Random Thoughts For Early 2010

     After several months of avoiding it, I finally did karaoke again at home because I saw Manny Pacquiao singing on the Jimmy Kimmel Live show last week. You can check out my karaoke experiences here: http://noeldlp.blogspot.com/2009/06/dabbling-in-closet-karaoke.html

     One thing I don’t like about writing these blogs: I tend to sit too long and not move around. The only movement happening is when my fingers start typing. How many calories do you think that burns?

     So what’s with all these Nerf products? I went to the store to buy my nephew a birthday present a few weeks ago and the shelves were stacked with Nerf toys. I bought one for him and he got Nerf toys from two other guests also.

     Just when I thought I was doing okay with my expenses, my mortgage payment got higher due to an increase in property taxes. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the homeowners association raised our monthly dues. So much for trying to save.

     I received my federal income tax refund on February 26^th. Basically, the federal government gave me back my deposit in the form of withholding taxes. At least I have something to pay for the increase in my mortgage and homeowner’s association dues and also the new elliptical machine.

     One of the runners from our running club recently ran a 50 kilometer race on trails and finished in 7 hours and 55 minutes. That’s about the same amount of time I engage in aerobic exercise for a whole week, sometimes lesser.

     Remember when I blogged about giving computer and internet tech support to my uncle and auntie a few months ago?  You can find that entry here: http://noeldlp.blogspot.com/2009/12/computer-frustration.html  . They still call me once in awhile but I found a function in Skype that allows them to share what’s on their screen to me. So now, if they have a question, we connect on Skype and they can point out to me what the problem is or ask me how to do things while I tell them where to point their cursor or where to type certain things to get the results they want. Microsoft Windows Live Messenger has a remote assistance function to it but I’ve never tried it and my Uncle and Auntie don’t have Messenger.

     Last week, I resisted the urge to use the internet so I could catch up on my reading. My reading nowadays is severely limited to Runner’s World, Westways, Competitor, and the USA Today magazine that comes with the Sunday newspaper.

     It’s funny to be remembered by former classmates or townmates not necessarily by my name but by a nickname a girl gave me in high school. Back in the day, I was nicknamed Renault. I heard that girl has been widowed, married a second time, has about four kids and still lives in the same town. I’m not in touch with her. Searching Google or Facebook has not yielded any results.

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The Simplicity of Life in a Small Town

Writing this reminds me of an old Barbra Streisand song with the lines “could it be it was all so simple then, or has time rewritten many lines”.

Children growing up nowadays lead hectic and complicated lives, with a sensory overload of electronic games, cell phones, after school activities, and the internet. What I remember best growing up in a small town was its simplicity. The only electronic item we had at home was a radio and the town had only two stations, though if the conditions were right, we would get Voice of America and a Manila station. We didn’t have TV in those days. Cleaning the house? Most people had hardwood floors then, way before they became popular in homes again. So we didn’t have vacuum cleaners because we didn’t have carpets, or even electric polishers or special fluids to make the hardwood floor shine. What we had was floor wax and a coconut husk scrub. You spread the wax with a rag by hand while knelt on the floor and afterwards while standing up, you step on the scrub with one foot and start moving it back and forth. It’s hard to paint that picture here, but my Filipino friends won’t have a problem understanding it. And if you didn’t have floor wax, melted candle did the job just as well.

 The one and only traffic signal in town was a small booth where a policeman steps in and turns a lever with a sign on top –stop on one side and go on the other side to indicate which street at the intersection stops and which one goes. Public transportation consisted of jeepneys and tricycles and if you had to travel out of town, you went on bus-like transports simply called trucks, because basically they were flat bed trucks with benches and a roof with no walls on the sides or the back.

Entertainment consisted of movie theaters, some of which were infested with bedbugs which bit into the back of your legs while you were sitting on the wooden chairs. One way to prevent this from happening was to spread newspapers on the chair before you sat down. There were a lot of restaurants in town and most of them served Chinese cuisine, but one of the perennial favorites was a Satti place, satti being local delicacy. It consists of skewered chicken meat, a special hot soupy sauce, and chunks of sticky white rice. Other entertainment venues were a couple of night clubs (Sky Room and Sea Breeze?). A frequent hangout for me was the local tennis club which was next door to our house. I learned to play the game in high school and became a member of the club.

Festivities like weddings or some other private parties thrown by wealthy people were considered whole day affairs because the partying lasted all day. This didn’t happen often but only on very special occasions.

When people exercised, it was usually a pre-dawn walk around the Jolo Wharf to breathe the fresh sea air, or jogging on the asphalt pavement of the airport runway.

The electric power plant of Jolo had a very loud (air raid) siren which blared at 7 a.m., 12 noon, and 5 p.m. to signal the start of the days’ work, lunch time, and quitting time respectively. People adjusted their clocks and watches based on that siren. How’s that for simplicity of time keeping? Would you believe that workers went home for lunch and perhaps a siesta before going back to work in the afternoon? Well, that’s the truth and I guess we got that from the Spaniards who colonized the country for more than 300 years.

Other things I remember but not necessarily about our town was going on a trip every year to Zamboanga City for the Fiesta Pilar. I had to be absent one or two days from school depending on what day of the week the fiesta was celebrated. One thing I looked forward to as a young child going to Zamboanga City was riding the calesa which is a horse drawn carriage and a main form of non-motorized transportation in those days. Another thing was begging my parents every year to buy me a helium filled balloon which string they tied to my wrist so it wouldn’t accidentally fly away. Other than celebrating the Fiesta Pilar, the birthdays of my mom and lolo Lawa (of Lawa’s Café, whose coffee addicted the town population to no end) were celebrated too. Mr. Lawa never failed to give his extended family a Christmas ham every year. Anyway, it seems that I’ve digressed from my main topic at this point.

I’m sure my townmates have their own share of memories of how simple it was in those days of growing up. My memory is not so intact anymore to remember all my experiences, but I hope this has awakened some forgotten slices of life in other people, and if that happens, please do share. Thank you so much.

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Another Harasser or Stalker?

While I was out running last Monday morning, a car stopped ahead of me and waited. I thought it was another case of someone harassing me. I’m thinking – Oh, great! I’m being accosted by another weirdo who is going to harass me like what happened several years ago. Back then, I was wearing running tights during the cold winter months, and you know when a man wears tights, it might show a little bump in the middle front part of the lower extremities. Please banish the thought from your imagination right now because I’m sure it was not a pretty sight. At that time, the man driving a car stopped me in mid run and complimented me on my so called asset (no, not the back part). I thanked him, continued on my run, but this guy kept following me. I had to do some evasive maneuvers by running down some streets in the opposite direction of where he was driving, and just in case he was able to track me down, I headed towards a police substation in the neighborhood. Thankfully, I was able to lose him. I bought my first of several pepper spray canisters after that incident.

Now back to the present and another case of a car which appeared to be stalking me. When the guy rolled down his window, he called out my name! Well I’ll be darned if it wasn’t my former co-worker from the mid 1990’s at a now defunct psychiatric hospital. I hadn’t seen him in more than a decade and only once briefly since that hospital closed, but I recognized him instantaneously even though he had lost a lot of weight since then. What a relief! It was not someone out to harass me after all. Ron M. and I worked together on the night shift for a few years and it was a good partnership. It was too bad that the hospital closed down because it was a good place to work. We exchanged a few updates about our lives and after giving him my phone number and email address, I went on to finish my run while he headed for his next appointment.

At least I wasn’t harassed this time and maybe because I don’t wear running tights anymore.

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The Tricycle: A Human Powered Taxi

Ever heard of the Smart car? Of course you have. It’s that tiny two-seater motor vehicle popular in Europe and has been sold in the U.S. in the past few years. Where I grew up, we had our own version of such vehicle, but it was human powered. It was called a tricycle, otherwise known as a pedicab, or phonetically in the native Tausug dialect, a tarasikul, or jokingly since there were no taxis in our town, a taxikul. It consists of a bicycle and a sidecar, plus a headlight and a ringer. Normally, what we consider a tricycle is the three wheeled kids’ toy. In our small town, this is what a tricycle looks like:

It’s supposed to seat two passengers but with small children seated on their parents’ laps, you can have as much as four riders plus the driver. I don’t think you can fit that many people in a Smart car. If it rains, the driver attaches a transparent plastic cover on the front and sides of the vehicle while he remains exposed to the elements. When I was growing up, it used to cost between 15 to 25 centavos for a ride, depending on the distance travelled. Imagine how strong the legs of the driver needed to be to propel that vehicle especially uphill. Their legs were the engines that made the tricycle move, fueled by rice and fish. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an overweight tricycle driver. From what I hear, they use motorcycles now and I don’t know how much the fare is anymore, or if any of the drivers have gotten fat.

Picture used with permission from and courtesy of elementary schoolmate LTG.

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The Unblogged Weekend

I haven’t been able to blog too much in the past week because I’ve been busy with other things. It’s not like I have a deadline to catch or have a ton of readers waiting with bated breath for the next blog post. Hah!

A couple of days spent with my high school classmate plus a birthday party on day three didn’t leave me much time to enjoy my usual routine of doing nothing. Even though ideas come to my mind from time to time, if I don’t write them down, the feeling passes and I would have forgotten what the idea was. With the break in my routine due to entertaining and being entertained, I kinda lost control of my calorie intake which I’ve been trying to stabilize in the last couple of days.

I enjoyed spending time with my former classmate who is currently visiting the U.S. We were in school together from kindergarten through high school then lost touch after that. The last time I saw him was in 1989 when I was on vacation in the Philippines and got in touch with him, after which he took me out to lunch. I don’t even remember the details of that day almost 21 years ago. This time, it was my turn to show him around. First I wanted to give him something he hasn’t experienced in the Philippines before, something authentically American. So I took him and his aunt to a restaurant called Johnny Rebs’ Southern Roadhouse, for a taste of the South. While he ordered a sirloin steak (not too southern, I thought), his aunt ordered pork chops (getting closer to the south), and I had the blackened catfish (now that’s more like it!). The ambience of the place was unlike the usual eatery. At the entrance, I could hear a cat meowing, but didn’t see a cat. Upon entering, you immediately notice the peanut shells strewn all over the floor (I already read about this so it was not unexpected). When I used their bathroom, I heard a rooster or hen crowing and cackling and noticed there were chicken figurines perched near the ceiling with a recording of them doing the chicken noises. I came to the conclusion that the meowing I heard at the front door was also a recording. Funny stuff!

I was supposed to take them to downtown Long Beach afterwards to show them the Pike, Shoreline Village and the other sights of Long Beach, but after taking them to my condo, we got hung up searching for some of his relatives on the internet, then upon getting back to his aunt’s house, a couple our townmates came to visit and we just ended up reminiscing about our small town in the Philippines. It was not until the next day that I was able to take my classmate on a tour of downtown Long Beach, but not before we had lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant and had pho. At least I was able to get him to experience two different types of cuisine he has never had before. See how one can lose control of the calories in just a couple of days? Anyhow, we walked around the Long Beach Convention Center, the Pike, Shoreline Village, Aquarium of the Pacific, and the lighthouse (Parker’s and the other taller one), and took a bunch of pictures which are currently posted on Facebook. Upon returning home, his aunt had her grandkids home and we were off to Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurant to entertain the kids. While the kids played games, we sat around and ate pizza. The kids were burning their calories while we were storing them.

The next day, I met with our AREC running group and did 12 miles (more on this later), then I went to a nephew’s birthday party, where my aunt cooked some Filipino goodies which I managed to partake of generously. Oh my goodness! Three consecutive days of engaging my body with all these good food. No wonder I lost control. By the time Sunday came, I was all but ready to decompress from the overindulgences of the past few days. I stayed home, watched a few movies, tried to reboot my mind and body so I could be fresh and ready to go back to work the next day.

Please forgive any grammatical errors in this entry. If you find any, please let me know because I didn’t have time to proofread it very closely.

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Raiding The Closet After The 10 Mile Run Last Sunday

I went through my closet to sort out things I needed, didn’t need, haven’t used or seen in years, can live without and can dispose of. These are some of the things that I found:

A receipt for my first ever laptop computer – a 1986 vintage Toshiba T1100 with two floppy disk drives. The price: $2200 dollars! By the way, I still have that laptop and can’t bear to throw it away because it could be a museum piece one day if it’s not already. The computer still works if you know MS-DOS.

Check registers all the way from 1983 and savings account passbooks from 1981. Bank of America, I’ve been so loyal to you!

Volleyball kneepads which I haven’t used since the late 80’s when I used to live in Torrance and played in adult volleyball leagues. I’m keeping the Debbie Green-autographed volleyball. She was an Olympian in 1984 and a setter extraordinaire for the U.S. team. I attended one of her workshops after they won the silver medal in the L.A. Olympics, and had her sign my volleyball.

An ex GF’s high school yearbook and some of her pictures. I’m not even sure where she lives anymore.

Two cotton Nike running tanktops and two Brooks technical (at the time) singlets which I haven’t worn since my racing days in the 80’s.

Three old Los Angeles marathon painter’s caps which came with the goodie bags in those days.

A bunch of worn and unworn cotton or polyester gloves for cold weather running.

A box of potpourri from 1989 given to us by the airline on my way back from the Philippines, to commemorate then President Cory Aquino’s trip to Vancouver. She was of course seated in first class on that flight.

A couple of soft sided carry-on luggage. The first, a parachute cloth bag which I used in 1980 when I moved here to the U.S., and the other, something I bought from Woolworth’s and used on my visit to the Philippines in 1989. Gives literal meaning to the term “old bag”.

A gag gift given to me many, many Christmases ago by the aforementioned ex gf and her roommate. It was a small pouch called One Night Stand consisting of a small vibrator, massaging gel, and a couple of condoms.

A Samsung camcorder, rarely used, but now obsolete, and a Ricoh Mirai camera which I used extensively as an amateur photographer in the late 80’s.

I probably forgot some of the other things I found, but under the disposed of list were: the receipt, kneepads, tank tops, painter’s caps, a few gloves, the potpourri, old luggage, gag gift, camcorder, and camera. The check registers and bank passbooks, I shredded. I’m keeping the old laptop computer and mailing the yearbook if ever I find the new address of my long lost friend.

The more I took out of the closet, the more it looked the same. Darn!

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The Fight That Broke Out At the Birthday Party

I went to a nephew’s 18^th birthday party Saturday evening. Eighteen already?! I can still remember when his mom (my first cousin) was a baby in the Philippines and when her parents were at work, my parents used to “kidnap” her from next door so they could babysit her. Not only that, my younger brother and I benefited from it because we went to the beach unplanned to have impromptu picnics, usually in the afternoon when my father was done with work. Nobody went to the beach in the afternoon in those days much less on a weekday. The reason why my parents were so fond of my cousin was because they never had a daughter and just had us two boys. My brother and I didn’t mind of course, we were just as fond of her and the picnics were just a bonus. Too bad this didn’t last too long because soon enough my cousin and her parents moved to the United States. I didn’t see her again until 1980 when I moved here.

And now her oldest offspring just turned 18. Did we time travel, flash forward, breach the space/time continuum? It doesn’t seem that long ago somehow but now we are here.

As I posted on Facebook yesterday, I went to a birthday party and a fight broke out: the Pacquiao/Cotto fight. In a totally unexpected turn of events, the post dinner activity involved waiting for the aforementioned boxing match to start on TV. My cousin ordered the pay per view event from the satellite TV company and we only learned about it when we arrived at the party. So instead of the usual card game, parlor games, or karaokefest, we were entertained with the sweet science of boxing on the tube. After a couple of hours of watching the undercard, the main event started.

I don’t really watch or follow boxing except for what I read in the sports section of the newspaper, but I know about this fighter from the Philippines named Manny Pacquiao who is much revered by his countrymen. He even has at least a couple of movies made about his life already. When Pacquiao fights, something like a Twilight Zone episode happens in the Philippines. The streets become deserted because all the vehicles disappear and the populace are glued to TV sets. I’ve never seen him fight so it was a treat from my cousin to show us this event at her home, even though most of the guests were not of Filipino background. My cousin married a white guy whose last name is the same as the fast food chain with the golden arches. I was surprised to see how fast the fights went. Three minutes each round plus one minute break, and no sexy girls parading around with placards showing what round it was. It was just slam, bam, clinch, punch, counter, then ring the bell and the round is over. No time wasted. So in spite of four undercards, the fights went pretty fast.

Well, we already all know the result of the fight so no use rehashing the whole twelve rounds here. Pacquiao won in a technical knockout 55 seconds into the 12^th and last round. Being born Filipino, of course I was rooting for him and was hoping for a knockout and since Cotto was being pummeled so badly, I wished that the fight ended sooner than later.

Well, my dear cousin, thank you so very much for inviting me to your son’s birthday party. It will forever be remembered as the eighteenth birthday party in which a planned fight broke out. Fortunately, it didn’t involve the celebrant. Welcome to adulthood Ryan J.

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What Dessert Used To Be (or the fruits of my childhood)

Remember when after a meal, dessert used to be fruit? Growing up in a place with an abundant variety of fruits, they were readily available to satisfy everyone’s sweet tooth. Cookies and candy bars were rare treats. Sodas (we called them soft drinks) were sometimes split between two people. And by the way, the cookies we had were similar to the Nilla wafers nowadays. We had no chocolate chip, peanut butter, sugar, oatmeal raisin cookies then. Doughnuts were homemade and they were just plain which you dipped in sugar.

I don’t know if I can remember all the fruits we had available then, but I’ll try. Most of these are sweet fruits but some of them are sour which you dip in salt, preferably (for me) salt with freshly crushed red peppers. Durian, mangosteen, lanzones or buwahan, langka or nangka, marang, mango, mampalam, star apple, carambola, atis, coconut, banana (smaller yellow ones), papaya, oranges (what were the small oranges called?), tambis, camias, grapefruit, wani, baunu, pineapple, tambis, macopa, santol, and guavas. Grapes, Sunkist oranges, and apples were only available in a grocery store and were expensive because they couldn’t be grown locally. My Tausug friends, if you can add any more fruits from the place where we grew up in, which I forgot about, please do.

Unfortunately nowadays, an after meal sweet would probably be chocolate bars, or cookies, or ice cream, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (I like PB&J). If had pies or cakes here, I would probably have that too, so it’s good that I don’t buy them. Even if the fruits I mentioned above were available here, it would probably be very hard to wean myself away from the refined sugars that I’ve gotten used to, but it could be possible. Make those fruits available to me and I’ll turn a new leaf, or in this case a new but old dessert of childhood.

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A Few Random Thoughts Post Marathon

Now that the generalized muscle soreness is subsiding, my regular aches and pains are returning as expected. I was wearing a knee strap at the race which I really don’t like using because I’m allergic to neoprene. It gives me a rash.

The perils of carbo loading: you eat a lot of carbs for three days before the marathon, during which you decrease the amount of exercise that you do because of tapering. Your stomach expands with the extra food which increases its capacity. After the marathon, the capacity of your stomach remains at an expanded state and it’s more difficult to attain satiety than during your pre-carbo load days, so you tend to eat more to feel satisfied. The result – weight gain. But that’s just my theory based on experience. This year, I didn’t alter my diet significantly so I didn’t get the resultant weight gain.

I don’t know when I’m going to start running again. It feels like I gave it my all last Sunday and don’t feel the need to run again soon. Maybe I’ll try on Friday and Sunday.

I haven’t lifted weights in more than a week due to pre-marathon tapering and post marathon recovery. I’ll have to get back to that routine soon.

I got my seasonal flu shot at work tonight. My right arm is sore. We don’t have the H1N1 or swine flu vaccine yet. I hope we get it soon because I don’t want to look like the picture above.

My CPR certification is expiring at the end of the month so I signed up for renewal at work which is exactly on the day that my current one expires. If I don’t do it, I’ll get suspended.

I haven’t thought of what to reward myself for finishing the marathon. Maybe I already pre-rewarded myself when I bought the treadmill.

Every year a week after the marathon, and for the past two years, Kate and Deb have been hosting the Win Freeman Post Marathon party otherwise known as the Liars Party, where people share stories about what great time they had running the full or half marathon. Shall I go to the liar’s party or not? I RSVP’d in case I make it there. I have a tad bit of social anxiety and I’m more comfortable socializing while on the run. Was that last sentence TMI?

I’ve been back to work the past two nights and wore my marathon technical shirt the first night. One of the patients was a spectator in the race and she told me that she was in awe of all the runners and volunteers. It has been a good couple of nights so far. Oops, I’ve spoken too soon. We are expecting two admissions after 1 a.m.

The security guard I wrote about last week is back tonight and the staff remains wary of him. The picture I included in that blog resembles his body type so well.

It was my mom’s 78^th birthday yesterday in the Philippines and I talked to her on the phone before I left for work. She is 15 hours ahead of us here in the U.S. She sounded well and said she felt good except for her arthritis. She had a full day planned to celebrate with her friends. She didn’t receive the birthday card I sent yet but I hope it gets there now matter how delayed it will be. One of my aunts said it takes more than a month – about 2 days from the U.S to the Philippines and the rest of the time seemingly by pony express from Manila to Zamboanga, if it gets there at all. My mom was able to attend the Notre Dame High School Grand Reunion because it was held in the city she lives in and she met some of her former classmates and childhood friends. My Uncle Dante and Auntie Lita also attended and they came from Jolo, the town I was born in.

Mama was happy to hear that I was able to finish another marathon because in the past four years I’ve been telling her I couldn’t cover 42.16 kilometers anymore. All’s well that ends well.

Baby Shower!

I went to my Uncle Oscar and Aunt Ditas’ house yesterday for the baby shower of my cousin. The party was hosted by my cousin’s older sister and parents. When I first received the invitation a couple of months ago, I immediately posted on my cousin’s Facebook wall, my congratulations to her and her husband about the pregnancy. Only about a day later did I realize that I might have made a mistake. Maybe they didn’t want to announce it to everyone and by posting it on Facebook, I might have broken a secret. I quickly deleted it and sent my cousin an email apologizing for my lack of judgment. She assured me that it was okay and I was able to breath a sigh of relief, whew!

When I came to the U.S. years ago, Kristine was just 3 or 4 years old and I lived in their house for a few months before I moved to my own apartment, so I practically saw her grow up from grade school, high school, college, then marriage to a wonderful man named Howard who is originally from Louisiana. And now they are blessed with the upcoming arrival of their first child. I don’t know if you remember this Kristine, but in the first couple of days while I was living at your parent’s house, your dad was teaching me how to drive and you were seated at the back seat before child safety seats were mandated. We were on the way home from a holiday party and as we neared your house, I inadvertently braked hard and you fell forward and hit your mouth against the front seat, which hurt you and caused your gums to bleed. I was mortified because you were crying and I thought that I broke your teeth. Luckily, the bleeding stopped and so did your tears. So just to warn you, when your baby is growing up, never let me drive a car with her in it.

At the party, my cousin Mary Ann, who is Kristine’s sister made an interesting table centerpiece in the shape of a three tiered cake made out of diapers. How creative! I got to see relatives whom I haven’t seen in months because we live far from each other even though it is within the Southern California area. There was Jeanette who lives in Thousand Oaks with her husband Ike (he couldn’t make it because he was babysitting the grandkids). I told her that Jon and Kate Plus Eight had nothing on her family because she was one of nine children. I used to live with them in U.P. Village for a couple of years when I was in college, so there was my Uncle and Aunt, the 9 children, plus 3 other relatives (including me) in the household. Ed lives in L.A. while his sister Beth and her daughter, son-in-law and two grandkids recently moved to Murrieta from Long Beach. Cousin Edwin, his wife Danielle and three kids live in Santa Ana.

After having lunch consisting of Chick-Fil-A nuggets, sandwiches and wraps, plus pancit, lumpia shanghai, steak, key lime pie, fruit tart, ambrosia and a huge cake, Mary Ann started some games. The first one was guessing the girth of Kristine’s belly using knitting yarn. We all took our estimates, cut the yarn to the size of our guesses then at the end compared it to Kristine’s actual belly size. Needless to say, I didn’t even come close, but Danielle, her with the three sons, came within an inch and won. The next game was word scramble consisting of words relating to pregnancy and having a baby. Out of 25 words, the winner came up with 16 correct answers. Trying to be a smartass, I announced that I got 26 words correctly. Another game was trying to pick the most number of tiny safety pins out of a big bowl of uncooked rice while blindfolded, within one minute. The winner was able to get 6 safety pins. I tried this game much later and was amazed at how difficult it was. If I only knew, I would have brought a magnet. There were other games that followed but I went inside to talk to relatives who were trying to guess the sex of the baby based on the shape of Kristine’s belly, the width of her shoulders, or if she was beaming or not. I didn’t even hazard a guess for I don’t know anything about it. While all these were going on, I managed to tease my Uncle who has been relearning to use the internet, not to forget to attach a postage stamp whenever he sends an email.

Later in the evening, I asked Kristine and Howard for the three of us to pose for a picture and asked for their permission to write a blog about the party and post the picture, which fortunately they consented to. If not, this entry would have never been written. Thank you very much Kristine and Howard, for your graciousness. May you be blessed with your new baby.

Glycogen Depletion And Tapering For A Marathon

This is how tapering for a marathon was like years ago. The last long run used to be two weeks before the marathon and those long training runs used to be on Sundays. I don’t know how, when, or why it got switched to Saturdays. Maybe it was more convenient for more people’s daily lives that way.

Tapering used to involve decreasing the total weekly mileage gradually over two weeks (still true today except you do it over three weeks), except for the Sunday before the marathon, you would go on a medium distance run of about 10 to 15 miles for the purpose of depleting your body of glycogen. Glycogen depletion continued for three more days up to Wednesday where you would be eating a high protein diet to really strip the glycogen out of your muscles. The theory behind this is that your muscles become more receptive to storing extra glycogen when you start on a high carbohydrate diet from Thursday to Saturday in preparation for the marathon on Sunday. This training technique worked very well too. The only problem is that during your runs and other activities from Monday to Wednesday you feel very sluggish and fatigued from lack of energy-giving glycogen in your muscles. Not only that, you tend to become cranky. And if you overdo the high carbohydrate diet from Thursday to Saturday, you might gain some unwanted weight. Nowadays most marathoners don’t go on a glycogen depletion diet anymore. You only have to eat a regular diet from Sunday to Wednesday and slightly increase your carbohydrate intake from Thursday to Saturday.

Another variation of tapering involves the same decrease in running mileage, but keeping the intensity of the workouts. In other words, you still run hard during the shorter runs to retain the speed and lung capacity you have developed during training.

So there it is, sounds pretty simple. Now go and do it. A little more than a week to go for the marathon. Good luck with the diet, tapering, and the race.

Growing Up Catholic

Being raised under the Catholic church is so ingrained in my brain so much so that I can probably still memorize the High Latin Mass to this day even though I haven’t attended church in awhile and Latin mass is rarely said anymore. After so many domino vobiscums and et cum spiritutuos, the words just imbed themselves in the mind even though you don’t know what it means.

During Holy Week, we do the Stations of the Cross and say these prayers on every station: We adore thee o Christ and we praise thee, because of thy Holy Cross thou has redeemed the world. See that? I haven’t done the Stations of the Cross in decades!

Take another example: the Angelus which we pray every dusk. Give me the first few words and it will all probably come back to me quickly. I think it starts this way: The angel of the Lord came unto Mary…(I can almost hear the church bells pealing in the background).

Our mother had the family pray the rosary every night when I was growing up that we memorized the Litany after awhile that we didn’t even have to read the prayer book anymore. What I never memorized were the Mysteries, the glorious, the sorrowful and whatever the other one was called.

I don’t consider myself a devout Catholic but neither am I a lapsed one either because I still believe and have faith in my heart. What I wrote above I did from memory and I didn’t look anything up on the internet so if there are things that are wrong, well I hope I can still be forgiven by going to confession again. Bless me Father for I have sinned…

Old Fashioned Marathon Training

Finisher's shirts from my first two marathons

Wow, I recently realized that the time it took me to run/walk sixteen miles last Saturday (2 hours and 53 minutes) was almost the amount of time it used to take me to do my longest runs while preparing for a marathon. If I remember correctly from training for my first marathon, the training plan only called for a three hour run as the longest. The reason was that if you can run for three hours, you can certainly finish a marathon. This was before GPS watches and runners only relied on an ordinary watch. Nowadays training plans call for twenty to twenty two miles as the longest runs and for slower runners that could take more than three hours. The three hour long run has taken a lot of runners using the old Honolulu Marathon Training Plan to the finish line and my old booklet from 1980 even says that a long run of fourteen miles is enough to finish a marathon. I don’t know if Honolulu’s finishers marathon plan is still the same today but it used to be that you would progress by increasing your long runs by thirty minutes every two weeks until you reached three hours, regardless of distance. As recently as five years ago that was the kind of marathon training I was doing and it enabled me to finish twenty five marathons. I can’t run marathons anymore because of my tendon problems, but it just surprised me that I was able to run/walk for almost three hours last Saturday.

What It Took To Run Every Day For 21 Years

I know, I know, I keep on revisiting this defunct running streak even though it’s old news, except I haven’t really given the reason why I started it and how I was able to do it. I just wrote about how it ended. I might send it to Emmett (AREC secretary and newsletter editor) and see if he needs a space filler for the next newsletter since I haven’t contributed anything this year yet.

Not that I was trying to set any personal records. I just decided one day to try to run every day and soon it became routine just like brushing my teeth. Actually, before the 21 year streak, I already had a 3 year streak going which was broken because I twisted my ankle playing volleyball. I happened to step on the foot of an opposing player on the other side of the net while landing from a jump. That was an eight day break before I resumed running every day again.

Distances? Anywhere from a mile to a marathon. The requirements of the United States Running Streak Association (which I’m not a member of) are as follows: A running streak is defined by USRSA as running
at least one continuous mile within each calendar day under one's own body power. (The current record is 41 years and counting.)

So what does it take to do this seemingly insane task? The United States Postal Service has this motto: "Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." The only thing I missed from that motto is the snow because I’ve never tried running in that. Everything else including tropical storm and earthquake, I’ve run through. One storm I remember was when I was running in the streets of Lawndale. It was already raining hard when I started but then in the middle of the run, gale force winds developed and I had to seek shelter in the eaves of a house. When the wind subsided, I continued running. Heck, I had run in the middle of a typhoon in the Philippines along Roxas Boulevard several years prior, so no gale force wind was going to stop me now!

Another time I didn’t know there was an earthquake, albeit a small one, until I got home from my run and hearing about it on the news. Speaking again of rain, I am reminded of a period of a whole week when I had to run indoors on my treadmill because of the constant daily downpour. The treadmill helped a lot during inclement weather, while waiting for a UPS delivery, or when I was injured and had to run on a softer surface.

Gloom of night didn’t stop me either. When I was working in Torrance a long time ago, I used to run during my break at 3 or 4 in the morning. The cops patrolling the area who saw me were probably wondering if I had escaped from the mental institution I was working in at the time. Run for three hours after working an eight hour midnight shift? Well, how can you say no to the hospital administrator who was training for his first marathon?At another hospital, I ran for as much as an hour back and forth on a long carpeted hallway. It took about one minute to run from one end to the other.

Going home to the Philippines with a stopover in Honolulu? No problem. Just change into running gear at the terminal in Hawaii and run through the corridors in the middle of the night. Fear of losing a day of running due to the time difference between the U.S. and the P.I.(Philippine Islands)? Just run amidst the jeepneys, buses, tricycles, pedestrians, and thick smog in the crowded streets near the Manila Domestic Terminal while waiting for the flight to Zamboanga City, then run a little bit more once you get to your final destination. Of course you have to find someone you can trust to watch over your luggage while you’re doing this especially if you are travelling alone. Feeling pain after going up and down the bleachers of the Long Beach City College Veterans Stadium? Keep running anyway despite the worsening pain. Well, actually that was the beginning of the end. I’m sure other people have run under more adverse conditions, but these were the ones that I experienced.

Do I wish I can still do it? Of course I do, but realistically, with my nagging posterior tibialis tendon injury I am unable to do so anymore. So I have to be content on being able to run just three times a week and cross train the other days. Speaking of which, I actually still have a streak going on - that of exercising every day. This one has been going on much longer than the already ended running streak. This streak may last forever.

See, it doesn’t take too much to start and maintain a streak. Just a wee bit of compulsiveness and bullheadedness and you’re well on your way.

Pimples = Love ?

Remember when having pimples were thought of as being in love with someone? This is a Filipino thing, not American, and I don’t know if any other culture has the same notion about pimples. If pimples = being in love, then a lot of us who had those as adolescents must have been in love a lot. Some of us were unfortunate enough to be plagued by bino or taghiawat. Those facial eruptions must have betrayed what we tried to keep secret inside us. Oh, look at him/her, he/she must be so much in love with someone, you can just see it in his/her face! The more pimples, the more love. I really don’t know how that belief came about. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.