch? Distance - 2.18 miles

Week 5, Day 4 - I think I'm getting the feel for this. Pushed myself even more today. Extended my route another block in the first half to avoid doing switchbacks at the end. Didn't work though, because I bettered my pace again and finished in almost exactly the same place.  Distance - 2.23 miles

C25K Week 4

This week, the intervals change to 90s run, 90s walk, 3min run, 3min walk, then repeat. The app drops the last walk because the cool down doesn't need to come after a walk, so the total time without warm up and cool down is 15 minutes. The last 2 weeks have been 19 minutes, making this week considerably shorter.

Week 4, Day 1: Pretty good. Managed to pace myself right around the 9-minute/mile pace even through the 3 minute runs. Ran my usual course, though, and came up almost half-mile short of where I used to start the cool down. Didn't think about the shortened time. Wound up doing another 3 minute run during the cool down just to get closer to home. Distance: 1.36 miles

Week 4, Day 2: Definitely feeling better, though running at noon pretty much sucks. Adjusted my route to better fit the time frame. Unfortunately, I was having issues with the cell phone data network being slow or something because Pandora was majorly slow in loading between songs, which made it tougher to maintain a pace. Then, when I finished, the dumb thing said I had run 6.45 miles! Boy, don't I wish. 6.45 miles in 15 minutes is like a 2:30 pace. It turns out that the GPS had glitched and put me a couple of miles away for a second, so one of my intervals had a pace of 0:09! So, sadly, I don't know how far I ran...

Week 4, Day 3: Yes, morning is much cooler than midday. first 90 second interval was horrible. The timing made it all uphill and my pace was almost 11:00. :-/ After that, though, it got a lot better. managed to keep it close to 8:30 on each running interval. Distance: 1.42 miles.

Week 4, Day 4: Seriously??? 3167 miles??? I burned 41 million calories? I expect to see some results on the scale tomorrow... Stupid GPS. I know I kept a decent pace because I finished a few hundred feet further up the road than yesterday. Distance: 1.45-1.5 miles. 

C25K Week 3

Ok, So I'm a little slack on getting this posted...sue me. :)

I decided to repeat week 2. I spent the weekend stretching and resting, hoping to relieve to pain in my calves, but that didn't work, so I'm hoping it will work itself out, but I don't want to push it. The run/walk intervals are still 90/120.

Week 3, Day 1: Calves still hurt like hell. Now my right hip is sore, too. Managed to keep my pace up, though. Distance: 1.62 miles.

Week 3, Day 2: Feeling a little better. Figured out that squatting on the balls of my feet stretches the heck out of my calves right where it hurts, so I'm doing more of that, even though it feels like my leg is going to break. Despite the pain, I can't help pushing myself. Distance: 1.69 miles.

Week 3, Day 3: Ugh, not feeling it today. Trying to push, but just hurt and tired. shouldn't have taken yesterday off... Distance: 1.66 miles.

Week 3, Day 4: Much better today. Calves aren't hurting so bad, hip's not sore anymore. Was able to really push, especially right at the end. Distance: 1.76 miles.

C25K: Week 2

Well, my second week of Couch to 5K is done and it's really growing on me. Sort of like a fungus... Here's my log for the second week of training:

When I started this, I didn't really have a goal in mind other than to complete a 5k by running the whole distance. After week 1, I now want to do it in 25 minutes. That's about 8 minutes/mile. My pace on the running segments last week were down to under 7:30, so this seems achievable.

Week 2, Day 1: I woke up late. Had my alarm set for Monday @ 5am, but it's Sunday. I wasn't going to run, since Rebecca was coming home from work and would need to sleep, but she encouraged me to go. I was surprised at how disappointed I was that I wouldn't get to run... New week, new segment times, so 90 seconds running, 120 seconds walking, 6 segments. Not too bad. Distance: 1.75 miles

Day 2: Woke up late again. It's tough getting up so early. managed to keep my pace up around 8:00 consistently. Distance: 1.82 miles

Day 3: Right leg is hurting right below the meatiest part of my calf. Stretching more seems to help some. Tried resting it by taking yesterday off, but it didn't help.Tried to keep up the pace but was really hurting by the time I got done. Distance: 1.79 miles

Day 4: Both legs hurt today, though the right is worse than the left. Distance: 1.75 miles

Day 5: Maybe my goal of 35 minutes is a little ambitious... Maintaining the 8:00 or less pace is really tough with the way my legs feel. Slowed the pace to 9:30-10:00/mile. Felt pretty good, like I could maintain that pace for quite a while. Distance: 1.49 miles

Well, not exactly the results I'd hoped for after what felt like a pretty good start, but I have to remember that this is a process and it will get better over time.

Projects, projects, projects...

So with some of my now-free time, I have a bunch of building projects on my list of things to do this summer.

My first one is to build myself a wood shed. Right now, I have all our wood on racks on either side of the yard, but it's out in the open and not the sturdiest setup with the kids out there playing nearby.

I spent a couple of hours today looking through some shed-building books from the library and I think I've settled on a design. It's a fairly simple one, but should do the trick. The plans are for a roughly 6' wide x 2' deep x 4' high front/3' high back shed, so I'm going to scale it up to 16' W x 8' D x 8'/6' H. It will be wide open in front and back for air to flow through. When it's done, it should hold about 6 cords of wood, which should be enough to heat our house for a winter (which takes about 3 cords) and to season new wood for the next year.



Next, I'll adapt that same design to build a storage building/tool shed for equipment like our lawnmower, pressure washer, log splitter, various yard/garden tools, hoses, etc. It will be the same basic design except it will be on a concrete slab, completely enclosed and will probably have 2 sets of big barn doors. 

Third on my list is a chicken coop. Rebecca and I have wanted chickens for years and here in Greensboro, you can have one chicken for every 3,000sqft of land. since we have about 19,000sqft, we can have 6 1/3 chickens. No roosters, tho. And I'm not sure how you keep 1/3 of a chicken alive... I've been looking at a ton of coop designs and originally thought we might go with something portable so we could move the chickens around the yard and let their poop fertilize for us, but, honestly, we just don't want to bother with the moving and we don't care that much about the grass. Rebecca found a design that might be a tad large, but was designed with a few things that I really like. One is a slightly sloped floor to the nesting boxes so that the eggs roll out and through a slot just big enough that the chickens can't get to them. (Chickens sometimes start eating their own eggs, usually because they lack protein or calcium in their diet. And once they start eating their own eggs, it's nearly impossible to stop.) Another is self-feeding tubes that can hold a week's worth or more of both feed and gravel (yes, gravel. chickens eat it to aid digestion) so that you don't need someone to come take care of the chickens while you are out of town. There are a few other little things I like about it, so I think i may try to cut the width in half and add a run to the side where they put the lean-to.

Last, but certainly not least, the kids need a playhouse. Right now, the plan is to build a "boxcar", since the kids love trains and Olivia has been reading "The Boxcar Children" books. I'll probably just build a slightly smaller version of my tool shed and deck it out for them to make it look like a boxcar.

So you can see, I have a lot of work ahead of me this summer... If anyone's got some vacation time that they are just dying to blow on more work, let me know. ;)

Now I've done it...C25K Week 1

Rebecca came to me a week ago and asked me to find her an app for her phone. I asked what she was looking for and she said, "a couch to 5k trainer. I want to run a 5k." Now, I normally would have made fun of her and loaded the app on her phone, but some small, insane portion of my brain said, "Hey...if she can do that, so can I!" So I loaded the freaking thing on my own phone. Of course, just loading it doesn't mean I have to run, but loading it and telling my wife I did? Yeah. I'm gonna be running.

If you've never heard of Couch to 5K, it's a 9-week training regiment that gradually increases how far you run until you are consistently running 3.2 miles (or 5 kilometers, duh). It's only supposed to be a 3-day-a-week plan, but we've both decided that we will do it 6 days a week. The first week, though, since we started on Tuesday, was only 4 days.

So starting last Tuesday morning, this is how things went:

Day 1: Oh my God, I'm going to die. I can't feel my legs anymore. Oh, wait, now i feel them and they are on FIRE! Distance: 1.57 miles

Day 2: Really? This seemed like a good idea when? Why can't I breathe? Distance: 1.6 miles

Day 3: Other than my legs feeling like they were dragged into a wood chipper, this isn't so bad... Distance: 1.64 miles

Day 4: Legs still hurt, but I actually feel pretty good. Distance: 1.70 miles

Just for reference: I downloaded the free version of RunDouble for Android. I like it because it tells you when to start and stop running and gives you verbal updates on how far and fast you went on the segment you just finished. I also am using Pandora with a Portishead station. I'm actually quite surprised how good trip-hop is for running. I thought it might be too mellow and I would need to go with something heavier like metal, but I think the steady beats are good for pacing and help pass the time pretty painlessly.

A New Adventure

So I lost my job back in November of last year and the first thing I did was start looking for a new job. I have loved the career I switched to back in 2002 after leaving IBM: making things sound great. Whether it was running sound at church, recording demo CDs for friends or designing and installing sound systems for churches, it is something that has been thoroughly enjoyable for me. So losing my job in November was a crushing blow. I immediately looked to people in the business that I had connections with and none of them had a place for me.I searched a little farther afield and found AE Global Media in Charlotte. I sent them my resume and after 3 months of talking, wondering and waiting, they finally hired me in February to work on their installation team.

Within 6 weeks, I was promoted to Lead Installer and was given control of an installation project in Cranberry Township, PA. What followed was 2 of the busiest, toughest months we, as a family, have ever gone through. The job was exactly what I wanted: an opportunity to continue in my career on a larger stage with a chance at advancing. However, that opportunity came at a price. I was traveling every single week up and down the East Coast. I would leave Monday morning when Rebecca got home from working all weekend and usually come home Friday, just in time for us to spend one exhausted evening together before she went back to work on Saturday. The kids we always so excited to see me when I came home and so sad to say goodbye the following Monday. Rebecca was stressed having to deal with raising and educating our children alone. And if I had to work over a weekend, which happened about once a month, she had to find someone to babysit the children overnight on Saturday and Sunday nights. After 3 1/2 months, I started to see my career in a different light.

One of our goals was for me to be able to support our family on just my income, allowing Rebecca to quit her job as a nurse and stay home full-time. That was possible, but it meant me having to work at least 55 hours every single week to make ends meet. Then, on a long ride home from Baltimore, Rebecca and I talked for a while on the phone about our respective jobs and whether we could do that. I also looked at some of the other goals we have for our family and things we want to accomplish and decided that it was extremely unlikely that we could ever do the things we want so long as I was traveling so much. What are these goals? Well, you'll have to wait on those... :-)

We decided Rebecca would go to her manager and see how things stood in her department at work and whether they had any need for her to return to being a full-time nurse. Now, she has been working 2 nights a week or 48 hours per pay period and a full-time, weekend-option position involves working 60 hours per pay period, so from our perspective, it's only one more night every 2 weeks that she would have to work. Not a big jump. For me to match her earning potential, I would have to work more than double that many...more like 65 hours every single week. Unfortunately, she was told she would have to wait a week because her manager was out of town. That was a long, anxious week of waiting. We shouldn't have worried, though, because they jumped for joy at the thought of having her back. (As an aside to my former co-workers: Sorry guys, I didn't want to get into all this and have to explain it over and over, so it was easier just to say that Rebecca was getting a promotion. Ultimately, the results are the same: she makes more than I could in half the time and I don't have to travel...)

So on June 4th, I turned in my notice and left for my last trip to Cranberry Township, PA to finish the job I was running there. The whole time, it was hard not to think about how great it would be once I'm home and also how strange it would be. There were also twinges of regret because I would be giving up a career that I really love and I would have to stop working with some really great guys. On the last 2 days up there, I had the pleasure of getting to mix two services on the system we installed and, I have to say, that it what I will miss the most. It was the first time in 6 years that I have mixed a service and it was a ton of fun. It was a great way to finish out the job.

I've been home now for a full week and the strangest thing is waking up in the morning and not really knowing for sure what day it is because I don't have anywhere to be... It's a great problem to have. I get to see my kids every morning, eat with them, play with them, work alongside them in the yard, teach them and enjoy every moment with them, even the whiny ones. I have a "honey-do" list a mile long, though most of it is self-inflicted. I have planning to do on major projects that I've never attempted. Over the next few months, I'll try my best to detail them here, so keep coming back to see what's going on.