13.1 miles, take 2

Last Saturday I ran my 2nd half marathon. I ran my first one earlier this year on very little specific running training. With all the travel I've had over the past couple months, I'm not in town all that much on the weekends so I wanted to pick a race that I knew I would be in town for, focus on it and train pretty specifically for it and also try a few different things in the week leading up to the race. The idea being to finetune my rest and nutrition in the 3-5 days before a big event (of which, I have several this winter).

I found this race a couple months ago that seemingly no one I knew had heard. It was called the Niagara Hospice Dash in Niagara Falls. This was the first year they had a half-marathon option (previously it was only a 5k). I knew I would be in town and with the proximity, it also gave me an opportunity to visit my Grandfather, who lives in Lewiston. The race course started in Artpark in Lewiston, which incidentally is about 3/4 mile away from the house that my Grandparents used to live and my mom grew up in. The course went through Lewiston, north along the Lower Niagara, through Fort Niagara (literally through the Fort) and continued north to the finish line in Youngstown. It was an extremely well run event and also included a lot of water stations and live music at several points on the course, which was very cool.

The race itself went pretty well, I finished in 1:25:41 (6:33/mile pace), which is about the pace I was expecting and was 4 minutes faster than I ran in Buffalo earlier this year. Additionally, the 2nd half of the race was as fast as the first half, which is probably the first time that's ever happened for me in a running race. I usually start way too fast and slow down big time. So, I took that as a positive sign for both my pacing and my fitness level. Also, I think my nutritional strategy worked well as I never felt out of gas and was even able to pick up the pace pretty well in the last mile.

The visit with my grandpa was also a nice added benefit as I don't get enough opportunities to visit him with my travel schedule.

Tonight, I'm headed to Buffalo for my good friend Matt Knodel's wedding. There's sure to be a story or two to come out of the next 4 days...stay tuned for the blog recap of that one!

Three countries and two states later...

It's been far too long since I've updated this. Since my last post, I spent another week and a half in Germany and Holland, then flew home, spent one night at home and drove to Vermont for our good friends Rick and Shannon's wedding. Germany and Holland were relatively uneventful all things considered, although there were a few decent stories from the Germany leg of the trip, hopefully I'll post about those in a separate post.

We left for Stowe, Vermont last Wednesday, with the bikes loaded up - the wedding was on Friday and we decided to make a long weekend out of it and stay until Sunday. The first day we were there it rained heavily, so our planned bike ride was cancelled. Instead, Jason and I took the groom-to-be on a nice trail run on the ski trails at Trapp Family Lodge. Rick bikes and bike races a lot, but isn't much of a runner, and the 7ish mile run we went on ended up being the longest of his life. He was able to make it down the aisle just fine the next day though. In fact, we went for a bike ride the morning of his wedding up to the top of smuggler's notch, which was a pretty fun ride and had some beautiful views all around.

Here are some pictures of the main event:

Here's a picture of the program. Skiing is a big part of Shannon and Rick's life and, given that we were in an area of the Northeast known for skiing, it was definitely a strong theme throughout the weekend.

Here's a shot of the ceremony - it was a huge honor for me to be able to perform the ceremony for two close friends. It was also a pretty amazing scene with the mountains in the background.
Libby, Nancy and Anne - these three hung out a lot over the weekend while Chad, Jason and I were biking and running. I think the shoe stores in Stowe may have been a primary beneficiary of this dynamic.

Here are the groomsmen (Rick in the middle) - coincidentally the best man (2nd from the left) and the guy all the way to the right both work at Harris and the guy 2nd from the right used to work at Galyan's with me...oh and that guy all the way to the left was a groomsmen in my wedding as well...so yea, pretty small world I guess.
This was taken right before the ceremony, I had to have my game-face on!
This was Rick and I while we were waiting for the ceremony to kick off.
Here's our table for the reception. They named all of the tables after famous ski runs from different resorts in Vermont.
There's the happy couple.
I don't know who these idiots are, but it looks like they found out where the Vienna Lager was being served.

All in all, the ceremony and reception were great. I think we were all also relieved that we had a free day after the wedding before having to make the long drive back to Rochester.

On Saturday, Nancy and I sampled the Trapp Brewery's new Oktoberfest seasonal beer and had lunch outside overlooking the mountains. Not a bad view.

After lunch, we all went up to Williston, Vermont and watched a pro cyclocross race, which was pretty exciting and involved a lot of heckling from some of the spectators. Not going to lie, Cyclo-cross looks really fun!

After one final dinner Saturday night and one last trail run Sunday morning, we hit the road and headed back for Rochester. After doing about 3 weeks worth of laundry and mowing the lawn, I was back in my office today for the first time in a few weeks. I seem to have picked up some type of a head cold, which I don't really have time for as I'm running a half marathon this Saturday in Niagara Falls. Hopefully I can shake it off quickly. I'm also looking forward to being home for a little bit here and hopefully get back into some type of normal routine for the next few weeks.

Bachelor parties, Supras and long runs

I've been too busy to update this is in a while. I'm pretty much been on the road since my last update. Last weekend, my dad and I drove down to Philly for my brother John's bachelor party. Unfortunately Hurricane Irene didn't want us to execute our original plan for the weekend, but we still ended up making it to a Phillies game before having to head home. Coincidentally, Nancy's brother Doug was also at the game for a different bachelor party for a different guy from Penfield High School, so it was also great to catch up with him a little. So, it wasn't great to drive down to Philly on Friday and come right back Saturday, but after seeing the devastation that storm brought to some areas of Vermont and Northern New York, it seems pretty silly to complain that we had to cut a party short because of it, so we're not complaining. It was great to catch up with some of John's friends and to meet John's future brother-in-law and father in-law.

The upside of weekend getting cut short was that I got an extra night at home. Incidentally, I would get an additional night at home due to cancelled flights from the storm. I finally got on a plane headed for Georgia on Tuesday. It was pretty smooth sailing once I finally got going. We ended up getting two solid days of meetings in and getting everything we needed to get accomplished. My friends there also threw an early birthday "Supra" for me, which involved a large Georgian feast, a cake and a healthy (or unhealthy?) amount of vodka. Birthday's are a much bigger deal in Georgia than they are in the US, which I wrote about previously while I was there for Ivane's birthday. Everytime someone that works with Ivane has a birthday, they shut down the office at about 3pm and have a large celebration in the kitchen. All in all it was a good trip.

Now, I am currently in Weiden, Germany. I had originally planned to be in Oberhof to ski in the ski tunnel there then drive to Weiden tonight, where I will be for work this week. However, I was delayed getting to Munich and didn't land until 7pm yesterday, so it didn't make sense to drive 3 hours in the wrong direction to get to Oberhof, only to turn around and drive 4 hours again today. So, that was a little disappointing, but I did manage to get a long run in this morning and will catch up on some work this afternoon before the rest of the team arrives this evening. I had my first driving experience in Germany yesterday and they drive really fast here, do not get in the fast lane unless you know what you're doing! My hotel is pretty small, one of those deals where the hotel manager is also the waiter, bar tender, chef and lives in the hotel. I'm also relatively sure that my TV is much older than me. It's about 10-inches and there is one English TV station. I am currently watching the Track world championships in German. I have to get a slingbox set up or something.

About that run this morning...that's a good story - I intended to go for a ~2 hour run. There are bike paths that go everywhere in this town, so I figured I would run for an hour in one direction, turn around and come back, perfect, right? How could I screw that up? Well, I'm not sure how it happened, but I managed to get very lost and my "2 hour run" started to remind me of this story from Duncan. After asking for directions from several people who didn't have any idea where my hotel was. I finally found another runner who knew where it was and pointed me in the right direction. Or at least I thought it was the right direction, I somehow ended up running in a circle from there and ran into the same runner about 40 minutes later. Thankfully, he saw me asking someone else for help, ran over, patted me on the back and ran with me all the way back to the hotel. That guy gets massive training karma points for that because I'm not sure how long it would've taken me to find someone else who knew where this hotel is. I wasn't too worried as I don't have a real agenda for today, but still not the greatest feeling to be lost in a foreign country, especially when you know about 3 words of their language, and you've already ran about 18 miles without water, not my brightest moment, but huge thank you to that guy whoever you are! So, my run ended up being a little longer than anticipated, but I felt pretty good.

I'll be in Weiden for a NATO exercise this week and will head to Amsterdam a week from today for meetings on Monday, then fly home Tuesday, drive to Vermont Wednesday and stay there for a few days for a wedding after which I'm going to take a long nap...like a 3-day nap...