Flop, Half marathon

Wow it was a tiring weekend.  Both days we got up earlier than we normally do on a work day.  On Saturday morning the reason for the early rise was to travel to Coconut Creek on the other side of Florida to play in Randall’s inaugural King of the Beach tournament.  It turns out I was the jester of the beach.

The drive over was fine although a little longer than I planned.  I allocated an hour and a half but needed closer to two hours to get there.  Ali and Nicki came along for the ride as Randall said there was a dog park right next to the courts, cool.  The park was very nice.  I walked Nicki and Ali to the dog park area and left them there so I could get ready to play. I knew everyone that was there except two guys (8 total) 

Let me get all the excuses out of the way up front.  Yea I have not played volleyball in more than 6 months.  I’m not in volleyball shape.  I have a hard time just picking up and playing well with a different partner each game and the court was BRUTALLY tough to cut your teeth on after not playing ball for so long.  It was badly bowled out so you were running up a foot high hill on each approach and the net was slightly higher than regulation. The sand was soft and deep.  It added up to an atrocious display of volleyball on my part.  I was just terrible.  Well let me be more specific, it was an atrocious display of offensive volleyball by me.

I passed ok generally, I served ok, I made some decent defensive plays.  But I could not hit the ball cleanly over the net to save my life.  In fact I don’t think I had what I would classify as one even average hit during my brief three game stint back on the courts.  I just could not do anything.  Every single time I went to hit the ball it either caught tape and rolled meekly over the net or planted itself firmly into the net, bouncing back at me in a defiant manner.  It was downright embarrassing.  I would get some great sets from these guys, approach, jump, swing hard and blast it into the net time and time again.

All three games I played in were losses with my three different partners and none of the games were even very close.  No matter how angry I got, I just could not get out of the sand.  I tried everything.  I had more costume changes than a vegas showgirl, trying various shirts and head gear combinations all ending with the same result.  Hitting is the biggest thing in volleyball I enjoy and not being able to do it at all just made for misery for me. 

Eventually Ali and Nicki came over to watch some of my last game of futility.  The format of the tourney was everyone played 3 games, then the top 4 players played 3 more, then the top two played best two out of three for the grand prize.  Well going 0-3 and looking terrible doing it ensured I would be sitting on my ass the rest of the day.  In the final matchup the top two players get to pick their partners from whomever is left.  Of course I didn’t get picked and I didn’t expect to be picked, but not being picked made me feel like the fat kid that has two left feet that is always picked last in pickup games. I remember when I played organized indoor 6’s pickup up north, I was always one of the 4 people picked to build the rest of the teams around. The idea was you wanted to have each team have at least one good player.  Now I am the shlub.

I had ideas of leaving early but everyone else stuck around so I felt obligated to do the same.  The two guys that were in the finals would not have been whom I thought would have been in the finals before play started but that is why you play the games.  So I watched the games play out like a good soldier, congratulated the eventual winner and then took off after eating a Burger King lunch that Ali went and retrieved for us.  Even though I only played three, relatively brief games, I had a full days aches and pains. The most painful thing at the time was my neck.  Cranking my head back to track sets is a movement you just don’t do in everyday life and as a result my neck was killing me.  I had other pains in my shoulders and knees as well.  The drive back was filled with me commenting on the putrid level of my play and Ali trying to build me back up.

When we got home I buried my sorrows in icing my knee and playing WoW for awhile.  During the tournament Ali made a smart ass comments to some of the guys about my WoW playing where she said all I basically do is sleep, go to work, eat supper, play wow, and go back to sleep.  I was a bit annoyed with that remark since I do manage to bust my ass around the house quite a bit, more so than Ali does I would offer.  However, I held my tongue on the way back and didn’t mention the comment until I was going to play WoW.  I asked her if she cared if I played since she made the comment earlier in the day.  She said it was fine, she just meant that it gets extreme sometimes.  Yea well there are things she does that are extreme in my viewpoint as well.  So anyway, the issue was swept under the rug with not much further squabble.

 Later that night I watched Lady in the Water, a M Knight Shamlam (sp) flick.  I always like his stuff.  This flick was weird, even for his films.  I enjoyed it but at times things were just so silly.  The best example I can give without giving away the plot was when some little kid discovers he is “The Interpreter” he magically deciphers what all the humans are supposed to do to help the lady in the water by reading it from the sides of cereal boxes.    Crazy huh?  I guess my biggest issue was how easily all the people involved accepted this far out situation of the lady in the water.  It was sorta like if I told you that you could walk on the ceiling and you said, “I can? Cool”  I found the film entertaining for the most part but for M Knight, it was a below par effort.  I give it a B, maybe a B-.

Sunday morning we had to get up even earlier, 4:30 am, in order to get to the half marathon site by 5:45 am.  I did not feel very chipper.  The night’s sleep brought me to two swollen knees as well as joint and muscle pain all over.  I gimped to the sink, took two advil and woke up Ali.  I stopped at Dunkin Donuts on the drive in to wake up a bit, it helped.

The first thing we did when we got there was work the packet pickup table where runners would come over, show us their race number and we would give them the Velcro timing device that goes around their ankle.  It was quite the hectic scene with over 1000 runners descending on a small area.  The row of at least 20 port-o-potties was impressive in a smelly way.  This race had some elite runners, many of them Kenyan.  A few of them came up while we were there.  Some did not speak good English.  Trying to explain to them what to do with the timing device was a challenge.  When the one guy realized it went around his ankle he was not happy and gestured that he wanted to put it around his wrist instead.  I’m not sure where he wound up putting it. 

Soon we had to give up our packet pickup duties and head out to the water stop we were working.  We had some problems finding it based on the verbal directions we got, however the gps saved the day.  As we pulled up we were surprised with the amount of people there, at least 20.  I had ideas of there being maybe 5 or 6 people per water stop.  It was quite the production.  They had 4 tables setup with several big 5 gallon water coolers on each one.  Then they had bags and bags of cups piled up and at least a couple dozen 5 gallon water jugs lined up in a row.  Ali and I asked what was needed. 

I got put on cup filling duty.  The lids were off the coolers and what we would do is scoop water out of them.  However you didn’t fill the cups, you wanted them to be roughly half full.  The reason being when you are handing cups to moving runners, water is going to spill, filling them all the way is a waste since the handoff would spill half of the water anyway.  It took awhile to get the feel of what a half filled cup should be but after a few minutes I was dipping and scooping water with robotic like precision.  I even drew a comment from the girl next to me about how good I was at it, yay.

  There were almost too many people helping.  We had three people scooping water out of our cooler, placing the cups on the table and even so we couldn’t keep up with the droves of other people that were taking the cups off the table and setting them by the side of the road to be handed out to runners.  We even had dedicated water pourers that would refill the coolers as the water level went down.  It was impressive how quickly we prepared at least 2500 cups of water for the runners.  Our stop was a double, meaning it got runners on the way out and the way back so we had to have a lot of water (and gatorade) ready.

The stand was at the 7 1/2 and 10 1/2 mark on the run.  The first guy came flying towards us less than 35 minutes into the race.  It was a kenyan guy and it was amazing.  Ali and I could not believe how fast this guy was running.  His stride was long and fast.  As he approached the water line, Ali was in the front and handed him water.  It was tougher to do than you can imagine.  He was running so fast that Ali said it was almost like trying to hand something to a guy driving by in a car.  In an instant he was by the water stop.  After he passed, Ali had tears in her eyes.  For some reason, just seeing someone that could run that fast made her emotional.  It was amazing to see a world class athlete running like that but I did not well up over it like she did.

The first 15 minutes or so of handing out water did not go well for me.  I just had bad technique and runners kept dropping water I attempted to hand to them.  We also learned quickly that we needed to yell out clearly if we had water or gatorade so they could get what they wanted.  Eventually as my technique improved and the speed of the runners going by lessened a bit, I was able to successfully deliver water with minimal waste.  While it was a long time to be standing out there holding out your right arm yelling time and time again “WATER, GATORADE DOWN THE LINE!”, it was surprisingly rewarding.  I could not believe how many runners were polite and courteous even in the middle of the physical pain they were enduring.  We got thanked by them time and again for volunteering as they ran by.  I was astonished.  As we handed out the drinks we all would offer words of encouragement, making eye contact and exchanging smiles that made both parties involved feel better.  Even the slowest participants got equal amounts of support from the volunteers.  It made you feel good about the entire experience.

As you were standing there you saw all sorts of people and I got to make all sorts of observations.  Early on I noticed several men that looked like they had weird stains on their chest.  It was only till much later in the race that I realized what these were.  It was blood from their nipples.  Evidently depending on the fabric of your shirt, it can rub nipples raw to the point where they bleed, ouch.  There were all sorts of people participating from the young to the old, wafer thin to the chubby.  There were many athletic, stereotypical runners whizzing by but just as many non-athletic people whom just had determination to finish on their side.  It made me regret not being able to be part of the event from a runner’s perspective.

  There were lots of people that ran/walked the event which is what Ali would probably wind up doing. She didn’t sign up because she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to finish in the supposed 2:45 time limit.  However the last person crossed the line more than 3:15 from the start so Ali definitely would have been able to do it.  My issue would be I just would not be satisfied if I stopped to walk at all.  I would force myself to continue running until I more or less dropped or ground my knees into dust, I just know I would.   But man that would be a feather in the cap.  We got done earlier than I thought and thanks to all the hands, everything was pretty much cleaned up and ready to pack up by 10:30.  It turns out we had more refreshments than we needed as several hundred cups got poured into the gutter.  Ali and I pulled out for home, both very satisfied with our experience, even with the getting up at 4:30 am part. It was inspirational to see person after person battling through their own personal limits to complete a feat of extreme endurance.

By the time we got home the advil had worn off and I was feeling quite beat up.  However I had a  list of things I had to get done before licking my wounds for the rest of the day.  We have had no rain this week again so I had to drag 240 feet of hose around the house to water everything.  The entire time I was thinking how nice it will be to not have to do this shit anymore.  After watering I filled the bird feeders, picked some ripe tomatoes from our garden and then moved inside to do the weekly counter cleaning/floor sweeping routine.  During that time we noticed we had a huge gathering of wood storks in our backyard, at least twenty.  They just stood around back there for a long time.  I took a few pictures of them and the pine trees I planted.  I’ll post them later.

From about 3 o’clock on I was just watching football.  Both teams I wanted to win, won. I was so beat though I only stayed awake until a little after 9, so I didn’t find out the Colts won till this morning.  This mornin Buttons the diabetic cat came into the bathroom for her morning “drippies”  Drippies are what she gets after I wash my hair in the morning.  She walks around me and meows constantly while I let the excess water from my hair drip all over her.  Anyway, she comes in this morning and her back is coated in pine needles from the Christmas tree.  Evidently she walked right under the branches and got dumped on.  This is the last week for the tree, too bad, I was hoping it would make it to February.