Tonight's example of "It's exactly like you've heard."

So I wanted a run today, but with Theo out of school for the week, it had to be an after dinner run. By the time I could get out the door, it was just before 8PM.

Along my running route there's a private school, or maybe it's a tutoring center -- I don't know enough Japanese to know the exact nature of the place. Most of the time I'm running past during the day, so I can't see inside, but running after dark I can glance inside as I run past.

Tonight, well after 8:30PM, there was a room of over a dozen kids, probably early high school or maybe slightly younger, deep in thought in the first-floor classroom, while a teacher explains a graph on the dry erase board at the front of the room. There were other kids heading from the convenience store across the street into other classrooms I couldn't see.

This didn't shock me, based on what I knew before we moved here; but it was just another reminder that we are here at a perfect time in our lives and as much as I enjoy our temporary status here, I would not be well suited to living "real life" in Japan.

So much to say...

SANY0996
Originally uploaded by javelis3

I've been writing down as much as I can about recent events, but it all still needs serious editing to be blogworthy, so obviously I haven't published anything.

Theo and I are still a little over a week away from flying out to Japan. We will be spending most of this time at my parents' house, so hopefully I will have some time to catch up on my posts about everything that has happened since the movers arrived. In the meantime, here's a set of photos I took this morning around my parents' house in IL, our home base while we prepare to move.

Happy Mothers day to one and all.

Uhhh..how's this thing work again?

Oh, yeah, I have to log on and TYPE INTO IT.

So it's been a crazy few months around here. We're just over a week from having movers invade our house and pack all our stuff into small boxes, which will then be placed into bigger boxes, which will then be sent halfway around the world to our new home. As usual, the blog has been low on the priority list.

We decided early on we'd sell our house, but it's only been on the market about a month. As I spend more and more time keeping our house looking like a museum, I'm discovering that there's a good reason I've been a crappy housekeeper all these years -- being a good housekeeper really, really sucks ass. Instead of looking at the past few weeks of vacuum/sweep/mop/repeat as a curse, I'm thinking of it as training for Japan, where I'm expecting lack of space will require me to become a better housekeeper.

Despite this being our first overseas move, I have none of the usual worries and angst about the movers arriving. This is my fourth change-of-station (plus one cross-town move) in 9 years. Even though this one is overseas, the process has been similar enough to a move in the states that I haven't really been too stressed about it.

I did let myself get far too worried, for a while, about selling the house. We can afford to carry the mortgage on this house for a while, but doing so will put us in a bind financially. I really wanted a contract before we left, but in the past couple weeks I've realized, it just ain't gonna happen. So I've chilled about that -- with any luck, negotiating with buyers from 8000 miles away will make the whole process smoother.

Moving overseas does require a whole new level of organization. I'm going to write more about this process, but last weekend I identified six different "piles of stuff" in our house that are all headed different places: 1. Our usual household goods move; 2. Our non-temporary storage, provided by the Navy because we're going to a duty station off the beaten path; 3. Our "unaccompanied baggage"; a smaller shipment sent overseas faster, of just what we'll need to get by when we move into our new house; 4. The stuff we're carrying on the plane; 5. The stuff we're leaving at my parents' house; and 6. The crap we're pushing out of our lives, either throwing away or giving away.

Amazingly -- perhaps because the house is so clean these days -- this level of organization isn't stressing me out at all.

Theo is still amazing and surprising and a whole lot of fun. His preschool teacher told me just before Christmas that he'd overnight transformed from a baby to a 3-year-old; and it was definitely noticeable. Now he's talking, he has an AMAZING will of his own and he is driven to do anything and everything he can by himself. I have some record of the past few months via twitter and photographs, but not blogging the first part of this year will someday be a regret of mine, I'm sure.

Running has come along fairly well this spring, even though it's been pushed down the priority list. I felt like I'd hit a new level of my training a couple weeks ago when I ran a 21:55 5K race -- beating my old record by over 90 seconds -- but that was followed by some pain in my foot that put me off my running for a week and has made getting started back kinda rough.

So my goals for the near future with the blog are -- 1. Post daily, even if it's just something short that I would ordinarily tweet. Even if the posts suck, there's no other way to keep the momentum going for the days I actually have something to say. 2. Talk more about running and my training. I enjoy it, I enjoy talking about it -- not blogging about it more is probably part of the reason I'm not blogging.

I might fill in this post more later with more details -- oh, who am I kidding, that never happens....

Wherein I get serious about cross-training

Just a running update: The good news, I ran the CHKD 8K Run-Walk for the kids on June 13. I was pretty happy with my time, 48:19, considering the weather was terribly hot and humid, even for the morning. I probably tried a little to hard to keep up with some friends at the beginning when I should've taken it easier all the way through the race.

Which leads to the bad news ... I started feeling some pain just below my knee in the days after the race. Knowing that we were a few days from a long weekend to DC that would mean many miles of walking each day, I stopped running. But lots of walking in DC, most of it with Theo in the backpack, probably helped get my legs stronger and definitely burned a lot of calories.

It seems pretty clear that any increases in my speed or mileage beyond where I'm at now will take quite a bit of time. Runner's World described the problem that fits my knee pain, and it sounds like my weight and lack of quad strength are likely culprits. I've decided that if I'm going to finish the Virginia Beach Rock 'n' Roll Half Marathon in a time I'm happy with, I have to do two things this summer -- lose a bunch of weight and improve my leg strength, especially my quads.

So my new program is going back to running only three days per week and not pushing the speed work for now, but hitting the bike hard at least three of the other four days. I'm also working on the Hundred Pushups and Two Hundred Squats programs of Tidewater local Steve Speirs, in addition to doing sets of planks and other core strength every day or two.

Yesterday I strapped Theo into his bike seat and set off. My first stop was the downtown Norfolk YMCA, just to see how long it would take to bike there -- looks like 10-15 minutes for me to cover the 2-ish miles, even with all the construction going on in that direction. I'd say there's a good chance we'll be joining there soon.

After my test ride to the Y, I set out for Norfolk's 5 Points community farm market. It's absolutely a treasure to have a source of local farm raised food available year-around, but I haven't been going there nearly as often as I'd like -- I don't have the car during the day and I favor destinations I can reach on foot. Now that I know how quickly I can get there and back on the bike, I'm likely to start visiting with Theo a couple times a week.

One more quick stop at Azar's to get Theo some Hummus (OK, I admit Daddy's eating it too) and we were on our way back home.

Of course, it figures...because of a seat malfunction and forgetting to restart my GPS watch after Theo stopped it, I don't have an exact mileage. I know it was at least 7.75, so I'm going to put a guess at 9.5 - 10 miles covered. I'm very happy with that. It made me tight enough this morning that getting started on my run was a challenge, but once I worked out the kinks I ran as well as I normally do for five miles with the stroller.

I figure a week or two of regular bike riding should get my body accustomed to the new work I'm giving it and with any luck, I'll start to show improvements in my run distance and speed as I hit muscles that haven't been working so hard up to this point. Next I have to find out if MacArthur mall has bike parking, anyplace where Theo can run wild in the morning is a prime destination...

Race day!

As I noted on Twitter, Ruth and I had a very successful Shamrock 8K this morning. Ruth has had old injuries that have kept her from running as well as she'd like and the last time we ran together, she covered about a mile and a half before she had to alternate running and walking. Last week she managed 4.5 miles in a little over an hour, so I was hopeful that with a combination of walking and running we'd finish in the 1:15 to 1:20 range.

It has been a beautiful sunny day in Virginia Beach, but waiting for the starting gun on Atlantic Ave. in the shadow of the oceanfront hotels, it was CHILLY. Our hands were a little numb -- we'd avoided bringing gloves or hats because we knew we wouldn't need them once the race started. There were 9,000 people running today, by far their biggest crowd ever.

I've run 5 miles in well under an hour before, so I told Ruth that my goal was to keep her running slowly enough that she wouldn't wear herself out. I know from running with her that as soon as she starts to run/walk, there will be more walking than running (not a criticism; I'm the same way), so we needed to avoid walking for as long as possible.

So we started off telling each other to slow down. I reminded her that of the people passing us, half of them were going to end up walking later in the race and we would pass them -- and the other half, we had no chance of catching, so ignore them!

Throughout the race it seemed like every time we were in danger of hitting a rut, something would happen to lift our spirits...

Midway through the 2nd mile, Annoying Evangelist Guy showed up along the course with his megaphone and 15-foot-high "ARE YOU ON THE HIGHWAY TO HELL???" sign -- I turned to Ruth, said, "You can't stop me!" and started screaming "WOOOO HELL! YAY FOR HELL!!" This kept Ruth laughing long enough to forget any discomfort.

(NOTE: I'm not actually a hell fan. But maybe he was, the sign wasn't very specific.)

A few minutes later, when we passed the 2nd mile marker, we made the turn onto the Virginia Beach boardwalk -- even though there was a pretty good breeze in our face, the sun and surf made the third mile fly by.

I completely forgot to figure out the difference between the official start time and the time we passed the starting line, so I wasn't sure how fast we were running until we passed the 2nd mile marker, 13 minutes after the first mile marker. At this point I felt like I'd been taking a brisk walk and Ruth was still feeling great -- even better when she realized this was probably the farthest she'd ever run without a pause to walk!

Between mile three and four, where I saw Ruth starting to flush and maybe puff a little, here comes the spectators with a cowbell. So obviously, I start yelling "THIS RACE NEEDS MORE COWBELL! REALLY EXPLORE THE SPACE!" Once again, laughter proved the best medicine.

After we'd covered three miles and even more so after four, I started doing my best to motivate Ruth, telling her that she'd done a great job, it was only a few more minutes ... and maybe most importantly, that if she stopped running we'd no longer be passing anyone. If encouragement is good, appealing to my over-competitive wife is even better!

We ran into one of Ruth's chiefs on the course and more than once spectators greeted us with cries of "GO NAVY!" We were both wearing Navy T-shirts and I know the acknowledgment gave Ruth a lift.

I'd obviously far underestimated how gassed she was in those final miles, because as the finish line loomed a few dozen yards in front of us, I looked over to see how she was doing ... and she was pulling away at as close to a sprint as either of us could manage! I had to catch up for us to cross the finish line together. I was so proud of her and so excited, I barely noticed the walk back to the car.

I looked over as we crossed the line, and the time since the starting gun was just under 1:11 -- so we probably made it in about 1:05, far ahead of what either of us had expected.

There was one sour note struck on that walk, which I posted about earlier. I didn't want to have the top post on the blog be an ill-tempered rant on such a great day! Thanks to everyone who has been wishing us well on Facebook and in the comments here. These were just the first steps of a longer journey -- we have a lot of improvement and even longer runs ahead!

The next race I'm registered for is the Virginia Beach Rock'n'Roll half marathon in September, which I'm running with my friend Rosanne. She's ahead of me in both distance and speed, so I have a lot of work to do. Of course, now that we've run one race, I'm sure there will be some shorter races between now and then.