In 4 days I’ll toe the line at the start of the Disney 5K, followed by a half marathon and a full marathon on consecutive days. Its sort of hard to believe its here already. For a long time it felt like a really long time away. Now its suddenly at the end of the week! In retrospect agreeing to work on a project as large as this one right before the marathon was not my best idea! This show has been particularly difficult from a physical perspective as I’ve been on the go all day long since I got here. Hopefully now that the show actually starts tonight equipment will stop breaking and I can go into more of a babysitting role where I sit around waiting for the lighting designer and programmer to break things at which point I hop up and fix them. But for now after many days of rushing about and lifting heavy things I get a couple of days of recovery. And then the really stupid thing happens. Thursday is strike day. Which is the day we take this whole mess down. And it’s a LOT of equipment. I’d post a picture of this giant pile of equipment except we’ve been asked specifically NOT to do so as this event is for a very high profile client and there is intense security surrounding it. As in armed policeman at every entrance and exit to the building as well as another private armed security detail as well. There are bomb dogs and the hotel is being searched and swept by security details. So yeah… no photos. Anyway… this is a very LARGE setup. If you’re a gearhead you’ll appreciate that there are about 80 moving lights in the room, another 50 or so LED fixtures and a mix of conventional, three Grand MA consoles, Oh and 26 DL3 fixtures. Which to those of you from the triathlon side of things means nothing… just know theres millions of dollars worth of gear in this room right now. All of which I have to help take down on Thursday…. The day before the challenge starts! Did I mention I’ll get out of work somewhere between 6-10pm and then have to drive 4 hours north to my hotel in Orlando and then wake up at 3am or something ridiculous and head to the start of the 5K? Yeah… its gonna hurt! And strike is incredibly phsycially intensive. I’m going to have to behave and let the stagehands do the work and take a backseat to the heavy lifting. But that’s not how I roll and I know I’ll end up getting my hands very dirty and my legs are going to be very tired at the end of it. But I gotta pay the bills so its suck it up time!
This morning I finally started to try and get myself on the get up early plan and my alarm went off at 530am and I jumped out of bed to get ready to run. My plan for the week was a three miler today, 4 miles tomorrow, rest Wednesday, rest Thursday (HA!) and then the fun begins on Friday. So this morning I headed out before the sun was up to get a quick little run in. Incidentally this was the first run I’ve done since the 12 miler just over a week ago. So I was a little tentative as to how it was going to go. I’m happy to say all in all it went really well. I was aware of my hamstring being there, but no pain, my right knee was about the same, and my right foot felt a little plantar fasciitis-y but not too bad. So all in all I felt fresher than I did a week ago so switching out those runs for bikes was a good idea. I was however a little surprised by how slow my pace was. I averaged 8:40s. Which is fine and all and that’s my goal pace for this whole mess but its slower than usual for a quick three mile run done after a period of rest. Usually I crank those out at 7-8min miles. But there were some other factors such as being tired from this show, the fact it was 70 degrees and humid out and I’m not used to that and to some degree I was being cautious.
As I started heading back towards the hotel and turned down the main driveway to the hotel I was passed by a giant convoy of 12 or so police cars. At first I thought something was wrong at the hotel and then I remembered today was the beginning of the enhanced security so they were all heading to start their details. I finished my run and walked a bit as a cool down and then got ready to go into work. Work so far today has been fairly easy and all seems to be well… but the way this gig is going I fully expect something big to break and for me to have to go fix it at any moment. This rig has not been terribly stable in terms of continueing to work properly for whatever reason. Some shows are just like that where nothing seems to want to work for very long.
Post run I was aware of all my trouble spots but none of them were really barking any more than they have been from being on my feet all week. My hamstring still feels unhappy and I’m SURE that at mile 16 of the marathon on Sunday its going to start yelling at me. Hec… both of the marathons I’ve run before this one it yells at me starting at mile 20. So this is not a new tightness issue. So I expect it to be in rare form on Sunday. I’m just going to suck it up and get through it although I hope my slower paced efforts in the 5K and half wont aggrevate it too much so I go into the full with it feeling ok at least. Time will tell.
At this point I’m just hoping to enjoy the whole experience and try and have some fun. We’ll see how it all turns out in the end. Part of me hopes to get through the full without too much trouble and then be able to toddle my way through the Donna full marathon a month later and throw another medal up on the wall. But I know that’s silly… but it would be fun to race that with the girl and her friends. Ok… time for me to go check in and see if they guys have broken anything in the time its taken me to write this.
No comments:
Post a Comment