On The Road Again

It's been a while!

Welcome back faithful reader(s). I've been thinking about restarting the website for a while now, and now that I've had a week to get settled in here, I think it's time.

So, where is here? Currently, here is located a couple thousand miles South of chilly, icy Concord, MA. I'm living on the east coast of Florida in a town called Ft. Pierce, about 3 hours north of Miami. I'm living with my grandparents and plan to stay for another month and a bit. But how did I get here and how did my plans change so drastically? Well, let's go back to the last time I wrote in here.

I wrote my last entry just a few days before my parents arrived in Quito. It seems like an eternity, though it was just a little over two months. My parents flew down to Ecuador and after my stunning Half-Marathon debut in a time of 1:23:25 (at 10,000 ft, I'll add), we flew to the Galapagos Islands. We spent 5 days on a boat, traveling from one Martian landscape to the next. After that, we flew to Peru, took a plane to Cusco and then a train to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. Overall, the trip was tiring but well worth it.

Upon returning to Concord, I was a little bit shocked by the weather. My first week back saw a cold front move in with temperatures dropping into the low 20s, unseasonably cool. The following week, Mother Nature started to drop foot after foot of unrelenting snow. Yikes!

My training suffered a bit in the few weeks right after I got back, as I was getting used to the cold and the snow. I raced on an indoor track for the first time, with few remarkable results. The weeks I spent back in Concord were nice, though, as I got to spend time with the many people who I had missed in Ecuador. I got to spend a good bit of time with Anna, do some workouts and races with my coach and friend, Jon Waldron, and party like the good old days with Duncan, Paxton, and the rest of the gang. All in all, December was a pretty comfortable and low-key month.

January brought my first running injury in a while which forced me to take off a few days and miss a race. However, I rebounded pretty quickly, running my best race, 16 minutes, for the 5000m at the Dartmouth Relays the next Sunday. I should have ended my racing season there, but decided to push it one more week, despite my body giving me signs that it needed a break, and finished the season with a pitiful 3000m at the poorly run GBTC invite.

We're now up to mid January. The week following the GBTC race was my "off week" from running. I wanted to take a down week between my indoor racing season and my late winter-early spring buildup to let my legs and body just relax a bit. It ended up good timing, as I had to spend the beginning of the week in Canaan, NH with my Mom's parents while my Grandfather was having surgery. All was well, though, and we returned to Concord and prepared for my departure.

After a good bit of discussion in late December and early January, my parents and I had decided that they would feel better and thus it would be better for all parties if I were to spend my winter with my Grandparents in Florida as opposed to my dad's friend who had offered to house me in Colorado. Originally, the plan had dictated that my Dad and I would drive down together so that he could visit his parents and then fly back and we would do the drive in one long day, but the complications with my maternal Grandfather led to him staying home.

So, on Friday, January 23rd, around 6:30am, I hit the road in my lovely Toyota Matrix, packed full of my stuff. I drove about 11 hours the first day, which got me to the bustling metropolis of Roanoke Rapids, NC, a small developement on the border of North Carolina and Virginia. Wanting to get to Ft. Pierce in time to get a run in the next day, I got up and hit the road by 4:30 and drove for another 11 hours or so, to arrive in Ft. Pierce in the afternoon.

Since I arrived here in Ft. Pierce, things have been going pretty well. I have a lot of time and not a lot of responsibility, so I can really focus on my running and everything that goes around it. I've also been looking for work, which has so far been unsuccessful, and helping out my grandparents with their day-to-day needs.

One other project I've been tackling is to become a decent laptop-DJ. Tim Douglas introduced me to a program called Abelton Live, which is a mixing, recording, and producing program. Well, I love music and I think this will be a worthwhile project to undertake. There's actually much more that goes into mixing tracks together well than I used to think. I'm hoping that when I get to Skidmore in the Fall, I might be able to put this to use.

So, what's my plan for now? I'm staying here until the beginning of March. On March 6th, I'm seeing Phish's first show back in Hampton, Virginia with Mr. C, and then I think we'll probably drive back together. After that, I'm planning on heading to Hanover to live with Brett and Erin until summer time. My grandfather who lives near there is getting more surgery in mid-march, so I'll be able to help them with things and also possibly do same training with Dartmouth's track team. Summer is a long ways away, but I'm trying to find a job at a local day camp or something. I've already applied to a few and hopefully at least one will pan out.

In the immediate future, I'm about to head out for a run. I had a pretty tough one yesterday, so today's will be an easy moderate. I've got a half-marathon coming up next weekend, which I'm pretty excited about. I'll keep you posted on how everything is going.

Okay, well, I'll try and update this relatively regularly, but not a whole lot of exciting stuff happens down here. Gotta run.