The Adventures of Cowboy Hazel

As of today, I’ve run more this March than any other month since October 2003. And I still have another week to add more mileage. Even so, I’m not going to make the 100 mile goal that I set for myself. I’m at 59.3 now and will probably end up at about 80. I think I may have been overly idealistic when expecting to suddenly bounce back to hundred mile months. I had forgotten how much pain comes along with them. And I think I underestimated the damage that I did to myself by smoking for so long. I’ve been having some serious issues with fatigue on my runs lately that I can’t explain. I should be in better shape than I am for how much I’ve been running lately. Yesterday, I met up with a fellow East Harlem runner that I found through NYRR and nearly died trying to keep up with him. We finished a loop of the park in 7:04 miles, which shouldn’t be that difficult for me to do, but I was having serious troubles. Today, I ran almost eight miles, but my pace was a miserable 7:21. I have the Scotland Run 10K coming up on Sunday and was hoping to get a sub 42 minute time on it, but now I’m thinking that that may not happen. Then the Bolder Boulder is only two months away and I want to beat 42 minutes on that too. But there’s the elevation and I’m not even sure I could do that here at sea level now. I have my work cut out for me over the next two months. Of course, all of this is just chickenfeed compared to marathons. My name is in the lottery for this year’s New York City Marathon and I am, needless to say, nervous to find out if I’m going to be running it. Furthermore, I’m nervous to see if I’ll actually be able to get myself in that kind of shape by November. I used to think that it was a given, but now with the fatigue and cramps and everything I’ve been experiencing lately, I’m wondering if I’ll really be able to get there. Maybe I missed my window. Maybe Tybee Island was it.

Sorry if I lost you there. I’m guessing that most of the people reading this know the significance of Tybee Island has for me. For those of you that don’t, Tybee Island, Georgia is the place where I was supposed to run my first marathon back in 2002. It didn’t happen. I got pneumonia a month and a half before the race and wasn’t able to keep up with my training. Not running that marathon has been hanging over my head and haunting me ever since. Of course, this has a lot to do with the fact that I’m considering marathons again. I almost wanted to go back and do Tybee first, but I decided that New York would be more memorable (and practical) considering my present geographic situation. But if I don’t get picked in the lottery this year, I’ll probably end up running Tybee in February ‘09.

Enough talk about running. What else has been going on lately? Let’s see… My sister came to visit for three days. It was a good trip. We wandered around the city a lot (we mapped it out and it came to a total of 25 miles), taking lots of pictures (I got 150, she had at least twice that), and just generally acting like tourists. It was good to get out and explore the city. I worked across the street from Rockefeller Center for a year but never went up to the Top of the Rock before this week. The views were amazing, by the way. And I hadn’t even seen the Statue of Liberty in God knows how long before we went down and rode the ferry out to Staten Island to get lunch. It was good to see my sister too. But, we really don’t have a lot in common and it makes it really tough to connect with each other. I mean, I sincerely enjoyed having her out here but I didn’t really know what to say to her. I sensed the same feelings coming from her. I was talking to Stoltz about this today and he thinks the lack of sibling closeness may be a Colorado thing. I wish I could come up with the direct quote of what he said because it was good, but it slips my mind. It was something along the lines of everyone out there is more introspective and that makes them associate with others less. Something like that. Like I said, what he actually said sounded better.

Of course, taking Monday through Wednesday off to bum around the city left me with a lot of work to catch up on. I spent Thursday and Friday working for Precision Prospects and then yesterday and today working on my own projects, namely restructuring my entire database schema for the Lantenengo Network. The thing that sucks about it is that there is almost no visible difference to show for the 15+ hours that I spent working yesterday and today. I do have a vastly improved internal record keeping system now, though, and that’s something that I’ve been needing. Now, I can easily visualize how many visitors each of my sites has had in the past 24 hours, week, month, etc. This is very important for the growth of my network. I can see what’s working and what’s not. Right now, East Coast Runners is the big king. So, my immediate plan is to work on promoting it, improving it, and making it even more popular. Then, I’ll go back and work on the other sites that are attracting less visitors. Some might go for helping out the floundering sites, but not me. I want to build up what’s good and make it great and then, if I have the time, fix the stuff that’s not as good. Another big benefit of the changes I made today is that enabling my sign-in functions is now much simpler on new sites because I standardized everything. So, I should be able to get the sign in part of Plant Ink up and running tomorrow and finally get the car mileage chart and vote functions back and working.

I had planned on writing about the whole Bear Stearns fiasco, but I don’t really have the energy for that now. Let me just say that this is only the first of many such failures — the finance industry is a house of cards that has been built up far too high and is about to collapse. My only hope is that the people responsible for these catastrophes get dragged down along with all us “common folk.”

I’m tired. I need sleep. I’m done. Good night.