Resolution 1 - Run Half Marathon - Day Before Preview Blog

Tomorrow is the big race day when I compete in my first ever half marathon race in Fargo. Past couple of days I have been trying to get in the right mindset to prepare for this event I signed up for nearly five months ago. I found a video showing a bunch of highlights and shots throughout last year's course so I know what I am in for. Yesterday I watched one of my favorite sports movies, Hoosiers followed up by an excellent running documentary, Spirit of the Marathon to get my psyche on.

Right after I finish writing up this blog, I will be heading down to Fargo where they have a ton of activities going on the day before the race. There is a fitness expo that will be going on all day, as well as a 5K run where the race organizers were trying to sign up 10,000 people for the nation's largest 5K and raise money for shoes for kids in the area. There is a pasta and lefse feed that evening so everyone can load up on carbs the day before the race.

It is too bad the weather is not looking too pretty for race day. When I last checked it looks like it will be raining off and on tomorrow morning throughout race time. At least the temperatures will be ideal ranging in the 60s tomorrow morning. They also are doing live online tracking of runners this year, so if you happen to be online tomorrow morning between 7:30 and 10, click here and then click 'track runner' to see my progress. I am shooting to finish the half in under two hours. The fastest I have done before on my several practice runs is 2 hours and 18 minutes, but I got a feeling I will have that race day adrenaline going on for a big boost which helped me achieve my fastest 5k and 10k times earlier this year.

I am super excited and super nervous for the race tomorrow. I got a feeling I will love it no matter how awesome or awful I perform. That wraps it up for my preview blog, check back in a couple days and hopefully I will have a detailed rundown of the marathon experience.

Resolution 2 - Drop 23 Pounds in 104 Days - Almost, But Not Quite

According to my first entry under resolution 2, I had 104 days and 23 pounds to go on my quest t o get to 170 pounds come race day of Fargo Half Marathon. I sought to accomplish this by giving up pizza and fast food during that timeframe and just trying to generally eat better all together and amping up my running.

It is almost judgment day, I am 100 days in, and only four days to go until the half marathon so I thought I would post my progress thus far as I could see myself easily neglecting to do so in the final days of prepping up for the big race! So unfortunately it looks like I am going to miss my goal. When I started this goal, I was at 193 pounds, I weighed in today at 178. I guess I can go sit in a sauna for a few hours and just hardcore sweat off those remaining eight pounds, but that just would not sit well with me. Still though, dropping 15 pounds in 100 days still seems a little impressive in my book and it will greatly help me to perform my best on Saturday.

Last week I went in for my annual physical at the local plasma donating center, and one of the things they look for in dynamic changes over the year is irregular weight loss so I told the nurse right away I have been working out a lot and eating better and that I have dropped a lot of weight in the last year. Sure enough, a year prior I was at 225, and at the beginning of 2012 when I started working out I was pushing 240.

During this timeframe I only cheated my pizza plan once when I was visiting my cousin during my vacation in Milwaukee. She is a vegan, and we went out to eat at this nice Italian restaurant. She kept talking up how she was looking forward to this vegan Lavosh (sp?) pizza she gets there and how it is a special treat for her and I would have felt terrible if I refused the slice she offered me. I think I only had Lavosh once before, and this version seemed radically different. It was a very thin, flaky crust and had a special kind of sprinkled cheese and chopped tomatoes on it, and that was it. It was actually all right, but tasted nothing like the pizza I am accustomed to. So I only had one slice of pizza this past 100 days, and it was in all likelihood the single healthiest slice of pizza that is out there.

I am actually getting a lot of good natured grief from coworkers about my pizza quest, and they got me looking forward to having pizza again come Saturday. I already got plans to eat pizza at Rhombus Pizza shortly after the marathon, the same place where I had my last real slice of pizza a 100 days ago and next week a few coworkers want to hit up a pizza buffet in town to celebrate me vanquishing my quest. A little under a year and a half ago when I first went a 100 days without pizza, I never thought I would dare do it again. While I may have just missed my weight loss goal by 8 pounds (give or take a few come four days), I think it is another achievement and a half to go this long without pizza and fast food. I do not plan to over indulge right afterwards all the time, but that first week I can see myself having pizza two times....maybe three.

Resolution 5 - Go Back to College - Decided

Since I looked into going back into school two weeks ago, I have been changing my mind ostensibly every other day whether or not I should go back or not. I spent a lot of time these past two weeks looking into ways to make going to work and school both full time possible, and I believe I found a way to make it work. It would absolutely kill me, but I could make it work for a year.

Unfortunately, I will not though because I went with my gut in the end. Something I just cannot pinpoint told me I should not go all the way with this. I like radio/podcasting, but I do not love it, maybe a few years ago I would say otherwise, but in the end I decided that I do not want to pursue a career path in something I do not 100% want. Especially if I go through the process all over again of getting a degree and failing to capitalize on it like before. So while I am failing on my goal of going back to college, it is not like I ended up not giving it any thought and ignored the goal the entire year. These last two weeks I consulted several family and friends about it, and went to the campus and got all the information I needed about it and gave this matter a serious think. I just ended up deciding it was simply not for me, and by deciding on this matter in this fashion in a way I feel I achieved this goal.

I was talking to another coworker recently about starting another podcast sometime later on this year. We threw a few ideas around, but nothing concrete was set and told him it has only been two months since I ended On Tap and I still want a few more months of a reprieve from podcasting before going back to it again. In the end, I feel I will enjoy radio/podcasting more as an occasional hobby instead of a full on career. We shall see what the future holds for me.

Bonus Resolution 2 - Get Back Into Baseball - Complete!

Going back to elementary school from Kindergarten all the way through 5th grade I LOVED baseball. I think I loved all sports as a kid, but baseball definitely took the cake. We would talk about baseball to death at the lunch table in school, and many summer days were spent playing baseball in a little open field by the railroad tracks with several of the same neighborhood kids. The summers of 1992, 1993 and 1994 I have great memories of playing summer little league baseball.

Up until that time too I was huge into collecting baseball cards. Whenever I was brought along to the weekly trip to the grocery store, the only solace I would take in after being dragged around the store for a couple hours was a pack or two of cards awaiting me at the end when we got home and instantly scouring through them in hopes of getting a valuable card. I still got a little stack of my most valuable cards, even though they have greatly gone down in worth over the years.

Then a few things happened within a year to turn me off from baseball. The first big thing was the family started spending the first of several summers in a row at a farm. I did not mind the summer farm life, as a matter of fact I think I was the only one of my siblings that enjoyed it when I think back on it, but an unfortunate tradeoff was not being able to take part of summer league baseball and neighborhood pick-up games anymore.

The second of the three deathblows to baseball for me was by 1994, and within the span of a couple years the average price of a pack of baseball cards went up from around 50 to 75 cents to $2 due to Upper Deck taking over the market with their premium produced quality cards and everyone else following suit and upgrading to more expensive material to produce their cards out of. This had a crappy ripple effect to where my parents would no longer pick me up a pack or two of cards to shut me up at the grocery store and before I knew it my baseball card hobby went up in smoke.

The last blow to baseball capping off the hat trick for me was the baseball strike of 1994. As a kid in those elementary school years, I always greatly looked forward to the World Series, even doubly more so than the Super Bowl. At the playground and lunch table, our sports talk went through the roof regardless if the Twins were in the postseason or not. Of course they won the '87 and '91 World Series at the time so it definitely helped they were an awesome team in my impressionable years, but every year we would thoroughly dissect every game of the World Series. In 1994 MLB cancelled the rest of the season with the strike and as a result World Series was cancelled too, and as a then 11 year old kid getting that taken away from me felt atrocious at the time and I just could not go back to baseball. For nearly two decades, I only kept up with baseball from the occasional highlights or big news stories like the Sosa/McGuire home run race and Ripken and Bonds chasing down records. All the big steroid and PED scandals from the past decade helped refrain me from getting back into it too.

So what got me back into baseball? Well, it was a gradual process that started about a year and a half ago. My dad retired in the beginning of 2011, and started going to the local senior center with his newfound free time. They were putting together a bus to go down to the Twins game and back for only $50 a person, which included the ticket. It was my first time ever at a Twins game at the new Target Field, and I loved the experience. Even though there were no announcers and we did not have the greatest seats in the world, I was still easily able to make out what was happening and the atmosphere just got me into all the small little intangibles that took place over the course of a game. The 2012 season came and went and I found myself actually making a little bit of an effort to look into baseball scores on my own and occasionally see what was going on in the league. My mom's boyfriend is a huge Twins fan, and whenever I came over to visit, he was usually in the living room watching the Twins game and I would usually go over and watch a few innings with him. I ended up catching about a dozen or so Twins games this way. I also ended up having an awesome BBQ last year with a couple friends, one of which was a huge Twins fan and the other a huge Cubs fan and when they met in Interleague play we drank quite a bit, and when the Twins won in a nail biter in extra innings I celebrated by drunkenly ordering a throwback Paul Molitor Twins jersey I was debating on for a few months.

Baseball has been back in action for a month now, and I have been keeping up with it on a daily basis now in ways I have not since I was a child. Technology has made it easier, instead of grabbing the morning paper or waiting for ESPN or local news highlights to see if the Twins won, I take advantage of the MLB app on my phone for instant access to the box score and AP write up of the game. I found an awesome Twins podcast, Gleeman and the Geek to help keep me up on all the latest Twins news and analysis and other happenings around the league. I also promised myself to try and catch at least one Twins game a week and I have been making good on that promise so far.

I have caught about six or seven games so far either watching with my mom's boyfriend or at various sports bars/restaurants in town. A new sports bar just opened up a couple weeks ago within a few block of me and I made it there last weekend and loved the place. They had plenty of televisions and they quickly turned it to the Twins game I requested; it was also nice they had 30 beers on tap too.

So yes, a month into the season I have considered myself back on the baseball wagon and enjoying it like I have not in 20 years. Go Twinkies!!!!

Resolution 5 - Go Back to College - We Shall See

In 2009, I graduated Northland Community and Technical college with a Associates Degree in Liberal Arts with Journalism emphasis. Over the next two years I sent out countless resumes, but unfortunately did not hear back from a single one. I was still doing Internet writing for several different blogs and other websites on the side for free as I was doing for several years before that, but towards the end of 2011 in the span of a few months, as many Internet sites come and go, they almost all went buh-bye simultaneously. Combine that with never hearing back from a single resume after nearly two years removed from graduating and I had an epiphany that it was time to walk away from that career path.

Since 2012 I have been trying to readjust my focus on life and trying to make the right changes to become a better person. That is the whole point behind this blog, to overcome several lifelong challenges I have been too reluctant on to make the jump. As I mentioned in the intro blog, I have a list of all 13 resolutions pinned to my wall at home, and I have already crossed off five of them, and it feels great to cross off each one. So no matter how trepid I may be when it comes to facing some of these more daunting resolutions, my whole mantra making me through this is "fuck it, it is on the list!"

That brings us to resolution five: return to college. The only thing I give a modicum of a damn about right now as far as career paths go is radio. I am relieved I finally ended the podcast and can go forward from that, and part of me wants to try out for different parts of radio, namely talk radio and sports broadcasting. A couple years ago I sent a couple resumes out to some local radio stations with some podcast samples. I knew it was a long shot with no legitimate radio background, but part of me wanted to see if there was a shot down that path. Of course, I never heard back from them.

Northland does have a radio program, and one that can be completed within a year to boot. I went over to Northland earlier today for the first time since I sold my last set of books shortly after I graduated in 2009. I inquired about the program and picked up a reenrollment form. It is great to see the program is only two semesters, but the catch is that it is on their Thief River Falls campus which is an hour away. I did not fill out any forms and officially reenroll yet, but there is a bus that goes out there twice a day, and I have been going over all the logistics on how to make it work. After cramming out a bunch of options, I believe I have found a way to somehow go to work and class both full time, and it is absolutely going to kill me, but it is only going to be for a year.

For a couple hours I procrastinated on it and thought there is no way I can make this work, but now I am returning to the "fuck it, it is on the list mantra" as it stares me in the face as I type this. I went to school half time and worked 50 hours a week at two jobs previously for four years, so I guess I can do it all over again, though only for one year instead of four this time. I am going to give this a serious think for a couple more days before moving forwards, but right now I am leaning towards giving this a shot.

Resolution 1 - Run Half Marathon - Progress Update

It feels weird blogging about running in the wake of the horrific bombings at the Boston Marathon last week. Never would I have imagined for something like that to happen at the biggest race of the country. My thoughts and prayers goes out to all those affected by this. It was encouraging to see all the outreach and support by the runners immediately after the bombings. There were also a plethora of positive articles I read throughout the week on various and blogs and websites about how this will not get in the way of runners in future races and will not prevent us from doing what we love. I can only echo those sentiments.

A great example of runners coming together in support/honor of Boston, was the local running club in town organizing a 2.62 mile group run open for everyone the day after the tragedy. My friend Adam and I ran with the front of the pack throughout it, and we all wore special runners' bibs and ribbons in honor of Boston while most of the runners wore the blue and yellow colors of Boston. It was a great experience running in a group in that setting that I will never forget. The picture to the upper left is from the local paper in town covering the run where you can see my friend Adam on the second to the left, and you can see a third of my blurry face tucked behind some runners to the right.

Earlier today also marked the second official race I competed in. UND was hosting a 5K run for Autism that looped around the campus. The weather has been gorgeous today, and it was around 28 degrees on a sunny day at race time. Unfortunately, this past month it has still been snowing fairly consistently and for one quarter mile stretch early on in the race, and towards the end again when it looped back there was a horrible stretch of trail that was caked in ice and frozen snow that was nearly impossible to run around. I tumbled into another runner taking a fall, and luckily was able to collapse onto a snow bank to break my fall to the side, and also had several scary slips throughout the race and saw at least a few other runners wipeout too. It was surprisingly dangerous on this stretch of trail, and I am shocked the race coordinators did not have someone attempt to plow or break up the ice prior to the race.

Extraordinarily icy conditions aside, I felt pretty confident going into this race. I recall on the 10K I ran in February I ran about half of it nonstop at a relatively fast race pace before slowing down, so I went in with a strategy of really going full steam ahead for the entire race thinking I can keep the pace up. After that initial icy stretch, I amped it up and was making great headway to the point I was within the top ten for the first half of the race of approximately 125-150 runners. Then, after about three songs into my playlist I could hear myself breathing very hard and I was grasping for air with increasingly deeper and deeper breaths. I started to slow down, and managed not to have many runners pass me until the final mile when I played it very safe on that returning icy stretch.

The running app on my phone said I finished with a time of 27:11, though I think 26:30 is a little more realistic because I started the timer shortly before the race started, and went about a half minute before remembering to turn off the stop watch after I finished while I was desperately looking for a glass of water. I have no idea if official results will be posted online for this small race, but I would guess I finished around 30th and felt pretty good how I did, especially by how winded I was for the last half of the race. I think that is the hardest I have ever started off a run yet.

Falling down and going through those scary icy conditions aside, I had a great time, and there was a great group at the finishing line giving loud applause for everyone who finished that made it all worthwhile. I definitely got that competitive race day spirit in me; I just got to learn to control it and balance out my pace a little more so I am not gassed by the halfway mark again. It is just under a month away until the big half marathon in Fargo I have been training for since Christmas. Here is to hoping the town will not be flooded with our record breaking snowfall this winter, and that there will please be no icy conditions come race time.

4/22/2013 Update - Race results did get posted online, I ended up finishing 23rd out of 74 competitors with a time of 26 minutes and 22 seconds. Not as many people as I thought, but I also finished a little better than I did as well.

Resolution 9 - Clint Eastwood Quest - 30% Complete

Remember THE television drama of the 2000s, The Shield? In case you are not familiar with the show, it casts Michael Chiklis and Walter Goggins as the two main members of a Strike Team that is filthy corrupt, but you cannot help yourself to root for them because beneath all the shades of gray and money they put off to the side, they are still cops at heart and looking out for the greater good, no matter which side of the fence they may fall on. Kind of also like Dexter.

Bringing this back to Clint Eastwood, the third movie of the ten I am covering in his BluRay collection, Kelly's Heroes from 1970 (trailer) reminded me quite a bit of the central plot that ran across the second season of The Shield. In the second season, the Strike Team are making a routine bust on a gang of Armenians when they stumble into plans of the Armenian's legendary "money train" making a upcoming stop in the area. The whole remainder of the second season is the Strike Team setting up a private operation on the side to rob the money train in the heist of heists, and by the time of the season finale you could not help but be on the edge of your seat to see if they pulled off the heist. If you have not seen The Shield yet, I just saw all the seasons on sale at Best Buy for $10 each, go buy them now!

I can see where the writers of The Shield may have been inspired, because at the beginning of Kelly's Heroes, Eastwood's character, Kelly is interrogating a captured Nazi colonel. Kelly gets him drunk to the point of spilling the beans on a relatively weak division guarding a bank that contains over $14 million in gold. And this is in the 1940s, so who knows what inflation brings that up to today, I am abysmal in math so I will not even attempt to figure it out. Obviously you see where this is going as Kelly assembles a ragtag bunch of soldiers in a private operation of their own to rob the bank!

Kelly leads quite the cast of misfits featuring Don Rickles as Sgt. Crapgame who is always second guessing Kelly's commands and Donald Sutherland as Sgt. Oddball, who is quite the peculiar character to say the least, and Sutherland is a riot to watch in this type of character I have never seen him portray before! The film is quite long at nearly two and a half hours, but the setup and journey they go on for building up to the heist is well paced, and much like the second season finale of The Shield, I was completely glued in by the time they were ready to start the raid on the German bank. It brought back memories as a kid watching old World War II movies and getting all psyched up whenever a battle would break out, hey I guess that is what Kelly's Heroes is, but it is a damn good one to say the least.

This came out only two years later the last Clint movie I covered, Where Eagles Dare, but it holds up much better. I am no film expert, but compared to the previous film, I really like how this is shot and the overall cinematography is better all together, and I rarely seemed to be pulled out of the movie with dated special effects and camera tricks like I was a few times with Where Eagles Dare. It is weird, I always remember Eastwood as having a rep for his older films being classic westerns, but the oldest two movies in this collection are awesome World War II films, with at least one more to come later on with Letters from Iwo Jima. Of course I highly recommend this film, it is on Netflix, but through disc rental only. Amazon has it available in a ton of various collections on DVD and BluRay for pretty cheap as well. If you want to keep along with the same collection I am watching, Amazon has the 10 film BluRay collection going for $40 right now.