Dad Life

Just in case you weren't in The Edge this past weekend for Father's Day - here is the video :)

Official Anchorman 2 Trailer

The Official Anchorman 2 Trailer!
The legend continues this December.

The NBA Job Interview: Trey Burke

Bill and Jalen grill Naismith and Wooden Award-winning NBA draft prospect Trey Burke about his lack of size, the chip on his shoulder, and dating celebrities.

Workout Recap - Week 24

Sunday, June 9th – 7 miles with hubby (his longest run to date), Foam Rolled & Stretched

Monday, June 10th – Elliptical for 60 minutes

Tuesday, June 11th – Strength Training (abs, back, arms and legs) & Foam Rolled

Wednesday, June 12th – Stationary bike for 60 minutes (18.45 miles), Foam Rolled & Stretched

Thursday, June 13th – Slow and steady 7 miles 

Friday, June 14th – 19.5 mile bike ride, Foam Rolled & Stretched 

Saturday, June 15th – Beach Blanket Beatdown, Foam Rolled & Stretched 

I know, NO REST DAY, WHAT WAS I THINKING?! Thankfully I added a Rest Day in today (Monday) - not only so I could catch up on some house chores, but also because I am pretty sure my body NEEDED it!

The last four weekends I have done a 10K, Half Marathon, 5K, and now triathlon. Although I have really enjoyed all of the races, I don't want to get burnt out or potentially injured. I am TRULY looking forward to sleeping in and doing my workouts at normal times of the day this weekend :). 

Official Pics

Check out the 'official' pictures from the Color Me Rad race that we did this past weekend. They didn't have photographers throughout the course, which was sort of a BIG BUMMER, but hey, it's not like I would have bought the pictures (seeing as we got a TON of awesome ones on our camera anyway). But hey, maybe we will buy one of these :)

San Diego Rock N Roll Half Marathon

Ryan and I decided we would go down to the Expo on Friday night. They had it going on both Friday and Saturday. We figured, since we get off early on Fridays from work, and because we wanted Saturday as a ‘lazy’ day, we would shoot for Friday as the Expo Day.

The Expo was down at the San Diego Convention Center. The area to pick up bibs and swag was large and open – which was nice, especially when it got busy, I'm sure. It was a quick pit stop to pick up everything I needed. The Expo itself was HUGE. I think it took up two or three of the Exhibit Halls. There were a TON of vendors and booths set up. Ryan and I meandered through most of the rows and isles picking up free goodies and taking fun pictures.

Sunday morning started EARLY. And by early I mean 3am EARLY. One of the awesome perks of living in San Diego County was that they had the trains running early for the race – which was AMAZING. Earlier in the week I had asked some folks if they would suggest driving or taking the train. I was told that the course was changing this year, so not only would there be 30,000 runners and probably 60,000 spectators downtown, but they wouldn’t really know where they were going. We quickly decided that the train would be early, but well worth it.

The train was leaving the Oceanside Transit Station at 4:10am – they had to make sure they were down to San Diego in time for the full marathon (which started at 6:15am, 30 minutes before the scheduled start of the half). We left our place by 3:45am, but probably could have waited a little longer, seeing as it only took about 3 minutes to get to the train station (but I would ALWAYS rather be early than rushing). We got on the train, found our seats and waited a bit for the train to pull out of the station.

By Carlsbad and Solana Beach the train had really filled up. There were runners and spectators standing in the isles because it was so full. I was actually surprised it was so full, especially because they said that the train tickets might sell out, so I figured they would only sell enough for the number of SEATS on the train.

They had us get off at the Old Town Station and then take ‘shuttles’ over to the start. The shuttles were actually big greyhound buses. They had everything pretty well organized. We walked off the train (with the cattle herd), went over and got right on a bus. They had lines and lines of shuttles. We were on the first round of buses, so I don’t know how many rounds there ended up being, but it seemed to run pretty seamlessly.

We got down to the starting area with plenty of time (although Ryan was bummed about all the extra time we had, since he would have rather been sleeping, I was glad that we had time to check out the surroundings, use the port-o-potties, etc). They had UPS doing the bag check, which I thought was awesome. I didn’t check anything, but I thought the idea was a great one. They had a ton of UPS trucks that were labeled by last name. The UPS trucks were able to drive to the finish area (since the start and finish were not close by each other) and have all the gear safely packed away. I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised, I mean moving packages form one place to another is what UPS does J.

They opened the corals for the full marathoners 30 minutes prior to the race start. I thought I read somewhere that there weren’t going to be corals or a wave start for the full marathon, but I guess I was wrong. They let the corals go about every 3-5 minutes. Once everyone was on the course for the full they let the half marathons start entering the corals.

Here is where I have my first CON for the race. No one was checking or monitoring the corals. Your race bib number notated which coral you were in. I had a bib number in the 5,000s, so I was in coral 5. Now mind you, this is my first NON-runDisney half marathon, so I am used to the way they run their events. I was very surprised though, seeing how big and ‘prestigious’ the event is. When folks don’t obey the coral it really messes with the system. People were WALKING right out of the 'gate', which means you have to do a lot of weaving. When people obey the coral placement the faster folks are up front and the slower folks are in the back and the flow of the race runs smoothly.

The race started about 10 minutes late because they were giving late coming marathoners time to make it across the start line (if they didn’t cross the start line by a set time they would have to run the HALF instead of the FULL – I guess it was because of the time limit on the course and having to re-open roads and such).

The course was pretty fun. The main reason I liked the course was because it went by where I used to live. I LOVE Hillcrest, Normal Heights, and all of those surrounding areas. We ran by the grocery store I used to walk to, the coffee shop Ryan and I used to play games at, the restaurants we would ride our bikes to for brunch, etc.

The first mile I knew I was going too fast. My time was about 8:15 or so. I knew I would have to slow down. The second and third miles were extra slow (my shin was a little tight so I slowed way down) – closer to 9:30 minute miles. At that point I threw my PR, personal record, out the window. I was really hoping to have my fastest half marathon time yet at this race, but once I saw my pace for the first three miles I decided I wasn’t going to stress about it. I decided to just run the race thanking God for the ability and opportunity, but not push myself too hard. After those first three miles I didn’t really look at my pace. I would check my watch to see the distance every so far but wasn’t really watching the time or pace.

Here is where I have my second CON for the race. The mile markers were NOT clearly marked. Again, maybe it is because I am used to the runDisney races, but I was surprised they didn’t make a bigger deal out of the mile markers (not that they needed characters at them, although that would have been fun J). Around mile 6 or 7 I realized that they only had the mile markers on the right hand of the course. I don’t know if that was because they could only afford one per mile or what, but I think I missed seeing every one of the mile markers for the first half of the race. This wasn’t a big deal since I wear a Garmin and it gives me the distance, but for folks that are depending on the markers to gauge their run it would have been a bummer.

Here is where I have my last CON for the race. Along with the mile markers only being on the right hand of the course, the water (and Gatorade if applicable) was only on the right hand of the street. This was an issue for the first couple water stations – mainly because I was running on the left hand side of the street and therefore missed them. Then when I would actually get water at the station on the right, that side of the course was so full (and littered with the empty cups). Of course I am comparing this to Disney, who seems to go above and beyond with their volunteers, accommodations, etc, but I was pretty disappointed to see the lack of liquids.

I had overheard some folks on the train talking to some other runners and mentioned that they had actually driven the course the day before (they said they didn’t want any surprises). They said that the people that laid out the course must have been looking out for us. They said that you could see uphills ahead, but then we would turn the corner to avoid them. There were quite a few turns on the course (weaving through neighborhoods and such), but I was pleasantly surprised at the lack of uphills (especially since I had run the Hot Chocolate 15K a few months back and felt like the WHOLE RACE was uphill). There was a fairly steep downhill around mile 10, which was nice, since it gave us a little boost to cruise into downtown.

At this point I checked my watch and realized that I was still doing fairly well (compared to what I was expecting when I decided to just run the race without paying attention to my splits). I thought I would try to push it and see if I could still hit my goal time. (My previous PR, personal record, for the half marathon distance was 1:58:53, which I got at the TinkerBell Half Marathon in January.)

To my surprise I was able to PR the race – whooo hoooo!! My Garmin had me finishing at 1:59:37 and my official time was 1:59:38, which is 15 seconds faster than my previous record. I was SOOOOOOO stoked – especially since I had sort of ‘given up’ on a good race so soon into the race. I found Ryan, which took a while with all of the people in the spectators around the finish line.

Since we rode the train down to the race, we had to ride it back home. I thought I had remembered seeing that the normal northbound train was at either 9:30am or 9:45am. I finished around 9am, so we thought we would rather try and make the early train, as opposed to waiting for the extra ‘runner’ train that they had going back around 11:30am or 11:45am. Ryan pulled up his map on his phone and saw that the train station was about 2 miles from the finish line and that walking it would take us about 40 minutes. I looked at him and said, “I can do it”. He had brought his skateboard with him so that he could get around from the starting line to the finish line (since they were a good distance apart), so he jumped on his board and I RAN.

Yep, I ran another 2 miles after finishing my fastest half marathon – so did a total of a little over 15 miles – wowser!

We got to the train depot around 9:25am and ran into the station. I asked one of the employees about the train and he said that it wasn’t there yet, but that it would be on the middle set of tracks. It ended up that the early train was at 9:45am and the later train was at 11:30am – but I knew I didn’t want to chance it and show up 5 minutes late, so I guess running was fine.

It was funny though; there were many comments along the way. I had someone tell me I was crazy. I had a couple other folks ask me if I knew the race was over. And the best I thought was a kid that was sitting by the mall and asked me if I had any change for him. I looked down, seeing that I was holding my medal so it wasn’t bouncing off my chest while running, saw my bib and my running shorts and told him that I didn’t have anywhere to carry any money…

Riding the train home was very nice. We were able to kick back and relax. Since not a lot of people had finished the race by 9:45am (remember the train station was about 2 miles from the finish, so they would have had to finish and then still get over to the train depot) so the train was pretty empty. We were able to get nice seats and just watch the coast out the window for the trek home.

All-in-all it was a fun time. The course was nice (seems like the runners time was kept in mind when charting out the twists and turns), the weather was lovely (about 65* and hazy – but still a little too humid for my taste), the organization was decent, and HEY I got a PR!

Color Me Rad 5K

When my mom mentioned she wanted to come out to visit I looked up to see if there were any races going on during her trip. We were pleasantly surprised to see a Color Me Rad 5K race the Saturday while she was here. My mom was actually talking about doing a Color Me Rad race in Toledo with my dad, my brother, and my brother’s girlfriend, later this fall, so she thought she’d check it out.

Ryan and I have done The Color Run in the past, so we knew the premise of these races. I would say that The Color Run that we participated in last year was the FUNNEST race I have done thus far.

Saturday morning my mom, Ryan, and I went down to San Diego. We left our place around 5:45am and got downtown around 6:20am or so. They had designated parking lots that you could park at, but they ranged from $10 to $15, so we thought we would try to find street parking. It wasn’t too busy downtown around that time, so finding street parking was pretty easy. We pre-paid the meter for about $.65, which gave us until about 8:30am to get back to the car.

Once we parked we walked down to Petco, where the race was starting. Of course we went down looking all white and clean (obviously the color stands out more if you wear white instead of another color – so we got decked out in our clean garb).

We were in the 7am wave, although I have to say, it didn’t seem like there was much organization on the wave starts. They mentioned that the City of San Diego required that everyone running would need to start by 7:45am, but other than having waves start every 5 minutes or so I didn’t notice anyone actually monitoring the time you started.

Unlike The Color Run that Ryan and I did last fall, the color stations  in this race were not spread out very evenly. I think the main reason was because they needed to have the color stations somewhere that they could spray off once everything was done, not sure on the streets of San Diego. The course was about 2 miles out around downtown and then about a mile within the Petco parking lots. I did like the course for The Color Run a little more (even though it was just around the parking lot of Qualcomm) because they spread out the color stations every 1K. The nice thing with that was it kept your mind off how far you were running. It was like you were just running from color station to color station and didn’t notice the distance much. For this race, since they were sort of ‘jammed’ in the last mile the first 2 miles seemed to drag on a bit.

They had the color stations within the parking lots, where the course did a lot of weaving and turning around.. There were 5 color stations – first was orange, then purple, then yellow, then green, then pink. We had a BLAST running through the color stations. We danced around a bit in the stations to make sure we really got COVERED.

Mom crossing the Finish Line BACKWARDS!

After the race there was a little after party where we did color throws (they gave us extra color packets and would count down so that everyone could throw their powder). Just in case we weren’t covered from the race, we made sure to get each other plastered with the color.

We had an AWESOME time at the race. Obviously it is not a serious race by any means… We actually tried to look up the official distance using Google Maps and aren’t even sure if the course was a full 5K or not. These are NOT the type of events that you should do if you are looking for a serious race. But man, this really helps to remind you of why you get involved in running in the first place. These types of events, at least for me, just revive the love for running.

I would DEFINITELY suggest that everyone signs up for one of these races if you have never done one before. No matter what your fitness level, I would say DO IT! There are people that run the whole thing and there are people that walk the whole thing. No judgment, just everyone out for a good time!!