Tag: running

New Father Brogging, #006

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the most important things that I’ve learned as a first-time dad is that whenever you feel like you’re getting a grasp of raising a baby, behaviors will inevitably change and then you’re back into a position of knowing nothing all over again, and feeling helpless when your baby is reduced to crying and finding great difficulty at what may be causing your child distress.

When my baby is crying, it could be a variety of things that could be causing it; might be hunger, even if it might be improbably because she ate a full feed just 80 minutes ago, but a growth spurt could be in play, meaning she’ll want to eat pretty much every single hour.  Maybe it’s indigestion, to which there are only a few things that can actually bring her relief, like pressing her up against the warm body of a parent, or medicinally with gripe water or newborn anti-gas drops.  Maybe she needs to be burped more.  Maybe she’s cranky because she needs to take a nap.  Lately, she’s become cognizant to the discomfort of having a soiled diaper, something that hadn’t been the case in the first five weeks.  And sometimes, she just wants to be held by mom or dad.

The point is, there have been numerous times where I feel like I’ve identified a behavioral pattern, only to rely upon the knowledge of yesterday for today’s problems, and find out that everything has changed all over again, and then I’m left feeling dumbfounded and useless that I can’t figure out how to bring comfort to my own child.

I never once discounted the difficulty of parenting, for the first time much less, but as I expected it would be, parenting is not easy.  This does not deter me in the least bit, but I am just confirming that it’s about as difficult, and occasionally frustrating as I imagined it would be.  There’s nothing like changing a diaper, only for the kid to rip a wet fart and soil it seconds after being put on, only for an after shock to hit two minutes later, and make me throw my hands up at the frustrating of changing three diapers in the span of 120 seconds.

Ultimately I wouldn’t change a thing, and I’ll change a trillion diapers if I have to in order to raise my little girl right, but damn can I at least say there are times when I just have to say, what the fuck man?

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New Father Brogging, #002

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite my sporadic writing habits leading up to the birth of my child, I ironically seem to be finding more time to sit down and write now that she’s come into the world.  Mostly on account of the fact that as she was five weeks early, she’s unfortunately not home yet, and is still at the NICU, where her frail little preemie body is playing catchup under the safe and watchful eyes of medical professionals.

Ultimately, mythical wife and I both know that she’s exactly where she needs to be in her current state, and we are eternally grateful to the kind and caring staff of the hospital that has been definitely providing excellent care for our daughter.  However, when the days are over, the reality is that she is still not home with us, and it’s an agonizing struggle at the end of each night when the time comes for us to part ways with our daughter, while she stays in the NICU while we leave her and head back to our house, empty of human children.

She was born 12 days ago, but it doesn’t really quite feel like we’re parents just yet, as when the time comes in which we go to bed, it’s like we’re a married couple with no children, since there’s no kid to put to sleep and marvel over the fact that it’s a life that we created together.

We spend around 6-8 hours a day in the NICU with our kid, but until the day she comes home, there really is something kind of missing from the whole experience of having a child.  We feel like parents when we get to change her diapers, feed her, and rock her to sleep, but the wholesome feelings always end when the realization hits that we need to go home to rest and take care of ourselves, so we have the energy and capacity to do it all over again the following day.

Our daughter’s showing progress on a daily basis, but the fact of the matter is that it’s still an indeterminate amount of time before she’s given the green light to come home.  Her last real hurdle is to continue to demonstrate the ability to eat more and out of a bottle, more consistently, and subsequently gain weight.  Every day where she drains an entire bottle is akin to a playoff win, but behind the scenes we don’t know if we’re in the lightning-quick MLB playoffs, or if we’re in the endless vortex known as the NBA’s playoffs.

Back home, I’ve actually accomplished a lot of the tasks around the house that mythical wife and I agreed needed to get done before the arrival of our kid, because once she got here, we know they probably won’t be gotten to.  I’ve painted entire sections of our house, I’ve stained the entire fence around the house.  I’ve swapped out old outlets and switches for new, tamper-proof versions of them for future kid safety.  I’ve unboxed strollers and learned how to install car seats into both mine and mythical wife’s cars.  Just about every piece of furniture for our baby’s nursery is assembled and the room just about finished.

I’d wager to guess that most parents who ever have to go through the experience of their children going into the NICU go through the same kind of anxieties and frustration that mythical wife and I are going through.  I know there are many out there who have it way worse than we do in terms of state of the baby upon arrival or how little or long they stay in the NICU, but when the day is over, we’re all in the same state of where we as parents go home, while our children remain behind, which is a shitty feeling no matter how you look at it.

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Fuck companies that phone ghost

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Recently, I’ve been in an unfortunate position where I’ve had to deal with businesses where I’ve needed to get in contact with them in order to resolve legitimate issues.  In a perfect world, this doesn’t happen, but as we all know, this world sure as shit ain’t close to perfect.

In the past, I’ve often times felt fairly confident that if I can get a live human being on the phone, I can typically make it to a satisfactory solution.  Given the circumstances of my latest scenarios, I felt good about my chances at being able to get resolution, provided I could get someone on the phone.

The problem is, that in both instances, both companies have made it impossible to get human beings on the phone that are remotely capable of providing any sort of resolution.  And I’ll go ahead and name them, I’m talking about RunDisney and IKEA here, as prime examples of businesses that operate in what I’m calling phone ghosting, or the act of making it impossible for customers to even have the opportunities to resolve their issues over the phone.

So let’s start with RunDisney; as anyone who’s ever done a Disney run in their lives knows, registering for RunDisney events are expensive, frantic, chaotic, and tend to happen in the blink of an eye.  Every run they produce inevitably sells out, and they always need to be registered for, months in advance.

Mythical wife and I both registered for the Dine & Dash Wine & Dine Two-Course Challenge; back in March, because we go to the Food & Wine Festival every year anyway, and we’re both runners, and we’ve both developed this taste for collecting Disney run medals.  But I reiterate the March part, because the run itself doesn’t take place until November.

Naturally, a lot of things can change over eight months, like getting married and knocking up my new wife and having a baby on the way; and we both are astutely aware of RunDisney’s pretty iron-clad rules and regulations when it comes to no-refunds/no-transfer of run registrations.  But even those have some flexibility in them, especially when it comes to medical things, like being pregnant and being not medically cleared to run 13.9 miles over two days in Florida.

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To prove I could still do it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Among the numerous things I did over Labor Day weekend instead of going to Dragon*Con, I ran in a 10K on Labor Day.  Ever since I installed a rod in my office in which to hang all of my running medals from, I was disappointed at how sparse it looked, and decided that I needed more medals.  The Big Peach Sizzler seemed like a perfect opportunity to do something productive in the sense of acquiring another medal, accomplish something that was exercise, but also to prove to myself that even at the ancient age of 37, I could still run a sub-60 minute 10K.

And at 58:44, I accomplished what I set out to do.

Not bad for an old dog like me that didn’t really prepare that much, other than routine maintenance runs, just to make sure that I can run 2-3 miles at the drop of a hat.  It wasn’t my best 10K time ever (54:09), but given the circumstances, I can’t really complain.

I was actually really excited when I passed the 55-minute pacer, and thoughts of possibly beating my best time began to swirl in my head, and the amount of personal gloating and braggadocio I could do if I achieved it.  But clearly I blew my wad a little too early, and around the third mile, I began to hit a wall of not feeling good enough to continuously run for the rest of the run, and had to drop gears and go into a run-walk for the rest of the run.  Not long after hitting this wall, it was only a matter of minutes before 55 passed me, and it became a personal battle to not see 60.

And fortunately for myself, I never saw the 60-minute pacer, nor did I ever take the time to look backward and try and see.  Given the fact that I finished at 58:44, they probably weren’t ever that far behind me at any point after the third or fourth mile.

Ultimately, this overall positive result, and the fact that I want to collect more medals for my display bar, has inspired me to get more back into running, to where I can, not just improve, but have reason to keep up training, and be capable of getting back to making progress and tackling longer runs, where I can start amassing more medals to display.

Hey, whatever it takes to have good reason to continue to exercise and have a good physical habit in my life, right?

I feel like a lack of time is all part of being adults

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Whenever I take the time to write, it’s usually because I’ve built myself a nice little cushion of time to where I can write, fairly uninterrupted, for anywhere from 45-90 minutes.  That, has not happened in quite some time, and therefore I have not really taken the time to write, which in itself gives me a little bit of anxiety, because I don’t ever want to fall out of the habit of writing, because writing is important to me, and it makes me anxious when I haven’t done it in a while.

It’s literally been two weeks since the last time I sat down and did any sort of writing.  This isn’t to say that there’s been nothing interesting or worth writing about, although I will say that the usual bullshit that occurs in Atlanta and/or Georgia itself has been a little on the dull side or a little too darkly serious side, like the prehistoric anti-abortion laws they’re pushing, which are things that I don’t really feel remotely capable of speaking about.  I ran in my first-ever official half marathon, the Star Wars half at Disney World.  UVA won a national championship in an actual sport (basketball).  Women, main evented Wrestlemania, with Becky Lynch winning both women’s championships from Charlotte and Ronda Rousey.  Tiger Woods won the Masters and proved that winning shit in sports absolves anyone of their personal indiscretions because they’re totally related.  Game of Thrones embarked on their final season, and the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris almost burned down, because bad shit always tends to happen this time of year.

Things, have most definitely been happening all around the world; it’s just that I really haven’t been able to build that cushion that I always tend to want in order to do some writing, because it never seems like there’s ever any time in the day for me do such.  Whether it’s the increased responsibilities and the seemingly endless parade of little and large tasks that I have at work, meetings after meetings, I barely have the time to have proper lunches on a daily basis, much less be able to eat food and type words at the same time. 

And then when I get home, whether or not I have to cook dinner or an endless litany of small tasks and daily chores that I feel the need to do in order to have a somewhat kept house, that by the time I’m done with everything, I’m at that awkward point of the day in which I don’t feel like I have enough time to write, or watch anything other than a 30-minute program on Netflix, because I should probably start considering going to bed in order to be a responsible adult and not be tired during work.

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Some Black Mirror shit coming to life here

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A little while ago, my gym brought in these three new stationary bikes.  Expresso bikes.  They do that every now and then; bring in some new cardio equipment, presumably to try and get people to actually work on their cardio instead of doing the age-old practice of bogarting elliptical machines for 30 minutes and calling it an adequate workout.

At first glance, they don’t look like anything special, they look like some fairly standard, nondescript exercise bicycles – except that they have a screen affixed to the front of them.  Obviously, with the constantly advancing rise of the digital world we live in, it’s no shocker to see screens ending up on bicycles, when there are already screens attached to various other bicycles, treadmills and elliptical machines; distraction is the key to long cardio sessions, and if screens can provide some distractions, then maybe some fat sweaty Atlantic City sweat hogs might actually lose some weight.

But it’s not television that these screens broadcast; users have the option on what they want to have broadcast between different settings of paths, some interactive studio training, or interactive games that can be played while bicycling, utilizing your own cycling as the controller.

Honestly, I’m intrigued by these Expresso bikes, and if I weren’t always in the mindset that running is really the only acceptable form of cardio, I’d be willing to give these a try.  Frankly, I’m under the belief that gamification is an effective way of teaching and training, and if making an exercise bike more fun by adding games or creating competition is going to be what it takes for some people to get up and exercise, I think it’s pretty cool.

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I fucking hate bicyclists now

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For the last few months, mythical gf has been training for a half marathon.  Being the long-time runner that I am, I’ve decided to join along for lots of her runs, as it’s never going to hurt me to get out there and run and burn some extra calories here and there.  As part of the training, we’ve been going out to trails and extending her distance little by little, in preparation for the eventual 13.1 mile course.

We’ve found a trail that we’ve decided is the ideal place to train and stretch out distances, and over the last few months, we’ve been routinely spending a day every weekend out there to log some miles, burn some calories and in my case, sweat out buckets.  With the weather finally changing from summer into fall and cooling off, the runs have been rather pleasant lately.

Except, for the existence of all these fucking bicycles.  Look, it’s a multi-use trail, and I understand that bicycles have just as much right as the two of us and every other walker/jogger in Georgia does.  But given the fact that the vast majority of bicyclists on the trail are all these mega-douchebag-tryhard bike riders, by the time our runs end, I always make some sort of proclamation about how much I’ve grown to hate bicyclists now.

I’m talking about these shitheads who roll into the parking lot in Audis, Lexuses and Porsches, are wearing these onesies that would raise the eyebrows of even the most dedicated Queer Eye viewer, and from what little I do know about bicycles, are unleashing these bicycles with blade wheels, carbon fiber bodies, and other ludicrously priced hardware meant to make them as fast as possible. 

And naturally, they capitalize on the expensive toys’ capabilities, and scream down the path as humanly possible, despite the fact that the trail’s width is maybe 10 feet wide, very well-populated, with a variety of runners, walkers, people with baby strollers, or dog walkers.

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