Month: May 2016

Drinking on Monday Starts at 8…am

/ bperica / 4 Comments

For the last ten weeks I have been training for the Bolder Boulder.

This running thing is pretty new to me. I competed in my first 10k on Thanksgiving day last year. Since then, I’ve tried two 5k races and another 10k.

Before those races, I ran in one 5k at the Milwaukee Zoo in 2008. That race doesn’t really count. Between 2008 and the turkey trot in 2015, running was not a hobby. I still hit the pavement every once in a while, but it was merely for cardio.

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The start of the A Wave at the Bolder Boulder. Just looking at this gets my heart racing.

Part of the reason I have kept on competing since the turkey trot is because the racing conditions were so horrible then. It was 32 and raining and the trail was 2-6 inch thick mud. My time was awful. The last three miles of the race were run in 7:50, 9:53, and 7:24. Can you tell which mile I fell twice on, nearly impaling my hand on a very narrow tree stump?

I think it was soon after that race I decided I needed another shot at a 10k and I instantly thought of the Bolder Boulder. For much of my life I’ve lived within a 45 minute drive of Boulder and have never thought about entering the race.

The race is five days out and today I realized I haven’t trained this hard for a competition since training for my last swim meet as a collegiate swimmer in 2005. I am actually tapering off of what was, for me at least, a tough training schedule. I’ve even shunned a daily beer or beers for all of May, which has been almost as hard for me to do as the running. I think I have had two drinks since the start of May. That Oskar Blues beer after I finish my race at Folsom Field is going to taste so good.

For many of my training runs I had to literally push my training partner. For London, it has been an easy training schedule. She gets a cushy ride in the Mountain Buggy, sips away at her water cup, throws it from the stroller when she decides it’s cramping her style, and kicks off her shoes whenever desired. Her stroller ain’t light and neither is she, weighing in at 35 pounds, but I was thankful to be pushing just one kid over the last ten weeks.

On Monday morning, London will just be having her breakfast when my wave (AA) goes off at 6:56. I get so anxious just thinking about it. I’m not sure what I will think of the crowd. I am hoping to just lock onto a group running my pace and zone out for four, maybe even five miles before I think about the rest of the ground to be covered.

My goal is to come home on Monday with one extra t-shirt, one that says Sub 40 Club on it. With luck, it’ll fit me.

Back from the Basement

/ bperica / 1 Comment

I’m back from the dead, I mean, the basement. For four months we endured one of the slowest basement finish projects ever taken on by man. It must be said that the aforementioned man and his pals worked maybe three days a week and a workday consisted of showing up at 10am and leaving by 3:30. Things got to a point where I did not want the man and his pals to work on anything else in the basement because every time they fixed something they broke or maimed some other fixture in the basement. The short list of fixes would grow from 5 to 40 in a week. I happily gave the man the check labeled, “Full & Final Payment,” knowing I was going to finish the rest of this basement myself.

Since then, I have spent every minute I had away from London in the basement. Even when she was awake I occasionally brought her down to the basement, installed her in the high chair, and queued up Sesame Street. I’d even push it to see if I could get her to watch two episodes in a row. I got pretty damn close a few times all without coating her with drywall dust, paint, caulking, and spackle. Success.

I had told the man that I could handle the painting of the walls,

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Kate enjoying an almost finished basement.

but somewhere along the way he thought that meant I was painting all the baseboard, trim, and doors. Rookie mistake on not clarifying that. However, after seeing how the man painted the ceiling, I felt quite confident I did not want him painting anything else in the basement. So, I took care of those things myself. The doors were easy, just time consuming if you want them to look good and show no roller or brush marks. The baseboard was a different story. I did not have the opportunity to paint it before it was flush with the hardwood floors downstairs. Painting already installed baseboard takes ten times as long as painting pieces of baseboard fresh from the hardware store. This is what really took up the majority of my work.

Other things we had to take care of ourselves: cleaning off the adhesive on the window frames left by this crazy,. strong, fireproof tape used to install insulation in the basement, installation of speakers in walls, caulking all trim/baseboard joints, filling nail holes, mounting doors, installing hardware, painting shelves, ceiling paint touchup, replacing a light switch, installing blinds, painting quarter-round trim, and finally, assembling Ikea furniture, which actually was given the final touch last night. All is not done. I have yet to paint a couple closet doors, paint the stairwell, install carpet on lower half of stairs, and paint an exposed I-beam. Kate and I agreed that when all that is done we will feel as though we finished a quarter of the basement ourselves.

Throughout this process I have been aware that we saved a substantial amount of money by using the people we used. We had expressed an interest in using the same people to finish the bathroom in the basement, but we will now be doing that ourselves. That will, undoubtedly, turn into a bigger project than it is in my mind and it will mean I may have to take another long break from writing, but this break may have been for the better too.

I’ve missed writing. Writing helps me destress. When I don’t have the opportunity to do it I have this horrible nagging sensation that if I were writing right now I would be writing some of my best stuff. Of course, this is not true, but it’s hard to ignore this voice, which always creeps into my life at the precise moment that sitting down for a couple hours to write something is an impossibility.

I promise no regular blogging at this point. I can’t even say for sure when I will write again. Like I wrote above, there are still significant projects to be completed before I can sit in front of a computer to write for even 30 minutes, but that time is closer now than it has been for months. I like that.