Tag: running

I’ve forgotten what normalcy feels like

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Occasionally, I’ll have a day where I’ve caught up with all of my daily chores, the kids are actually asleep, and with the whole, giving myself until 1 a.m. thing in play, I have a moment to sit there and feel like a human again.  But then I realize that I don’t really know what to do when I have like, 90 minutes to myself suddenly, and it’s occurred to me that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a normal person.

I’ve put my general life on hold until things chill out on the whole raising kids thing, but in doing so, I seem to have lost touch on what to do with free time, when I actually have it.  One of the first things that comes to mind is to possibly watch television or movies that have been queuing up as things I feel like I should watch, but with just 90 minutes if I’m lucky, I often tell myself that I don’t want to start something that I won’t have any real reliability to continue on with, so I kind of nix that idea.

Running, as much as I wish I could keep doing it like I used to, isn’t really an option, because it’s often times so late in the evening, that I don’t like the idea of pushing myself to do cardio at a stage of the day when energy levels are low, and I don’t want to elevate my heart rate before ultimately going to bed, because that seems counterproductive.  Plus, I don’t want to work up a massive sweat, and be forced to shower at like 1 a.m. because #2 is already a light enough sleeper as it is, and I don’t want to risk waking her, so running is off the table too.

I’ve basically forgotten how to surf the internet, and the vast majority of news and information that I get on a somewhat regular basis is often second-hand over social media, and if I’ve got a little bit more time, then I scroll through Apple News to see what might be showing up in the media.  All the sites I used to go to in the past, I really don’t anymore, because I don’t remember them off the top of my head, or they’re just black holes that I know I’ll get sucked into if I visit them again, so I opt not to.

There are worse things to eventually fall back onto, but at least I’m often times using these opportunities to catch up on writing, which indicates to me that even at the most base and subconscious levels, the act of writing is still that highly prioritized in my head to where it’s what I gravitate towards whenever I can.

But if it’s not writing, it’s usually some dumb bullshit like, finding a YouTube channel simply called Idiots In Cars, and then the rest kind of serves itself.  All the same, it’s going to be an odd transition when the day comes where both my kids are in bed and out by 8pm or sooner, and I might actually have some more hours to actually feel like a human being again.

2 Under 2: Untitled dad ramblings (#065)

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I may have accepted that life might be on hold, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t occasional bad days.

#2 is getting better in terms of us managing the colic and learning her tendencies, but one thing that hasn’t really changed is her sheer unwillingness to take naps and give us a break from time to time, and the fact that she still exists in three states: sleeping (overnight), eating, or screaming her head off, with the caveat being that the screaming is usually only remedied by having someone holding her 24/7 until she can be brought into another state, eventually

I’m on dad duty for so long that I have no time to do anything else.  And when I say anything else, I mean do more work that I’d be able to do without having to have a baby in my arms, because I’m not fucking Goro from Mortal Kombat and have another pair of arms to be productive with.  My house is a fucking disaster zone full of piles of things that adds to my general stress and anxiety because I’m typically a pretty tidy person and I prefer my home be such as well.

I hardly have time to upkeep personal hygiene and pretty much every shower that I’ve had in the last two months have typically been after midnight, where I’m sacrificing rest time in order to not feel completely unraveled.

I don’t have time to be a good dog owner, and since my dog is 16 and elderly, I have to keep him crated for the vast majority of the day solely because he will pee on everything under the sun if he’s left free to his own devices.  I get mad when if and when he soils his dog beds, but it’s primarily frustration at the fact that I don’t even have time to even be able to take care of a dog’s base needs adequately enough.

I seldom have time to eat, and eat well, and everyone knows cooking at home is typically the key to improved eating habits, but who the fuck has time to cook much less eat it, without having to be hands-on with #2, so mythical wife and I subsist on an unhealthy amount of fast food because it’s all we can tolerate to indulge on when we’re already parked on E and need to eat while we can breathe.

Throughout the last few months, I’ve actually lost weight, I’m below my license weight which was fabricated to make me feel like not a fat fuck, but I’m actually below it now.  However, I know that’s solely based on the fact that I literally haven’t lifted any weights since mid-March of 2020, and I’ve pretty much lost all muscle-mass that I’d cultivated in the decades before coronavirus, and I’m pissed at ‘Murica for not being able to do what it takes to eradicate the pandemic and how it will never end and short of me turning my garage into a gym, there’s no way I’m ever going to reclaim any muscle mass that I’ve lost at this rate, not to mention where the time would be, being a dad of 2 under 2 and all.

Let’s not even talk about hobbies and personal indulgences, and the sheer time I don’t have to be able to do any of those.  One more thing I’d add to the list of unsolicited advice for new dads, would be to think of all the things you hope to accomplish in a day, and then count at day’s end just how many of them you didn’t get to.  Hobbies, are probably at the top of the list, followed probably by anything you wanted to do that utilized arms not handcuffed to an infant.  I’ve watched a lot of television over the last weeks, which isn’t the worst thing in the world and is something that I ordinarily would like to do, but the thing is I do it because it’s something I can do while holding an infant but when the day is over I’d rather be writing because that’s my passion hobby that I always want to be doing if I were ever to have free time where I wasn’t joined at the hip to my infant.

It’s not lost on me that the time I’m taking to write this could’ve been spent writing about anything else at all instead of another frustrated rambling of an overwhelmed dad, but as I often say, I want to remember everything, including the negative, about fatherhood, because it’s always important to be able to look back and learn from the past, even if they’re not always the most positive of things.

And unlike a lot of things where I have to write from memory and retroactively try to mentally get back to places, this is something that’s written fairly live and current, and I think it’s important to chronicle these emotions and frustrations and not let them simply evaporate until they bubble back up in the near future, and the words come out completely differently. 

Weekends suck because I don’t have the free time that I have to pay for in order to do absolutely anything other than being a hands-on dad.  Funny how that works out: free time, costing a fuck ton of money.

Pour one out for my dead treadmill

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

My treadmill died this weekend.  I feel like I’ve lost a limb.

Ever since the start of the coronavirus pandemic really began, one of the first things to obviously go, was, the gym.  Something that I’d been consistently doing for literally ten straight years, and if I were factoring in the sporadic working out I did intermittently while I was freelance, butted up against the time before that when I was working and had a gym membership, then probably 15 straight years.

It was not an easy pill to swallow, but it was made easier by the fact that it also coincided with the birth of my daughter, so frankly I was too busy to even consider working out in the first place anyway.  But once things starting settling down (for the time being), I began to notice that my shirts were starting to feel a little loose in the arms, and tight in the stomach.  Obviously my body was beginning to revert back to a lesser state because I wasn’t exercising at all, and most definitely not aided by the sleep schedule of a new father.

Eventually, I reached a point where I couldn’t take it anymore, so I dusted off the treadmill that my mother-in-law bequeathed to us, and began running on it.  I remember the first time I really did a lengthy jog on it, I did probably about 40 minutes at a light pace, and I felt absolutely incredible afterward.  I was soaking in sweat but my body felt alive again, and I most definitely felt elation at the endorphins that were popping anew in my system for the first time in a long time.

Needless to say, running, and running on the treadmill has been the only real substantial exercise I’ve been doing since like, April of last year, and it’s been the only real saving grace to my rapidly shrinking and deteriorating physical state, since I haven’t lifted weights in quite literally, almost an entire year.

My angst and rage at the legions of ignorant fucks who couldn’t be bothered to wear masks and eradicate all this bullshit in just a month and that ‘Murica is still in this fucking predicament to where I still can’t work out, knows no end.

Anyway, I eventually settled into a pretty good every-other-day running routine, and I always feel pretty good after running, because as I’ve always stated as one of my personal exercise mantras, is that time is never wasted when exercising.

But a few days ago, I noticed that my treadmill was starting to make a really loud sound.  Typically I wear my AirPods and am often times watching shit on the WWE Network, so I can’t really hear the ambient noise of the treadmill, but when I was winding down, it was noticeably loud.  I chalked it up as an anomaly, and hoped it would be gone the next time I ran.

It wasn’t.  I popped open the mechanical panel, to see if there was anything obvious about why it was making such noise.  Nothing seemed amiss, and I ran it on a low setting, with the panel open to see if there was any loose parts.  If anything at all, it sounded like body noise that was causing things, which I guess with the aging, vibrating, and the fact that I probably run with an elephant’s stride, shit had jarred around throughout its age.

I closed up the panel and decided to just run anyway, and brace occasionally on the console, to see if I could settle the noise down.  It seemed to be okay at first; but then three minutes into my run, everything just kind of clunked to a stop, and I’m surprised I didn’t hurt myself in the process being brought down from 6.5 mph to 0.

I got off the treadmill and watched it abruptly reset and made a noise, reset and make a noise.  Obviously, something was wrong with it, so I pulled the plug.

As far as I can tell, the treadmill was dead.  I haven’t ran since.

Obviously, I’m at a crossroads where I definitely want a new treadmill to replace the dead one, but I’m not sure if I want a fairly inexpensive direct replacement of what just died, which would probably run me around 300-400, but mythical wife is really suggesting that we spring for something way nicer.  But at the same time, I want to believe that maybe 2021 will be a year in which with vaccinations, I might be able to return to a gym, to which in those instances, my running at home will definitely reduce dramatically as I would be working out at gyms again, to which why would I want to have an expensive treadmill collecting dust?

I don’t know, really.  For the time being, I’m going to have to resort to running outdoors again, but I’m at the mercy of the elements, and the fact that there are still occasionally fucks without masks out there, and I definitely don’t want to catch their coronaHIV while I’m just trying to exercise.

But I’m super sad that my treadmill died. 😢

New Father Brogging, #032

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment
baby’s first promo.

Recently, my daughter has begun doing something that makes me so indescribably happy: she comes to me and demands to be held by daddy. 

Since she’s begun crawling, we’ve given her occasional freedom to roam around supervised, obviously so she doesn’t eat dust bunnies or dog fur, and to make sure she doesn’t hurt herself when she inevitably wants to brace against everything, pull herself up and stand, on wobbly feet.  But when there are two adults in the room, be it mythical wife or our nanny, I can go do things and let them be the eyes for me while I try to catch up, or grab a quick bite to eat if I’m in the middle of my workday.

Lately though, my daughter has begun tracking me down to where I stand, and with determination, she military crawls over to me, and pulls herself on my legs and makes whining sounds until I acquiesce and pick her up.  She clearly is wanting to be acknowledged and held by dad.

I’ve stood in the kitchen while she stood in the room adjacent, and she crawled her way to me which has to be a tremendous amount of effort for one who hasn’t really gotten the hang of proper crawling yet.  I’ll spend some time with her in her room, and usually this is where I can kind of relax, dick around on my phone and let her crawl around and play with toys without much concern, because it’s a fairly safe space, but the toys get old really fast, and she’d rather crawl to me and want to play with me instead.

Earlier today, I went into the sunroom to get a run session in during my lunch break, and closed the door behind me since I sound like stampeding elephants when I run on the treadmill.  I could see out of the corner of my eye while tying my shoes that she was crawling to the door, and fussed when our nanny gathered her up because she obviously can’t come in while I’m running, but it was clear where she was wanting to go.

And my heart melts every single time.

Obviously, there’s not a day that goes by where my child doesn’t make me happy, but this is the first time she’s shown a modicum of choice and action, and it just so happens to be choosing to seek out dad.  I love my kid more than anything in the world.

Every blet has a story

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Originally written on December 24, 2020 (I wanted to start the new year with a positive-to-me post)

I recently redecorated my office.  Primarily because I had exceeded too many running medals for my medal bar, and I had exceeded too many blets for my blet wall, and my running medals and my blets are my favorite things to collect, so I decided to do some reconfiguration in order to proudly display all of both that I have.

First, I decided to create a new medal bar that would one, go all the way across the entire room, and two, actually be made of metal.  Not because it would be metal to make it out of metal, but the fact that a large number of medals accumulates weight very quickly, and I simply needed something strong and sturdy to be able to withstand a gradual increase of weight over time because I have no intention of ever stopping running and collecting medals.

So I basically made a new bar out of actual iron pipes and flanges, mounted to the studs, and measures in at 128” long, which basically accomplishes my goal of going across the entire room.  There is now plenty of room for expansion, and I don’t have to fear that they will eventually bend, sag and break, because it is not a weak curtain rod but is made of actual iron.

And then we have my pride and joy, my wrestling blet collection, which simply needed more space in order to display them all.  So I decided to swap walls between the blets and my giant Jinx graphic, because I needed to have one entire wall in order to accommodate all my blets, and Jinx could comfortably go on wall vacated by all the blets.

I simply had to procure more wood to mount more belts onto and do a good bit of patching and repainting to all the walls prior, but in the end, I was able to comfortably get all 18 of my blets up on the wall, and I couldn’t be happier with the way it all turned out.

But the whole point of this post ultimately was the fact that (almost) every blet has a story or an inspiration behind it, and really for nobody’s edification except my own because I can’t really imagine anyone other than me actually caring, I decided to share all of them, because I have 18 fucking blets so that’s a lot of stories or inspirations to relay.

Continue reading “Every blet has a story” →

A sad reminder of how much I miss the gym

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A week ago, I ran 13.1 miles to fulfill the obligations of the Disney Dine & Dash Wine & Dine Half Marathon that mythical wife and I signed up for months ago.  We were itching for redemption to run it this year, as we had to bow out the year prior with lots of sour grapes on how runDisney handled it, because of a little unexpectedly quick turn around on pregnancy, but we signed up for it in 2020, thinking we would have our opportunity to redeem ourselves as well as introduce our little one to her first Disney trip.

Among other things ruined on account of coronavirus, this too was denied to us again for a second year, but we opted to stay registered and run our half marathons virtually.

Mind you, in spite of having obligations of a half marathon, I’ve basically been living on auto-pilot for large swaths of the year, and I hadn’t really done any proper distance training leading up.  I run regularly, but only around three miles per run, mostly for maintenance and health purposes, and not necessarily with a distance goal in mind.  Regardless, because I was planning on doing run/walk, I was still confident that I would be able to pound out 13.1 miles without killing myself.

Sure, some preparation probably would have made things easier, but I did just that, and finished my half marathon’s distance without dying.  I admittedly hit a wall a little faster than I had hoped, and by mile 10 I was running out of gas pretty quickly, and my right calf was telling me that it was very unhappy with my choices in life, but I still finished, and under my goal time of 2 hours and 30 minutes to boot.

I figured I would be in pretty rough shape afterward, seeing as how such was usually the case whenever I’d done any prior 10K or 10-milers in the past, with training, but the following day, it was nothing more than the atypical tender quads and achy ankles, leading me to be quite satisfied that I wasn’t a complete train wreck of a physical specimen after having not been to the gym in literally eight months.

A day ago, as is something that always has to be done this time of year, I went outside and raked leaves, as I have three very large trees on my property, and therefore have a metric fuckton of leaves to have to rake.  It was a massive pain the ass last year, as I had but a cheap wire rake that I had procured from Amazon, so I decided to not be a cheapskate and get myself a real, effective rake, even if it meant that I had to leave my house and go to a Home Depot to buy one. 

Continue reading “A sad reminder of how much I miss the gym” →

Nike’s Seinfeld Shoes

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Lately, I’ve struggled a little bit trying to get back in to the groove of regular writing.  Between the balancing act of trying do things whenever my child is napping, and the fact that I haven’t really found a good rhythm or inspiration to write about things, I’ve often times found myself sitting at my laptop with nothing much going on, other than scrolling through news sites and feeds to look for something to inspire me before ultimately killing time on YouTube watching chiropractor popping clips or scenes from Marvel movies.

But then I saw an ad, of all things, for Nike’s Alphafly shoes.  Supposedly, they’re causing somewhat of a stir in the running community, and I guess there are some tryhard enthusiasts out there who think they’re illegal or performance enhancing or something along those lines, but I can’t really care enough to delve deeper because I can’t really get over the fact of how fucking hideous they look.  With their gigantic, bulbous and protruding soles, all I can think of is that they’re basically the modern-day equivalent of the jump shoes from that one episode of Seinfeld.

Seriously, my mouth curled into a wtf face after I saw these things.  I gave a cursory google search to see what they were even capable of, but there’s so much noise and chatter about the legality of these things in organized marathons, that I can’t actually find any credible information on what the whole point of these shoes actually are, nor do I feel like expending the effort to dig any deeper.

Regardless, they’re basically Seinfeld shoes, visually.  And much like Kramer was pegged as looking like a special needs person when going out in public in them, I imagine anyone wearing these that isn’t actively in a competitive run would probably look similarly having these thick-ass shoes on while wearing jeans or ordinary pants.  But given the fact that they’re like 3” off the ground, I imagine a lot of height-conscious people might do it anyways, to make themselves look taller.  That’s the tradeoff however, for wanting to look taller than less mentally capable, I suppose.