Keith Booe

I used to love running.  Now, I’m to the point where I don’t even want to be around it.

We ran in the Marine Corps.  A lot.  A WHOLE lot.  Twice a year you had to take the PFT, which included a three mile run, and people use to say “I run twice a year”, and that was usually when people went all out.  But despite that saying, in between those tests, we ran.  A lot.

It wasn’t until a few years ago I found out that I had a severely deviated septum.  One side of my nose was almost completely closed, so that affected my ability to breathe.  Which affected my ability to run easily.  Which affected my desire to run.

So I had it fixed (not just for the running aspect, but that is the purpose of this post, so we’ll stick with that).

My running did indeed get easier.  So I started to run more.  Like others, I loved the benefit that comes from running and the feeling of accomplishment once you finish a new challenge, and since I enjoy my alone time as much as the next person (maybe more)… it was something that worked for me.  I trained for a couple of marathons, did some intermittent races… nothing special.  Josh Cox and Meb probably shouldn’t be worried about me any time soon.

Then, like many others, I started to get IT Band problems and a whole litany of other running ailments.  I’ve followed the prescribed methods to get rid of them, and for the most part I have.  So I kept running, and felt good about the “overcoming”.

I’ve been in ruts before… burned out from training, or just too rigid of a schedule so there was no enjoyment in it… and the usual “take a break and relax” worked after a couple of weeks.  This time… not so much.

My last marathon was a year ago.  My next scheduled one is forty-two days from now.  The thought of doing this one actually annoys me.  Natch… I loathe it.  I’ve been shirking my training in favor of doing remodeling on our house, going the gym, go into work earlier than normal (actually, a valid point considering how busy we are at work).  Basically any excuse I can find to NOT run is good enough at this point, so it really hasn’t been an overtraining thing.  Believe me, overtraining is NOT the problem at this point.

I think running has become something I had to do… and not in the way that I had to do it to feel better, that I needed my “fix”… it’s more that “I have to do it because I signed up to run another marathon”, which takes much of the enjoyment out of it for me.  And if you’re going to do something because you have to, and not solely because you want to… well, they call that a job, and I already get sixty hours of that therapy each week.

Or maybe it’s the thought of being in Vegas at a time when it’s so cold that the pools are closed… I mean, really what is the effing point of being in Vegas with no pools available?!

So, this is something I need to figure out.  Not even sure why I wrote this… as I read it, it’s a bunch of aimless rambling… maybe when I read it again later (admit, you go back and look at your own blog posts sometimes) I’ll have a “no-shit-why-didn’t-you-see-that-[facepalm]” epiphany.  Probably not, but one can hope.

In the meantime, in the words of that great American philosophizer Forrest Gump’s Mama… “Life is like a box of chocolates…”

So I think I’ll go sit on the couch and enjoy life.

She met him after work…

The chariot awaits...

They walked through the park…

The park...

Past a romantic dinner candle Mother Nature provided…

Thanks, Mom!

To the beach…

They found Supergirl on the beach...

Where they enjoyed an impromptu picnic…

Grub-a-dub-dub

That, while almost crashed by some… undesirables…

They'll let *anybody* in this place...

Was still a beautiful night to watch the sunset…

oooohhhhhh..... aaaahhhhhh.....

Which drew nearer…

Appreciate the beauty of what's in front of you...

The clouds made a last minute substitution for the horizon, as the sun disappeared…

Sunsetus horizonus interruptus...

Departing from a beautiful, straight-line horizon that says the world, while flat, goes on forever…

Thar be monsters there...

The end.

Rode the train in to work today.  When I ride the train I sometimes run into a couple of people from work, and we have a good chat.  If I’m riding “alone”, I usually read a book, listen to music,  work on some side projects, or sometimes, just stare at the ocean.

Today I boarded and took a seat across the aisle from a young (mid-late twenties) woman who had a toddler (2-3), an infant she was feeding, and a whole bunch of bags.  She was rather harried looking, and her toddler was loudly announcing everything he was seeing out the window, climbing on and off the seats, and trying to ignore his mother telling him to stop licking the window.  The child was precocious, to say the least, and the mother, well aware that people were looking at her with annoyance, was doing her best to try and keep the child contained.  I took my notebook and some colored highlighters from my bag and offered them to her, in case she thought they may help with her son.  She tried, they didn’t, so with a slight smile and thank you, she returned them.

At the next station a man wearing a suit and carrying his laptop bag, talking loudly on his mobile, took the seat directly across from me, and subsequently, across the aisle from the the loud child.  Clearly he was an important person, as the volume at which he carried on his conversation (which consisted of him chastising the other party of his conversation) made it clear.  It seemed like he and the child were in an competition to see who could drown the other out.  The young mother was continuing to try and control the child, but after this fourth stop, the car was full (which was surprising considering today is a holiday).

The businessman was clearly exasperated at the thought the child may be interfering with his conversation, and shot several dirty looks in the direction of the family.  The mother, seeing these from this person and some others, increased her efforts to quiet the boy, and seemed on the verge of tears.

As I looked out the window, I saw in the reflection  the man turn to the young mother, and heard:

“You really need to control that child and quiet him down.”

The young mother immediately flushed deep crimson, I’m not sure whether with embarrassment or anger, but she was taken aback and momentarily speechless.  I however, was not.  Looking directly at the man, I responded for her:

“Shut your pie hole and mind your business.”

Turning his head he looked ready to respond, but thought better of it.

There was a bit of an awkward silence around us as people weren’t sure how to react, but that seemed to make him uncomfortable enough that he decided he should move elsewhere, and did.  I’m glad, since I could easily see this clown pushing my buttons more than I cared to have them pushed.  Muttering to himself (no doubt questioning my parent’s marital status), he walked to the lower level of the car.

The young mother looked at me, smiled while still suppressing her tears, and went back to trying to manage her son.

Since I was getting off at the next stop, I offered to help her move her stuff down to the lower level, to make it easier for her get off the train when she got to their stop.  She said her husband was meeting her and would help her, and that her son was more quiet when he had the distraction of view from the higher level.  She thanked me again as I went down the stairs to exit the train.

I don’t know why I’m typing this out… I guess it bothers me that there was once a time I could have been the guy bitching at the young mother.  And I hope if I ever did that, someone was ready to check me, and help another.

On the off chance the man ever reads this, it was nothing personal, and maybe we’ll have a conversation next time.

And on the off chance the lady on the train ever reads this… you were doing a damn good job with your children.

I’ve made some pretty good progress on my fairly recent undertaking to get back in shape.  I don’t blog all aspects of it because, quite frankly, I don’t like feeling that I *have* to blog.  And there are already about two hundred quadrigazillion blogs about people doing similar things.

But a funny thing happened on my way to losing another pound…  I was inadvertently reminded how much I’m bothered by people who think they need to congratulate “star performers”, while ignoring the “everyman”.  Don’t get me wrong… I’m not one of those “Hey, good job, you got out of bed today, you’re a WINNER” types.  But I AM one of those “you’re putting in effort above what you’ve done before, and I hope you stick with it” types.

Here was my workout set list for  last night:

• Reverse lunge with twist and press
• Physio-ball cobras superset with tricep kickbacks
• Physio-ball planks with forward/backward roll
• Wipers
• Straight-leg deadlifts
• Bent-leg deadlifts
• Core rows
• Dumbbell curls
• Shoulder shrugs
• Physio-ball bridge curl
• Physio-ball leg curls
• Physio-ball pushups

I skipped my normal cardio (knee was hurting a bit so decided to take it easy on the run), and sat in the sauna for a little bit (I so wish that Americans were as “reverent” to the sauna environment as the Europeans… meaning just shut the hell up and enjoy the soak).  I was pretty toasted after my workout (the one the night before had been similar, but with more core work), when something interesting happened…

One of the trainers at our gym walked by and said to me “You’re shredding on those workouts, you can really tell they’re paying off.”  Now Alex is one of this misleadingly studly guys… very unassuming, but he does free-running, all kinds of crazy gymnastic balance stuff, and his workouts are just insane.  I have muscles that I didn’t know I had get tired just from observing some of his workouts.  To have him say that to me was very motivating and I thanked him.

While in the sauna I started to think about something…

For obvious reasons, trainers are always motivating those they work with, and these guys have seen me around the gym enough to know I’ve been putting in my time.  But I realized that over the past couple of months other regular gym goers have been saying something to me on occasion as well.  And that was when it hit me…

People will walk right past someone who is significantly larger and clearly putting in a whole LOT of effort to the workout, and not think at all about motivating them.  Yet go out of their way to acknowledge someone else who already *knows* they’re putting in a lot of work.  This is clearly something that is “evolutionary” from when we felt the need to be associated with the biggest guy for protection, or the girl most appealing to bear our children… and now it’s egotistical, where we need to make sure the “cool kids” know we know who they are (stupid high school behavior).

Having been the fat guy, I know that it was a helluva lot harder for me to take that first step back into the gym and get in a routine, or to start with my walking (eventually working my way up to run marathons) than it is for me to gut out one of my workouts now.  Sure, I’m more efficient in my workouts, and can sustain a higher level of effort longer, but I’m certainly not putting in more effort.

And I think of the mental effort… I cut an hour off of my last marathon time from the one I ran before that.  And the only real pain I had on this last one was my ITB, where the one I ran before I fought through cramps and all of the things that go with the fat guy (or “Clydesdales”, as we’re called in the running world) struggling through 26.2 miles.  It was so much more of a struggle to make it through that last hour of my previous marathon than it was to finish the last five miles of the one this past October, even with someone stabbing me in the side of the knee with a screwdriver every time I set my foot down.

And I remember back to when I first started working out again, somewhat self-conscious and struggling both mentally and physically.  And I would have loved to have someone who had been doing it for a while, someone who wasn’t paid to say it, tell me that my effort was obvious.  Sure, my trainer did… but at those rates, he damn well better be telling me that.

Thus, while it’s not “cool” or “manly” to acknowledge those people nearly as much as it is to try and be associated with “peak” performers, I’ve decided that I don’t have to be a trainer to help motivate someone else.   So I try to acknowledge those people who I see have started out and stuck with it.  I’m not talking about the “resolvers” that have already started to disappear.  I’m talking about those people who have been gutting it out, and are making progress, but no one talks to because they’re NOT “peak” performers.

And while it’s doubtful that a few words from me in the gym is going to change anyone’s life drastically, who knows, it may do some good.  But I absolutely know it sure as hell doesn’t hurt them.  Or me.  It might not hurt you, either.

I’m kinda over the Information Technology thing right now.  Well, let me be more specific… I’m  over the aspect of IT I’m working in now, and would like to get back to my roots.  But that’s a story for another time.

IT, by necessity, is transient in nature.  Principles, once they come into existence and are used, are more permanent by nature, but the implementation of that technology is usually transient.  Products come and go, and they evolve or die.  IT people are the same way… if they (meaning their skills) don’t evolve, then they die (professionally, no literally).

However…

IT people are packrats.  We hold on to things of the past like they are lifelines to… something.  I don’t know, maybe to the fact that the things we did before mattered, that those things of the past we worked with and still have in our clutches mean that we’re “old school”, that we came from hard knocks.  That those of us who had to install DOS 6.22 and then WFW 3.11 from disk are “more” IT than the people who only have to install Ubuntu through a GUI and then fire up their Ruby on Rails environment and bust out code that is automatically flagged as good or bad… Or that don’t have to do anything because Steve Jobs does it all for you…  Regardless of the reason, something about the clinging has been bugging me…

I use eighteen gallon plastic containers to store and stack stuff in my garage.  I started changing my garage around this weekend to reclaim some room and get rid of things I no longer need.  In two of these tubs I found old IT-related garbage.  One of the bins was over half full with 3.5 FDD, including some with various versions of DOS and Windows.

Note the complete version of DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11

I’ve do doubt there is nothing on them that I will ever need again.  That anyone will ever need again.

As I got rid of them, I started to dig a little more deeply into the bins.  Token Ring books, LPT 9-25 cables, non-2.0 USB hubs, BNC network cards, 3Com Etherlink PCMCIA cards with Ethernet dongles…  seriously, is any of that ever going to be useful.  Maybe if there is an apocalypse and the world has to start over… but I have other plans if that ever happens.

So into the trash it all went.

And more followed.  By the end of the hour I had gotten rid of a bunch of stuff.  To be precise, I had gotten rid of eighteen gallons of useless junk.  And I have already started planning to get rid of a LOT more of useless junk.  It’s not a lifeline, it’s a tie-down.

And with a single deep breath, my life moved forward.  Much lighter in many different ways.

Note – Before all you enviro-whiners get all out of control and start crying, by trash I mean trash, recycle, electronics recycle or donation bin, as appropriate.  So just STFU and get on with your life already.