Time and the training schedule

I was lucky to get in a good run before the rain started tonight. Tomorrow, during "wintery mix" weather, whatever that is, I need to get in a quick 4 miles. Sunday is long run day, if I've recovered from St. Patty's, the night before.

This week is the first week that I haven't felt like I've had to really squeeze in the mileage, and felt like I've been running like I'm supposed to, and I've felt like I've been running strong, too. I've had to alter my training routine to get the distances in, mainly because of how busy everything else is. Work is actually pretty good, now that the dark cloud has left our office. I've gotten a step up in responsibilities, which I like, but I've needed to put some extra time in to ride the learning curve a bit and stay ahead of the game. Budgets are tight.

In turn, this has meant that my running has taken the place of my commuting, for the most part. Instead of taking the subway home, changing, and heading off to the park to run with the Flyers group, I now start my training runs from the bottom of the park, do a loop and a half, and head home near the top. Unfortunately, this means that I don't get to enjoy the group chatter, but it gets me home earlier so that I can do some other work.

And that work is mostly Flyers work. Doing the newsletter and being on the executive board for the largest local running club in NYC really sucks up the time. Most of that is spent e-mailing people about articles (usually earlier in the month) editing and laying out the monthly issue (later in the month), or e-mailing people regarding board activities (all the time). It's a strange group we've assembled as a running club, let me tell you. In a good way, though. I actually enjoy the work, but there is a lot of it.

So, as much of my time is spent writing e-mails or reading/editing other people's writing, it figures that I don't spend too much time blogging anymore.

Oh yeah, and I'm training for a marathon. That kind of sucks away the time, too. I actually officially signed up for the New Jersey Marathon this past Monday. Got the whole thing out of the way: registered for the race, booked the hotel, and found a ride down to Long Branch, all within about an hour or two. Sure beats having the distraction of those things eating away at the back of my mind. Once I had that all settled up, it definitely improved my focus on my running, knowing I'm actually doing this thing. Unfortunately, I now only have just over three weeks until I taper. Not a lot of time to get in top condition. As long as during those few weeks I can stay uninjured, it should still be a fun time in Jersey.

Saturday Long Run

Today I had to sit down and put on my mathematician's cap to figure out how many miles I did this morning, having broken it apart into many different segments with a lot of different people.

I'll start, though, by saying that I almost didn't make it out the door. In fact, at 8:00 AM, I geared up, locked my apartment, and stood in the doorway of my building, staring at the cold outside, contemplating turning around. Unlike the previous two days, though, I stepped outside and began, albeit sluggishly, to run. The mileage broke down as such: .65 miles to the park, 3.4 down the west side and back up the east drive and 72nd, plus one 1.7 mile loop at the bottom to back to the same point, where I met the Flyers for the 9:00 AM group run. after lingering for a few minutes, we started south and did 5 miles of the 6 mile loop. I ran with our Flyer cartoonist, and enjoyed some good conversation about Flyer dynamics and relationships before I broke off at Engineer's Gate, where I met up with Miss Antarctica. Since we had a few minutes to spare, we ran about 3 minutes out and 3 minutes back around the icy, snowy reservoir. Back to Engineer's Gate, where we met up with a group of Flyer's for the 10:00 AM Round Two: another full 6 mile loop, clockwise. staying with the group for much the run, I attempted to sell everyone one writing articles for the newsletter. Oh, and by the way, if you have enough time to blog, you have enough time to write an article. Hehe.

Again, at Engineer's Gate, or as Antarctica apparently wants to call it "Gold Head" (at first I thought she said Goat Head, which didn't make much sense to me, but whatever), we went our separate ways. I turned around and headed the 2 miles back to the apartment in Harlem.

Figuring out my mileage felt like I was doing my taxes again (by the way - Yay for refunds!). I finally settled on 18.75, but had forgotten the little stint on the reservoir, so I'm calling it a cool 19. I had only planned on 18. The pathetic part is that this is almost half my mileage for the week. I am really looking forward to a warming trend next week (Yay, 40 degrees!) so that I'm more enthusiastic about getting out the door.

Anyway, I napped for 2 hours at home, and just happily lollygagged the rest of the afternoon away. Now I'm off to a friend's birthday in West Orange. Should be a fun, fun night.

Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines!

The last few weeks; the last month, has been unbelievably busy. It all culminated with 3 deadlines this week, on Wednesday and Thursday: two projects at work and the Flyers' newsletter.

It has been harried, to say the least. For the last week, particularly, I've been getting 6 and a half hours sleep a night, max. This has been partly due to time constraints, but also due to that stress I've been feeling over the deadlines.

At work, my Wed. deadline was for a seriously boring project: the redesign of the Belt Parkway Bridges for NYSDOT. Our part was basically the construction documents for the planting along the highway exchanges. The project has been entirely uninteresting, but subject to an intense schedule as of late that resulted in all the aforementioned stress. That said, in a few years when you're driving along Rockaway Parkway and notice the lovely Crataegus crusgalli and Quercus Rubra out there, well, that's all me. Part of my stress level can also be attributed to my colleague, the the project manager, who is a real a*shole. Really, she just has absolutely no people skills whatsoever. Everybody hates working with her.

The other project, which was due the following day, was not as extensive. It was just a progress meeting for the redesign of a park & ride in Staten Island, also for DOT, and we just brought in a few sketches that the client hardly looked at. People tend to think that us landscape architects are all busy all day designing creative and artistic parks and gardens. Then they hear that I'm doing a highway right-of-way and a park and ride and it pretty much blows 90% of the romanticism away. The other 10% disappears completely when they find out how little I make.

Okay, so maybe that's not all quite accurate. I have also been working on the Bronx River Greenway, and that has been an interesting project, along with the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, which we were working on awhile back. And the work I was involved with on West Street last year was also interesting and somewhat enjoyable. So it's not all bad. Unless you look at the paycheck.

Anyway, the meeting with DOT on Thursday went alright, especially considering how little time we invested in the project, since we'd been so busy on the Belt Parkway Bridges. However, the next couple of weeks on that project look like hell, so we'll see how that goes.

I do realize that writing about work is a risky business, but given the size of my income, getting fired from my job could be a blessing. Don't get me wrong - I do acknowledge that my current position/company has some serious advantages over other firms, which is why I'm still there. However, I just don't particularly care that much, and if someone gets a bee in their bonnet about the general crap I write, well then I'm just happy enough to move along.

The last deadline this week was a self-imposed Wednesday night deadline. I had promised myself that I'd get the Flyers' newsletter out within the first week of February. Being as finicky as I am, I ended up putting way too much time into the redesign of the layout, not to mention that my two final submissions came in on Feb. 1st and Feb. 5th. So getting it out on the 7th was a lofty task indeed. I attempted to proof-read the thing myself with much failure. Not only did I miss a lot of grammar and general spelling mistakes, but I spelled over a half-dozen members' names wrong in the document; two of them both the first and last names. I did tell a fellow club member that I'd use her as a proofreader, and have had offers from two others whom I will totally use as backups (thank you very much!). The proofreader is a former newsletter editor and club secretary and I connected with her on doing the March issue today.

The redesign, as far as I took it, seemed to go over well. Most people gave me very positive feedback. That said, negative feedback, in my experience, tends to come either after someone's had a few drinks, or when you specifically ask for an opinion. I'd say the best compliment I received was from a fellow architect who said the layout reflected that I was a designer. This sort of surprised me, since I really didn't feel like it was finished. The awards page and calendar still look like hell, so stay tuned for some graphic improvements next month... if you do actually read the thing, that is.

I also changed the name. It used to be called the New York Flyers Newsletter, until the last couple of years when editors have changed the name - first, to News on the Run, and then to On the Fly. I called it The New York Flyer to give a nod to the original name, and also I liked the play on words... "flyer". Of course I had to explain the double meaning to someone already, so I think it might be lost on readers.

And so my last couple of weeks have basically been going to work at 7 AM until 6 PM and coming home to work on the Flyer until midnight, sometimes with a run and some eating in between. Even when I went to bed, my mind was still spinning over what needed to be done.
And technically I did miss my Flyer deadline, as I finally sent it off to be posted on the website after midnight... so, the 8th. Oh well. At least the template is done for future issues, so that they won't be so labour-intensive.

And at least one of the benefits of editing this document is that it guarantees that my photo will not appear in it this year, and I'm sure we can all appreciate that. Don't all thank me at once!

Having those deadlines out tof the way has left me with an unusually unplanned weekend, which is nice. I stayed home tonight and watched a DVD after grocery shopping, mostly for beer and junk food to accompany the movie. I was going to go to the Flyers' impromptu happy hour, until they put forth the venue. Take note: do not let Flyers women decide on happy hour venues... I'm only teasing! I'm just not fond of the bar they selected, and it's a bit out of the way, in Manhattan geography, for a Harlemite.

So it was a quiet evening at home, and hopefully a quiet weekend to come, ahead of the maelstrom of work that will hit me once again this week, and the March Flyer production later in the month...