.: bistan.net :.

I’m turning into a data entry whore.  It seems all I do lately is log my life.  This blog is just one example.  There’s also Facebook and twitter.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been logging everything I eat as well as calorie counts in an effort to eat more healthy.  I’m doing the physical exercise part, but until I start eating right I’ll never have the runner’s physique.  Five weeks ago, my average daily calorie count was 2901.  This past week, it was down to 2611.

Running is also a huge thing to log.  I’ve used mapmyrun.com to log my miles for the past 4 years.  They just forced me to use their new format and I hate it, but I would have to subscribe to export all of my data.  It sort of sucks.

After logging my miles, I have to enter it monthly into my running club website to participate in the “Challenge of the Miles”.

Here’s my current mileage chart:

I can tell you that my lifetime mileage is 2252.95 miles. January was the first month that I’ve ever passed 100 miles in a month.  My goal for 2012 is 1000 miles and so far I’m on track.

Also, my job participates in the Presidential Fitness Challenge and I’m supposed to log all of my physical activity there too.  I sort of dropped that, but to be eligible for prizes at work, I need to start back.  So, in addition to running, I’m suppose to log walking, outdoor work, t-ball, etc.

To take it even further, my health insurance carrier has a website where I can log physical activity, nutrition, and stats like blood pressure everyday to earn points redeemable for healthy rewards.

I also log my Coke points in mycokerewards.com to earn points for rewards.  I guess if I stopped drinking Cokes, I wouldn’t have to log those calories or Coke points.  That seems like a good plan.

Then, there’s disneymovierewards.com.  It’s a good thing we don’t buy many DVDs, but I have earned several Disney gift cards from this.

I haven’t mentioned the biggest: I use Quicken to log all of our financial transactions.  That’s the most time consuming, but also the most beneficial.

I’m probably missing some others as well.  I guess you see now why this blog suffers.

I used to maintain a clothing log, so that I didn’t accidentally wear the same shirt every Tuesday or the same pants several days in a row.  I gave up on that when I became a runner though. It’s not rare for me to change clothes several times a day: sleep clothes, running clothes, work clothes, casual clothes, etc.

So am I OCD? I don’t think so. Everything I log has a benefit.  The fitness and nutrition logs are helping me reach my goals. Today at Kroger, I didn’t buy a 450 calories/slice pie even though it was on sale because I thought of my log. If I wasn’t logging miles, I would have never come close to 100 in January.  Quicken helps me stay on track to reach short-term and long-term goals. And the others score me free stuff!

So, what do you log?

This will be my final Walt Disney World Marathon recap post for this year.  I wrote this article for the newsletter at work, so I thought I would post it here.

A Little Goofy?

What were you doing Saturday at 4:30 in the morning? What about Sunday? Sleeping? On both days, I had already been awake for two hours, and was standing on the side of a Central Florida highway, waiting for fireworks to send me off.

This past weekend, I completed Goofy’s Race and a Half Challenge at Walt Disney World, which consists of the WDW Half Marathon on Saturday and the WDW Marathon on Sunday — a total of 39.3 miles.  Over 56,000 runners competed in the weekend events, including which about 7,500 of us participating in Goofy’s Challenge. This was my fourth year conquering the challenge.

Both races have a spectacular fireworks start on a road right outside of Epcot. The half marathon takes you to the Magic Kingdom, where you run all through the park, including right through Cinderella Castle.  Then you head back to Epcot, through the park and around Spaceship Earth (the big ball) and to the finish line in the parking lot.  13.1 miles of fun.

The marathon takes you past all of Walt Disney World’s icons. First, you run through Epcot’s Future World around Spaceship Earth. Then, you’re off to the Magic Kingdom where you run through Cinderella Castle.  After that, you head over to Animal Kingdom where you circle the park and the Tree of Life and then to Hollywood Studios where you pass the Earful Tower and the Sorcerer’s Hat.  Finally, it’s back to Epcot for a loop around World Showcase before finishing in the Epcot parking lot. Another 26.2 miles of fun.

The races also take you through many “backstage” areas of the parks, which regular guests never see.  Some of the areas include the parade float storage facilities, recycling and maintenance facilities, horticultural areas, and animal care areas.

Along the courses are all types of entertainment to help the miles go by.  Local high schools send cheerleaders, bands, and dance teams to entertain the runners. DJ’s, rock bands, choirs, jugglers, and other entertainers can also be found along the course. Disney puts random parade floats, hot air balloons, animals, and other props along the course.  Also along the course are all of you favorite Disney characters.  You run past princesses, dwarfs, Mary Poppins, several incarnations of Mickey, and many more. And with so many participants, there are also thousands of spectators and cast members to cheer you on both in and out of the parks.

There are all types of runners who participate each year.  There are world-class elite runners who compete for cash prizes, walkers, and everything in between.  Some people run to raise money and/or awareness for their favorite charity while others dress as their favorite Disney characters.  You won’t find me wearing Mickey ears or Tinkerbell wings though. I find it hard enough to run with a camera!

All finishers receive a Donald medal for completing the half marathon and a Mickey medal for completing the marathon.  Goofy Challengers also receive a Goofy medal for finishing both races.  And when the volunteers put the medal around your neck, you temporarily forget how much pain you are in (and how hungry you are).

My strategy for these races, other than finish, is simply to have fun along the courses.  The first few miles of each race are pretty crowded, so much so that it is nearly impossible to get much speed.  And, I made lots of photo stops.  There are many awesome photo opportunities that are just not available to other Disney guests.  There were also lots of interesting people to talk to along the way, including celebrities.  Last year, I found myself running next to TV weatherman Al Roker.

Along with these two races, there are other events during Marathon Weekend.  My wife ran a 5K through Epcot Friday morning.  My 8-year-old son ran the “Mickey Mile” and my 5-year-old daughter ran a 200 meter race at Disney’s Wide World of Sports..  Each of them received finisher medals as well.

Somehow, out of the 56,000 runners, I managed to be one of only 40 who were invited to a “meet, greet, and tweet” and “training run” with former Olympian Jeff Galloway.  It was held early Friday morning at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, before the park was even open.  We had the entire theme park to ourselves!  We were joined by P90X creator Tony Horton, as well as Survivor winners Jenna Morasca and Ethan Zohn, who also later ran the half marathon. We were able to mingle and take photos with the celebrities and I even got to ride Tower of Terror with Ethan and Jenna.  Of course, I bought that ride photo and they were nice enough to autograph it for me.

So how did I do? I’ve posted much better times in non-Disney races because I took them seriously, trained right and ate well. With the Disney races, I’m pretty much the poster child for how not to run. (Besides, it is even possible to “eat right” in the months leading up to January?) So while I’ve done better in other marathons and half marathons, I haven’t had nearly as much fun!

So, who’s with me next year?

I’m such a sorry blogger. I take hundreds of photos and tons of video and I rarely get them off of the camera.  It was so much different when the kids were younger.  I guess I need some motivation.

The weather was perfect again this weekend!  Last weekend, we let Tristan spend the night in his playhouse outside.  This weekend, we saw The Lion King in 3D, and then spent lots of time outside — running, playing soccer, visiting the local park, etc.  Here are a few photos:

I’m backfilling blog posts once again because I’ve been lazy.  Hopefully I’ll get everything caught up this week.

If you follow through RSS, you might be wondering why my blog seems to be hemorrhaging posts.  For some reason, all of my recent posts have been going to Drafts.  Ooops.  Everything should be fixed now.

In case you haven’t noticed, I have blogged nearly every day this week.  And some days (including today), I have blogged multiple times.  I still have lots of things to post, including Mackenzie’s 3K graduation from last month.  I think I’ll go have a cookie now.

If it’s not obvious, I’m clearly avoiding school-work by blogging.  (I have two more projects to turn in before Tuesday.  One is 75% done and I haven’t started the other.) I’m also considering promoting this blog more to my friends, etc. via facebook and twitter, so I need to populate it with lots of content.

Next week, I’ll be blogging live from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Camden, New Jersey.  Stay tuned . . .

I have a new blog reader, which just *might* bring my readership up to a total of 3.  She sat down the other night and read this site from top to bottom. She gives me plenty of feedback on my posts, though you wont see any of it in the Comments section.

To protect her identity, I won’t disclose her name, but we can refer to her “wife” for short.

Here we go again. I blog about how I resolve to blog more. Then I make about 3 blog posts. Then you don’t hear from me for a few weeks. Then I make an excuse about why I haven’t been blogging and then I resolve to blog more.

I guess that means this is the excuse post. Let’s see . . . I’m swamped at work, swamped with class, and swamped in my personal life.

Work: I won’t bore you with the work stuff.  I doubt you care about Windows 7 imaging and Drupal modules anyway.

School: It was stupid to commit to doing this masters degree in the first place. My first masters degree didn’t get me anywhere, yet I sign up for another one. My classes this semester are Object Oriented Programming II and Advanced Graphic Design. “Advanced Graphic Design” is what Mercer calls a video game programming class when they want employers to pay for it.  Since my language of choice for the program is C#, I’m developing a game in XNA Game Studio 3.1.  I have a project in OOP2 due next week on secure code and wikis and a project in the game class due the following week on 2D game programming.  My game is pretty sweet and when I compile it, I’ll publish it here and you can download and play it too!

Running: My heel is still freaking killing me.  I can barely walk when I get out of bed in the mornings. I only ran 7 miles this week, but I need to knock out at least 5 tomorrow to exceed 70 miles for the month.

Personal life: We signed Tristan up for T-ball.  That should be interesting. I’m not particularly looking to spend 3 nights a week at a ballpark, but we want to get him involved in something.  Kimberlie is now up to 60 – 70 hour weeks so I have the kids by myself in the evenings for a while.  She works with two other Occupational Therapists.  One is in Africa for a month and the other just went out of maternity leave.  And then on Monday, as if we didn’t have enough going on, her mother died.  After this week, we are both certainly looking forward to a new week.

My calendar says its December but clearly the year hasn’t gone by that fast.  It must be a Y2K but or something.  It’s unimaginable that Y2K was a decade ago. Paranoia was everywhere and my field was at the top of our game.  Fun stuff.

I’ve been annoyed with blogging and micro-blogging lately.  Sometimes I want to say more than a tweet or Facebook status will allow, yet it’s not enough for a WordPress post.  There really needs to be a solid convergence between the two soon.

My goal for December is to update this blog at least once a day.  Ha!

Oh my blog, how I’ve neglected thee — but I’ll update soon, just wait — you’ll see!