He can run?

Moving to San Francisco!

Posted by rhigdon - 07/10/08 at 03:10:51 pm

The answer to your first question is “No, I’m not.”

I accepted a Job with IGN Entertainment and will be starting at the beginning of November.  My last day in Harrisburg is October 10th then I am gonna spend a week and a half with the Family in NEPA.  My brother is making the trip with me to San Fran which is awesome.  We leave on October 22nd and then he Flies back on the 27th or something.

Anyway I have been staying active by going to the gym 5 days a week but I plan on making an effort to get in better shape and then hopefully update this blog more with running/triathlon stuff.  Also I plan on purchasing a digital camera for when I move so hopefully I can get some more content up here so there is more to see than my terrible writing.

Weekly wrap up

Posted by rhigdon - 09/06/08 at 05:06:21 pm

It has been quite some time since I’ve blogged about my workouts but I assure you that I am still killing myself daily.  I took a good week and a half off of running since my knee was bothering me and I have just recently started again but slowly. ( 1 mile and 1.5 miles so far. )  My knee feels much better so hopefully I won’t get any more pain on that front.

I have pretty much spent all my time lifting (Roughly 5-6 days a week) and throwing in some cardio like swimming.  Swimming is coming along very slowly but it is an awesome workout.  I am talking to my triathlete friends to try to get my form better.  I haven’t bought a bike yet but I was home this weekend and went out for a mountain bike ride with dad.  It has probably been like 5 year or more since I’ve rode a bike and it felt really really weird at first but it ended up being a decent workout.

I have not made any plans for races but I am kind of leaning towards trying a triathlon in the fall.

Triathlon maybe?

Posted by rhigdon - 27/05/08 at 06:05:55 pm

So I decided to wait till June 1st to even think about running again in order to give my knee some recovery time.  Perhaps I should even wait a bit longer cause after I stopped running I continued to play Racquetball because it didnt hurt my knee during play but last Wednesday I came up limp the day after so obviously it was.

Since I am not running I decided to give swimming a try this weekend.  I wen’t to Dicks and bought a pair of swim goggles and hit the pool on Saturday afternoon.  I knew swimming was going to be hard but after swimming half a lap I was totally out of breath and pretty much had water in my nose and mouth.  I always felt I knew how to swim but it has probably been 15 years since I’ve done actual freestyle swimming.  I am trying to get some help from some other guys I work with that are seasoned triathletes so we will see how it goes.  I swam again on Monday and it went slightly better but I still have a ton of work to do.

On both days I did about 20 minutes of swimming and it was a killer workout.

He actually can’t run.

Posted by rhigdon - 19/05/08 at 05:05:10 pm

So last week I tried a few times to run and normally before 2 miles my knee would start to feel bad and I don’t want a relapse of what happened to be in San Francisco so I have decided to stop running until the end of May and then see how things feel.  At this point if I am still having issues then maybe it is worth following up on.

Since I have’nt been running I have decided to still workout 6 times a week and just add more lifting into my routine.  I am not really ready for two days a week of the major muscles so I have been devoting some days to all core excercises or just certain excercises that kind of fall into a bunch of categories so I usually neglect them.  I actually started to track my lifting in my blog posts as private posts to reference back to to show increase in weight but now I am kind of finding this to be a pain in the ass.  Actually in my spare time I want to remedy this through some sort of web application that makes it much easier to track but this idea hasnt exactly came to fruition yet.

Anywho we will see how things go.

Finally my gym, developers hell, back at it

Posted by rhigdon - 12/05/08 at 11:05:13 pm

I went to the gym on Sunday afternoon and ended up lifting (Tricep / Shoulder ) and tried to run a bit.  I made it a mile and a half before I felt something off going on with my knee so I decided it to call a workout.  I then visited Mom back at home in Nanticoke (nepa).

That night i decided to finally do some work related stuff I have been putting off like upgrading to the new Ubuntu 8.04 (The Hardy Heron!) and trying out Netbeans IDE.  The reinstall of Ubuntu went really smoothly and this time I made sure to partition my harddrive so my /home directiories are by themselves so next time I don’t have to lose all my data (or migrate it elsewhere as was my case).  So I was up late and still didnt finish and ended up going to work.  I knew the day was going to be a bit slow because I wanted to tell everyone about all the goings on at JavaOne but then I still had to get my laptop to a state I could work on it.  This ended up being much harder than I had inticipated since learning the Netbeans IDE is really confusing for someone who has been using Eclipse for the past year.  I kept telling myself I won’t give up just because I am wasting a lot of time and I made a decent amount of progress.  Anyway I ended up being at work for 12 hours and not actually working at all.

After that nightmare I went to the gym and did some core lifting and some other random muscle that I normally never get to (like wrists).  I then did 20 minutes of cardio on the stair machine and all in all it was a good workout.

San Francisco, Java, and Injury

Posted by rhigdon - 11/05/08 at 12:05:08 pm

So this is a bit of a wrap up post since I haven’t really posted much since last week.

After my Tuesday run last week I ended up doing 4 miles on Thursday after some easy lifting.  After that my knee was bothering me.  Well it was kind of bothering me the whole week but I finally got smart on Friday that I should probably give it a break.  So I was going to go for a long run on Saturday of about 10 miles but got invited out of the area so I decided I would take a break Saturday and run on Sunday.

I ended up partying all weekend and didn’t get back till Sunday at 9pm which at that point I had to pack for San Francisco so I did not get to work out.  I was a bit bummed out by this but I figured my flight was coming into SFO at 3pm tomorrow so I should have plenty of time to get a run in afterwards.  As things always go that did not happen because we ended up taking a later flight and not getting into San Fran till 8pm.  (The bonus to all of this is we actually volunteered to take a later flight in exchange for free round trip tickets anywhere in the USA.  (Vegas anyone?)  So I went to dinner and was pretty beat from traveling so I did not end up running.  Maybe I was just being a baby since there is rarely a point where I actually WANT to go running but I was severely tired or at least that is my excuse.

So Tuesday JavaOne started and after the first General Session.. or maybe I should call it Sales Session… was over the actual classes we’re awesome.  You can call me a fanboy but I wen’t to see all of the programmers that are kind of big names.  This paid off since they all gave awesome presentations.  So at this point I was dying to get a workout in so I ended up going running around downtown San Fran.  I really have no idea how far I went since I still havent gotten a garmin but it was about 3 miles I beleive.

The next morning my knee again was killing me.  This was about the worst it has been and actually at one point during the day I had to stop going down stairs because i was in so much pain.  I understand running has its ups and downs but I really really really hate the downs.  The rest of JavaOne was pretty good and I feel I really learned a thing or two.  I am going to make what I learned into real Tech blog posts on my other blog.  –> see link over thar.

I ended up wanting to work out Thursday despite my knee still being in pain so I ended up paying 10$ to go to a gym downtown.  It is pretty bad that I wanted to work out so bad I was willing to pay 10$ for 2 hours in a gym but oh well.  I ended up doing some cardio on the step machine and my knee felt alright so I think I will use that for my cardio as I try to get my knee to feel better.

On the last day we ended up blowing off the conference which I am glad since there was an email sent out titled “URGENT HEALTH NOTIFICATION FROM THE JAVAONE TEAM” then the body read :

The JavaOne conference team has been notified by the San Francisco Department of Public Health about an identified outbreak of a virus in the San Francisco area. Testing is still underway to identify the specific virus in question, but they believe it to be the Norovirus, a common cause of the “stomach flu”, which can cause temporary flu-like symptoms for up to 48 hours. Part of the San Francisco area impacted includes the Moscone Center, the site of the JavaOne conference which is being held this week. We are working with the appropriate San Francisco Department of Public Health and Moscone representatives to mitigate the impact this will have on the conference and steps are being taken overnight to disinfect the facility. We have not received any indication that the show should end early, so will have the full schedule of events on Friday as planned. We hope to see you then.

Please see the attached notification from the Department of Public Health.

For further information, as well as Frequently Asked Questions related to the Norovirus, please visit the San Francisco Department of Public Health website at http://sfcdcp.org/norovirus.cfm

So coming the fact I did not have any really interesting classes that day we ended up going to the Google campus (This was totally my idea) to check it out and they ended up not giving tours so we really only got to walk around outside and see some cool stuff like a giant volleyball court in the center of the campus.  We wanted to use the rest of the gas in our rental car so we went to San Jose and got to see some other cool HQs of like Intel, Yahoo, Cisco which is probably only interesting to a geek like me.

Oh I forgot to mention that the assholes at Thrifty rental car gave us this as our rental car:

Yes.. they gave us this gay mobile as Gene and I drove around San Francisco.  Thanks.

Anyway to wrap up our flight got delayed on the way home so I ended up missing my connection and got 5 hours tacked on to my already long trip home.  I got home and pretty much crashed and have been doing nothing but sleeping since I got home except trying to go to the gym last night and it was closed at 9pm.  (Fucking LA Fitness)  Actually time to go back there now.  Sorry for the huge brain dump.

3.1 Miles Wildwood — Tuesday 4/29/08

Posted by rhigdon - 30/04/08 at 02:04:50 pm

Did a quick loop with Bill which was my first run since LVHM. As I got there I noticed I had my dress shoes instead of my running shows but I decided to just go for it with my K-Swiss. It sucks running without my running shoes I can tell you that. The first mile really felt like I was going pretty hard then at the mile market Bill notified me that we were doing a 9:15 pace. It is pretty interesting how fatigue affects your runs I guess since I am still a little tired from the weekend.

The last mile we ended up running a 7:38 mile which is very good for me. I really felt it after we stopped though as sweat was pouring off my face and Bill was looking at me as if he was worried I was going to die.

Either way I think it is safe to say I am injury free so that is awesome. Maybe I’ll look to do something a bit longer on Thursday.

Lehigh Valley Half Marathon — 4/27/08

Posted by rhigdon - 29/04/08 at 01:04:56 pm

If you noticed there is quite a bit of posts missing from my blog ! I ended up hurting my knee while playing racquetball on Wednesday. On Thursday I could barely walk so I decided to take a few days off. I ended up taking 3 days off before the half which I guess turned out to be a good idea. Here are my times:

Place Div  /Tot   Gende/Tot Name        Split10 Chiptim Pace
===== =========== ========= =========== ======= ======= =====
756    40/80      572/1457  Ryan Higdon 50:50   1:48:23  8:17

I was aiming for a 1:55 time so you can see I pretty well shattered that with a 1:48:23.  Looks like all my hard training paid off since originally I was only worried about finishing this race.

Also Congrats to everyone else who ran.  Pretty much everyone did really well.

4 mile run Front Street — 4/22/08

Posted by rhigdon - 23/04/08 at 09:04:04 am

Unfortunately I forgot my ghetto watch to keep track of my time. I did realize after i had finished that I was listening to my iAudio and it did have the time of the current track I was listening to. It was a podcast from The Java Posse so it was long enough to keep my time. However by the time I realized this I was walking back for about a minute so I have a slightly inaccurate time. It was 37 minutes when I looked so between starting this while i was still stretching and walking I am pegging my time at around 35 minutes. I guess this debacle really just pushes me more to buy a Garmin 405.

I also started to cramp up and slowed my pace near the end. I have been cramping up a lot lately and originally I thought it was dehydration but I think it also has to do with pushing myself a bit too hard. I just have to find a good pace Sunday that I am not going to cramp up at.

Conewego Trail run 9 miles — Saturday 4/19/08

Posted by rhigdon - 22/04/08 at 02:04:34 pm

So originally this was going to be a 10 mile run. -_-

We started at 1pm in the afternoon due to some scheduling conflicts. I was actually happy to do a late run since I am always complaining how this hobby is ruining my Saturday mornings. At 1pm I think it was about 82 degrees or so which was 15 degrees hotter than my 12 mile run on the same trail just a week prior. The first 5 miles were at probably a quicker pace than I needed to be going and that combined with the heat really wore me down so I ended up stopping at mile 9. I went with Bill and John who then turned around at mile 9 and did an extra 2 miles. It kind of bums me out that I couldn’t finish but I have to realize that I have only been doing a lot of running for the past few months and that those guys have both done full marathons already.

Oh also I broke down and bought a nerdy water belt. It looks funny and adds about 3 lbs but its pretty much a necessity to carry water on these long runs.

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