I'll keep the video posting kick going with this...the greatest music video ever made.

Here are some reasons why:

1. Everything acted out by kittens.

including:

 - Kittens waking up at 10 am

 - Kittens riding a train to town

 - Kittens ghost riding the whip

 - Homeless kittens

 - Fake kitten arms exchanging small US currency for catnip

 - Kitten hallucinations

2. Director not afraid to have a human hand in the video that's supposed to be only kittens (and other baby animals)

3. Exciting story

 

  

 

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200801.30 - A domestic juggernaut of pocket-sized winsomeness, the kitten enjoys its popularity while it is still young. Anything it does during these feline salad days is usually characterized by such adjectives as "cute", "adorable" or "wicked precious", and then immediately immortalized in a calendar or your mom's shirt.

 

The tragedy that every beloved kitten faces is adulthood. After some time, kittens skip puberty altogether and--seemingly overnight--turn from "ooh, a kitten", into "oh, a cat...I'm allergic to cats". Kitten owners have an animal that everybody loves and has a great time with. Most cat owners, though, have an animal that is now known for shedding hair all over your sofa and chairs and suits and dresses. With adulthood, a cat develops the ability to poop into sand chemically designed to hide odor, and have the aforementioned turd smell like it's right under your nose, perhaps resting on your upper lip.

 

Needless to say (but I'm going to say anyway), people usually like kittens more than they like cats, but you can't have one without the other...unless you just got a full grown cat.

I've just finished watching The Flight of the Conchords season 1 DVD.

At this point your reaction could go one of many ways. Here are a couple.

 

1. You not only have heard of Flight of the Conchords, you've already seen season 1 of their show as well as their live act and you're so hard core you've even seen their "other stuff" like Tongan Ninja. You already know how great the show is. High five.

2. The name sounds familiar. You're pretty sure you've seen some of their videos on YouTube. You may even be planning on renting or buying the DVD sometime soon. Do it. You know it'll be good.

3. You have little to no idea who they are, and you probably lost interest and started trying to remember the plotline to Flight of the Navigator. Well, a kid flies away in a UFO. There's some time travel involved.

 

I think that whichever reaction you had, you'll appreciate these videos. The videos show mostly music, but the show isn't all musical...in fact, there's usually only a couple songs in each episode. The duo writes their own music, and the lyrics are clever and very funny.

It's nearing 6am and Mike (my brother) and I are walking up to our corral where we'll start the marathon from. We walk past thousands of people, some sitting down and stretching, some standing up and stretching, some peeing the woods. We're about right in the middle of the 12,000 participants of the 2008 Walt Disney World Half Marathon.

 

A couple minutes go by and the gun goes off and runners pour across the starting line. The entire line slowly moves forward; 18 minutes go by before we begin our run. Before I go any further, let's rewind 2 weeks. Aside from my regular running training, I'd been playing soccer every Saturday-- which I figured would also count for the amount of running involved during the games. Two weeks before the race, I sprained my ankle during a high-speed challenge for the ball. It felt OK the moment it happened, and I even finished the game, but later that night I wasn't able to put any weight on it.

 

I went to CVS the next day to pick up an ankle brace.

"Hey, man, are you OK?" says the guy at the counter.

No.

"Heh. It'll be OK." I say optimistically.

 

The brace and a little rest (had that Tues. off) had me walking with barely a limp by Thursday. I even played soccer again (cautiously) the next Saturday.

 

OK, so as I start the marathon, I'm thinking about my feet. Are these new shoes going to help prevent shin splints? Will I get blisters?  How will my ankle hold up? Why did I bother asking that second question? Of course I'm going to get blisters. I had blisters by mile 3. I had set out to run 3, maybe 4 miles before I took a walking break for a few minutes, and getting the blisters just seemed to solidify that scenario. But beyond the blisters, I felt good, so I kept running. Mile 4, Mile 5, through the Magic Kingdom, through the enchanted castle, Mike and I are still running. We didn't actually slow our pace to a walk until after mile 7.

 

After we ran through the Magic Kingdom we started on the road back to EPCOT. Miles 9, 10 and 11 seemed to drag on, and by mile 12, my ankle started to go numb, so I walked until I got to the final mile at the entrance of EPCOT.

 

The track took us in the park and then back out, and as you round the corner and exit the park back onto the parking lot, you finish mile 13 and have only one tenth of a mile to the end. Seeing the Finish line felt so great. It makes you forget about everything else. My ankle was numb, my feet were cramping up, I felt like I stepped on a nail for each of the (about) 3000 steps I took during those last 10 miles. But you put all those aside and pick up the pace for the last stretch.

My goal (and Mike's) was 2 hours, 30 minutes. Mike finished in 2:28:13. I finished in 2:30:03.

 

One of the scariest moments of my run came at around mile 10, when I started to feel the onset of the dreaded "runner's nipple". It's painful to see and embarrassing to get. What happens is that as you run, the salt from your sweat can create friction with the fabric of your shirt. Enough of that friction leads to chafing and then bleeding. Thankfully, I didn't have any bleeding. I did see one poor guy that was bleeding pretty bad from his nipples. It was such a nasty sight to see, and I cringe in pain every time I think about it.

 

After everyone in our group (there were 6 of us in total) finished, we slowly walked back to our cars and headed back to our respective villas to clean up, and then headed back out for some wings and beer. We stopped by Downtown Disney for a bit, and then came back to our place to watch the Patriots beat the Jaguars. Top it all off with a few minutes in the hot tub and a good night's rest, and I'm good to go for the next marathon...which probably won't be until September...so I suppose I had plenty of time to rest up.

 

Here's the rest of my marathon numbers:

Overall Place		5394
Gender Place		2868
Division Place		208
5K Time		32:51
10K Time		1:06:34
15K Time		1:43:54

 

 

Yes. It's been a while. I've been diverting all of my allocated blogging/online free time effort into figuring out Wordpress and trying to make my own design from scratch (which is proving to be a little difficult to implement as I'm new to php). But I've had much going on elsewhere as well, so I figure I'd take a break from coding and troubleshooting and actually do something that shows I've done something.

 

Now that we've got that introductory tangent out of the way, let's get to the subject at hand -- addressed in the theme: blisters vs. shin splints

Those were the contenders in my mind on Friday night. Last Saturday (Jan 12) was the half marathon. I had a pair of shoes that I use for running, but they weren't the greatest running shoes. I had been getting shin splints from running in them (as well as from soccer...but we'll get to that in another post). So I was thinking about picking up a pair of running shoes with proper support. I leaned toward not getting them and going with the ones I already had, and so I left for Orlando ready to take on my shin splints.

 

We got up to Orlando (Lake Buena Vista, actually...but it's easier to just go with Orlando) by the afternoon, and headed to the Wide World of Sports complex to register for the marathon. There were about 12,000 people registering for the 1/2 marathon, and most of them seemed to be in the line I was supposed to be in at the time I was there. Meanwhile, my brother's line had about 6 people and his wife's had fewer than that. Instantly impatient, I asked my sister-in-law to see if they could take my registration at one of the less busy registration booths. I got a thumbs up (as vocal confirmation at that distance is hardly possible), and I immediately spared my life from another hour or so of waiting in line.

 

After we were all registered, we went to the expo going on in the same building. There were a decent amount of vendors there, and I did a quick lap around to get whatever free stuff I could get. Right in the middle of everything were several vendors selling running gear and, more importantly, shoes. So the battle raged on as blisters (new shoes!) arose from the grave with renewed vigor and excitement. I tried on a pair of Brooks that felt immediately good on my shins. The expo pricing was cheaper than normal, and so with that I chose blisters as my racing partner for the next day.

 

I'll save the details of the marathon for another post. Maybe later on today or tomorrow (Fri).