New Year's Eve!

Quick race recap: Ran 4:29.7 for a full mile this morning at BU. I was pleasantly suprised with this. I didn't really expect to run this fast, considering I haven't run a workout in a really really long time. This gives me a lot of confidence for the rest of the indoor season. 9 miles on the day total...

Tonight's New Year's plan is to go out with Skip and Cummings, meet Sarah Ahmed (fellow Foley employee) and bunch of her friends, and go the The Harp near North Station. I'm psyched. If I weren't in such a rush I'd recap all the New Year's nights I've had since 7th grade... it was sort of a tradition at Saratoga. Maybe tomorrow I will... anyway, here's a picture from 2 years ago. Chops, Andy, Curran, myself, and Tully. Good times... more on this tomorrow (as well as a more detailed race recap...)

12/30 is a good day

12/30 is a good day becuase Phish played some of their greatest shows of all time on or around this date. Highlights include 12/30/93, 12/30 and 12/31/95, 12/31/96 (in Boston, complete with the Boston Community Choir. This was the 2nd live phish show I ever heard... probably got the tapes from Sean Rourke in 8th grade), 12/30/97 (culmination of the 97 fall "funk tour"), 12/29/98 (perhaps my favorite show of all time... unreal 2001 and YEM), and, of course 12/31/99, which included and 8 hour non stop set from just before midnight until sunrise. Pretty cool.

I ran 6 miles today. Next week I'll finally get serious about mileage, hopefully be up around 70.

And, without further ado, enjoy the "Buff Chick" (photos taken during the spring of 2004, at the end of my junior year. Alas, we never acheived the original "7 for 7", but 7 for 7 Buff Chicks was pretty good anyway. Second photo goes me, Rosen, Thor, Bromka, Chrisco, Moose and J-Lew, residents of the legendary 19 Walker St. Apt. 2)

Thriller

Just got back into Boston.... good to be back in the apartment. I ran 5.5 miles today (I was lazy) in the rain before I left Saratoga. During this past week I organized all the music on my computer.... I now have 41 live Phish shows indexed and burned on the hard drive. It's awesome.... reminded me of all the tape trading I did back in 8th, 9th and 10th grade. Going back and organizing all that music was like taking a trip back in time. Pretty cool. I'm psyched for these next few days. I don't have to go back to work until tuesday, this saturday I'm racing at BU, and then going downtown for New Year's. Should be a blast...

What's a Blog?

Running: 8.5 Skidmore backloop with Curran, Shane, Crouton, Devo, and Pete J. Decent group today... reminds me of running over the summer/sunday long runs. Relatively uneventful run, talked about college stories for most of the run. Saw Tully downtown, which was a bonus. At some point in the near future I'll post the long term training approach for Boston.

So, what's up with blogs? The whole thing intrigues me. The first memory I have of blogs is from junior or senior year of high school (1999-2001) when livjournal.com was popular (or at least among Saratoga Springs High School students). The format was almost identical to current blogs. People would post their thoughts on whatever they wanted. Friends would read each others' journals, etc. etc. Back then they weren't called "blogs" though. Fast forward to 2002 or 2003. At somepoint, someone coined the phrase "blog", which I undertand to be a shortening of the phrase "web log". I attribute the explosion of blogs almost entirely to the phrase itself. Blog. Once someone came up with that word, and people started using it colloquially, they gave "blogs" legitimacy. I don't mean that in a bad way either. Where were you when you heard the phrase "blog" for the first time? If you were like me, you probably thought it was some weird online lingo used to describe a community or activity that you knew little about. "Oh, sure, so and so is blogging about it". Or "Right, yeah, well I read something really interesting about the election on a blog yesterday." For a while, I thought a person had to have a certain amount of expertise or clout to "publish" a blog. (I guess this is still true, at least to the extent that people actually read a blog.) It took me a few years to realize that a blog was simply a website that a person used to express their thoughts and opinions. This realization probably coincided with the mainstreaming of blogs in general. Now I understand that blogs are no different than those first livejournal.com entries we used to post on 6 years ago. Now they just have a name...

And so, in honor of blogs, here's a link to my most recent favorite. If you want an unfortunately accurate (and hilarious) account of life at a big law firm, check this out...

http://anonymouslawyer.blogspot.com/

(His recent entries aren't as funny as some of the archived material... enjoy)

1:21

Apologies for the lack of recent updates. I guess I can use the holidays as an excuse. Christmas was pretty run of the mill here. I'm finding as I get older I enjoy giving people gifts more than receiving them myself. This is a good thing. Among Christmas gifts this year were a bunch of books I'm psyched to read. I left my Cicero biography back in Boston, so I started "The Lost Painting" by Jonathan Harr (also wrote "A Civil Action", which I just finished, and featured Foley Hoag, the law firm I work at). It's pretty good so far... fairly light reading. Hopefully I'll finish it sooner rather than later. I'm most excited to read "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman. He's a Op-Ed columnist in the New York Times. (Thank god we have a subscription and I can read Brooks, Dowd (barf), Krugman and Friedman now that the New York Times online has started charging for these columns.) The book deals with globalization in the recent past. This is interesting to me becuase with the advent of the internet and techonology, progress is being made at an incredible rate. The ability of people to communicate on a global level is breaking barriers that people had held for granted for a long time. Reading books like these also makes me feel smart.

Running: On Christmas I did 5.5 from home. It was like 40 and raining. I asked myself more than once what the heck I was thinking leaving my cozy house to go out and run on Christmas. Oh well.... I guess my high school running streak (5 years 11 days) has had some residual effects on my running mentality. Monday I did Skidmore backloop, 8.5. Such a great run. I've been doing it since I was in 7th and 8th grade and it never gets old. Today I ran 11.5, long strock loop plus backloop. Took 1:21:05. I probably should have run 14 or 15 to made up for a lack of a Sunday long run. Oh well. Plan is to head back to Boston on Thursday, and run a mile race at BU on New Year's Eve. That should be interesting to say the least considering I haven't done any speedwork since the summer....