I should spend more time being thankful (to whomever) for the position I have reached in my life. I am fortunate enough to be paid to use my brain for a living. I work with computers, so I spend the majority of my time sitting at a desk, typing. It's really the job I was meant to have; even as a high school student I spent my summers doing data entry while my brother and my friends washed dishes and mowed lawns. Not to discount that, it's fine for a great many people. Just not me.
Where I work, like where most people work (hopefully), there are janitors. They are an odd lot, especially in my current place of employment. There's one bald janitor with a perpetual goofy smile on his face. He re-enacts this conversation approximately 350 times per day.
Worker: "Hey, Robert, how are you?"
Janitor: "I'm getting there! Not sure where there is though!"
This joke repeats itself like the Zapruder film scene from the movie "JFK." Again and again, all day. I only say hello to Robert. I refuse to ask him how he's doing and participate in his little yuk-fest.
There was another bald janitor here who had a bicycle decorated as a shrine to the late Thurman Munson, complete with photos, statistics, and even a little statue of him. This guy was constantly muttering to himself. He no longer works here, I suspect that he is crying somewhere in an Ohio cornfield.
My theory was that the two bald janitors were cyborg creations of one of the researchers here, a bald fellow himself who I was told studies artificial intelligence. He keeps trying to clone himself, my theory supposes, but got one clone too happy, another too surly, and so on. I'm looking forward to the sneezy and bashful bald janitor clones.
Then there's another janitor who reminds me of Shrek. He keeps giving me the prison yard love stare. I can't help but feel like he's looking at me in an attempt to magically transform my life into his and his into mine, like that movie with Jodie Foster and her mom from the 1970s (which sucked) or the movie with Kirk Cameron and Dudley Moore from the 1980s (which also sucked). So far his efforts to go all "switcheroo" on me have failed. AHA!
Not sure where I'm going with this, really. Pick up your own trash, give these guys a break, or they'll haul you off to their basement and put you in a bell jar.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
The Ten 5k Challenge, Race #5 Recap (Beaver Lake Run)
This past Sunday I ran the 10th annual Upstate Chiropractic Beaver Lake 5k Run.
Beaver Lake Nature Center is a beautiful state park about 20 minutes west of where I live. Our family goes there every year the weekend after Labor Day for their Annual "Golden Harvest" Festival. They have a lot of smaller trails around this lake that are nice for nature walks. This race was once around a 3 mile loop that encircles the entire lake, with a little bit of extra distance tacked on at the beginning to make it a 5k.
I looked at last year's times and noticed that the winner of this 5k last year finished in just under 18 minutes. This is about two minutes slower than most of the other races I've run, and so I expected my finish time to be a bit slower than my practice runs.
The weather was overcast, a little muggy but mostly a nice day for running. I felt good going in, my back was still a bit tight but nothing serious.
After the race started the runners spread out into a thin line. There were about 120 runners, or so I estimated, and I fairly early on found my pace. I thought maybe I ran a little hard out of the box as I got tired early, like 6-7 minutes in, and dialed it back a bit.
I passed a few people in the first mile and then found myself alone in the woods, running, like Rudy from the movie "Meatballs." It was nice, actually. The trails were narrow and soft and often broken up by wooden plank-style boardwalks through the swampier parts of the trail.
No water breaks and no mile markers made it tough for me to know how I was doing, so I tried just to keep a steady pace. By the 20-22 minute mark I was getting caught and passed by a runner or two. I did my best to not let it affect my pace, but by the 22 minute mark or so I was gassed.
I hit the home stretch and saw that I was just crossing the 25 minute mark, as I could see the timers' clock from the clearing once I hit the end of the trail. I got caught by one last runner, an older gent with grayish hair, before crossing the finish line at 25:20. I finished 32nd out of 115 runners. My slowest race time of the year, two seconds slower than my first 5k in April.
Many of the other folks were saying the same thing after the race, that they were 1-2 minutes off their usual running pace. I suspect that the race is longer than 5k as I run that exact distance enough to know when I'm extending beyond it. Plus, the soft trails don't give you that same spring that pavement does. Anyway, it was a fun race and I'm looking forward to my next one, a week from Sunday, as it's a return to downtown Syracuse and good old street racing.
Beaver Lake Nature Center is a beautiful state park about 20 minutes west of where I live. Our family goes there every year the weekend after Labor Day for their Annual "Golden Harvest" Festival. They have a lot of smaller trails around this lake that are nice for nature walks. This race was once around a 3 mile loop that encircles the entire lake, with a little bit of extra distance tacked on at the beginning to make it a 5k.
I looked at last year's times and noticed that the winner of this 5k last year finished in just under 18 minutes. This is about two minutes slower than most of the other races I've run, and so I expected my finish time to be a bit slower than my practice runs.
The weather was overcast, a little muggy but mostly a nice day for running. I felt good going in, my back was still a bit tight but nothing serious.
After the race started the runners spread out into a thin line. There were about 120 runners, or so I estimated, and I fairly early on found my pace. I thought maybe I ran a little hard out of the box as I got tired early, like 6-7 minutes in, and dialed it back a bit.
I passed a few people in the first mile and then found myself alone in the woods, running, like Rudy from the movie "Meatballs." It was nice, actually. The trails were narrow and soft and often broken up by wooden plank-style boardwalks through the swampier parts of the trail.
No water breaks and no mile markers made it tough for me to know how I was doing, so I tried just to keep a steady pace. By the 20-22 minute mark I was getting caught and passed by a runner or two. I did my best to not let it affect my pace, but by the 22 minute mark or so I was gassed.
I hit the home stretch and saw that I was just crossing the 25 minute mark, as I could see the timers' clock from the clearing once I hit the end of the trail. I got caught by one last runner, an older gent with grayish hair, before crossing the finish line at 25:20. I finished 32nd out of 115 runners. My slowest race time of the year, two seconds slower than my first 5k in April.
Many of the other folks were saying the same thing after the race, that they were 1-2 minutes off their usual running pace. I suspect that the race is longer than 5k as I run that exact distance enough to know when I'm extending beyond it. Plus, the soft trails don't give you that same spring that pavement does. Anyway, it was a fun race and I'm looking forward to my next one, a week from Sunday, as it's a return to downtown Syracuse and good old street racing.
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