Casey Blog

Memo to the Ladies Re: Airport Security

Your natural beauty is breathtaking, but your efforts to complement it with jewelry is understood. When flying, please pack your metal baubles and save wearing them for when you've reached your destination. All of us behind you in line at the metal detector will understand and find you to be even more beautiful for doing so. Thank you.

2009 in Review

On New Year's Day 2009, I posted a blog entry that reviewed some of the highlights of 2008, and listed a few expected goals and milestones for 2009. So now, a year later, it's time to review what I said I'd accomplish in 2009:

- organize and enjoy a local inaugural ball

FAIL! We weren't able to generate enough ticket sales to put on the local inaugural ball that we had in mind. We did instead enjoy a more intimate neighborhood fest, and enjoyed the inaugural activities on TV.

- run a Half-Marathon and a Triathalon

PARTIAL WIN! I did in fact run a half-marathon in 2009, with a personal best time of 2:10. And I even ran my second Marathon, last October in Baltimore. But I failed on the challenge of competing in our local neighborhood Traithalon. The swim portion really intimidates me. I was determined to carry this goal over to 2010, but the event has been cancelled by my POA, a decision I regret and opposed.

- paint the kitchen

WIN! Completed in November, so I pushed it as far as I could, but in the end got it done.

- take a trip home to Huntington Beach, CA this summer

WIN! We had a wonderful two-week trip home in August.

- send my oldest child off to college

WIN! Katie began at UMW in August and has completed her first semester with straight A's.

All in all, pretty good. I guess most of those were easily predictable events, but still, we did them. Time to give some thought to what I'd like to accomplish in 2010. More on that later.

Arlington Cemetery

I like cemeteries, I guess I always have. I'm a history buff, and cemeteries are full of that. They became even more interesting to me when I took up genealogy as a hobby about seven years ago and began tracking down the final resting places of distant family members. But I don't necessarily need to know someone there to enjoy a cemetery. The history of them, and the feeling that even if strangers, the visit and the remembrance is appreciated, is reason enough for me to explore a graveyard.

Having lived in the DC area for 22 years now, I've been to Arlington National Cemetery on a number of occasions. You can't go there and not be awestruck by the sight of the uniform rows upon rows of white headstones. I've been their as tourist, tour guide, and as a staff aide (at a memorable memorial service for RFK that is a whole nother story).

But recently, Arlington has stopped being just a resting place for strangers, or famous people I knew of, but who never knew me. This summer, two people I knew, and who knew me, were buried at Arlington. I can't claim to have been especially close with either of them. One was an employer, the the other a co-worker in the same employ. Friendly acquaintances at best. Regardless, I knew them.

I worked for Sen. Edward Kennedy for three years as the computer geek in his Senate office in the early '90s. The world was abuzz with this new 'Internet' thing, and Sen. Kennedy appreciated the possibilities enough to let me help bring him online, and in doing so he gave me a career. Working for Sen. Kennedy grants you membership to an alumni association for life. At the annual Kennedy Christmas parties, which doubled as staff reunions, former co-workers would reminisce, swap their current business cards, enjoy the costumed skits that were the hi-light of these events, and then angle for a few moments of face time to share a holiday hello with EMK. I'm remembering now, one year when the Senator had performed as Barney, and afterwards, my wife Jennifer and I speaking briefly with him, still wearing his purple dinosaur costume with only the head removed.

Last August I joined hundreds of fellow current and former Kennedy and Senate staffers on the step of the U.S. Senate, to pay our final respects as Senator Kennedy's funeral motorcade stopped briefly on it's way to his final resting place at Arlington.

Bill Cahir was exactly the sort of person I could expect to run into at Sen. Kennedy's annual Christmas parties. We had both worked for Kennedy at about the same time. After the Hill, Bill worked as a reporter, but after the attacks of 9/11 he enlisted in the Marines at the age of 34 and served two tours in Iraq. He returned and ran for Congress, during which I did some work on his campaign and re-connected for a short time. He lost that election, and deployed to Afghanistan in the spring of 2009. Bill was killed on August 13 at age 40. Earlier this week, his wife gave birth to their twin daughters.

The day after Thanksgiving, my daughter Katie and I visited Arlington Cemetery. We were tourists, visiting Arlington House for a National Park Service Passport cancellation. We were volunteers, tracking down and photographing a few headstones to fulfill requests on the Find-a-Grave web site. We were students, searching out how many different religious symbols we could spot. And we were mourners, visiting Sen. Kennedy and Sgt. Cahir's graves. Two guys I kinda knew. Bill was just a little more than three years younger than me. Not far from his grave in Section 60, we found another recent burial of a young woman just three years older than Katie. We both fell silent at that realization.

Today I returned to Arlington to participate as a volunteer in an event that's taken place since 1992, the laying of holiday wreaths on graves. I imagined a few dozen people working feverishly, walking rows of graves in the designated sections, quickly leaving a wreath at each. And so it caught me by surprise to find I was one of 6,000 volunteers who showed up at eight am on a cold Saturday morning to pay their respects and place a few wreaths. I placed a few in section 31, one of five sections selected this year, on which approximately 16,000 wreaths were laid. Then I took three wreaths and set off to find the three graves for which I sought to fulfill a Find-a-Grave photo request, one Civil War veteran who died in 1902, and two casualties of the Vietnam war. I went just one for three in my hunt, but the gentleman who had requested a grave photo of his pilot training classmate, Capt David Carl Lindberg, was very appreciative for my photo and to learn I had left a wreath.

And on the way out, I again visited Bill, because I kinda knew the guy. And I don't think I'll ever be able to go to Arlington again without visiting him and paying my respects.

For further reading:

Letter to the Unborn Twins of a Fallen Marine
Politics Daily, 8/31/09

'In a few months...this could be us'
The Washington Post, 12/12/09

Vote Virginia!

Don't know where? Google can help (but of course!)

The Baltimore Marathon - Crunching My Numbers

Yesterday I ran the Baltimore Marathon. It was my second Marathon, and won't be my last as I'm already signed up to run the Surf City Marathon in my hometown of Huntington Beach, California next February. Not quite a year ago in Richmond, my friend Jay and I accomplished our goal of running a marathon and we completed a 16-week training program to reach the goal of just finishing the race. During long runs in those weeks of training, Jay and I would frequently comment that if we reached our goal of completing our first marathon, it would certainly also be our last. And yet, within hours of completing that goal (we finished in 5:56:57), Jay was saying, "We could do better", and the thought of doing another was planted.

Among the things that I really enjoyed about running Richmond was that it was a great way to see a city. How often can you tour a city, with police stopping traffic so that you can run down the middle of major roads, and with cheering fans lining the course offering high-fives, snacks, and beer? It is truly a unique experience, and the thought of taking such a running tour of other cities holds great appeal to me. Some marathoners pursue the goal of running a marathon in all 50 states. I don't know that I'll go that far, but I've learned to not rule anything out either.

My Runner's World magazine, a Christmas gift from my wife following last year's marathon, brings a monthly dose of motivation, and advertisements for marathons across the country. And from those ads, Baltimore stood out, mostly for being relatively nearby, and in July I made the commitment and registered for the race, along with friends and family who were going to run the Half-Marathon and the 5k.

I set my goal for Baltimore at 5 hours, an hour faster than Richmond, where just finishing had been the only goal. In a previous half-marathon and a 10-miler, I had found success at reaching my goal times by creating a Pace Tag which I pinned to my shirt to keep me on track. Having goal splits handy makes every single mile a race of it's own. Make those mile splits, and you'll reach the goal time for the whole race. To reach my 5 hour goal time in Baltimore required a pace of 11:27 per mile. That's a very easy pace when doing shorter training runs, but I had no idea if I could maintain it for all 26.2 marathon miles.

Happily, I found that I could. And my day-after geek came out today wanting to compare my actual performance with the goal pace I had established. The below table shows my goal pace, goal time, actual splits, pace difference, actual time, and actual difference. Where I am ahead of my goal pace, the number is in green, and where I am behind my goal pace, the number is in red.

Mile	Pace	Goal Time	Actual Split	Pace Diff	Actual Time	Difference
1	0:11:27	0:11:27	0:11:04	0:00:23	0:11:04	0:00:23
2	0:11:27	0:22:54	0:10:50	0:00:37	0:21:54	0:01:00
3	0:11:27	0:34:21	0:10:40	0:00:47	0:32:34	0:01:47
4	0:11:27	0:45:48	0:10:34	0:00:53	0:43:08	0:02:40
5	0:11:27	0:57:15	0:10:24	0:01:03	0:53:32	0:03:43
6	0:11:27	1:08:42	0:10:30	0:00:57	1:04:02	0:04:40
7	0:11:27	1:20:09	0:09:53	0:01:34	1:13:55	0:06:14
8	0:11:27	1:31:36	0:09:50	0:01:37	1:23:45	0:07:51
9	0:11:27	1:43:03	0:10:04	0:01:23	1:33:49	0:09:14
10	0:11:27	1:54:30	0:09:58	0:01:29	1:43:47	0:10:43
11	0:11:27	2:05:57	0:10:04	0:01:23	1:53:51	0:12:06
12	0:11:27	2:17:24	0:10:31	0:00:56	2:04:22	0:13:02
13	0:11:27	2:28:51	0:10:26	0:01:01	2:14:48	0:14:03
14	0:11:27	2:40:18	0:10:34	0:00:53	2:25:22	0:14:56
15	0:11:27	2:51:45	0:10:57	0:00:30	2:36:19	0:15:26
16	0:11:27	3:03:12	0:10:59	0:00:28	2:47:18	0:15:54
17	0:11:27	3:14:39	0:12:36	-0:01:09	2:59:54	0:14:45
18	0:11:27	3:26:06	0:11:33	-0:00:06	3:11:27	0:14:39
19	0:11:27	3:37:33	0:11:33	-0:00:06	3:23:00	0:14:33
20	0:11:27	3:49:00	0:12:13	-0:00:46	3:35:13	0:13:47
21	0:11:27	4:00:27	0:11:47	-0:00:20	3:47:00	0:13:27
22	0:11:27	4:11:54	0:11:49	-0:00:22	3:58:49	0:13:05
23	0:11:27	4:23:21	0:11:42	-0:00:15	4:10:31	0:12:50
24	0:11:27	4:34:48	0:11:57	-0:00:30	4:22:28	0:12:20
25	0:11:27	4:46:15	0:11:46	-0:00:19	4:34:14	0:12:01
26	0:11:27	4:57:42	0:11:09	0:00:18	4:45:23	0:12:19
26.2	0:02:18	5:00:00	0:05:03	-0:02:45	4:50:26	0:09:34

The race started uphill for the first 3.5 miles (see the elevation chart) As you can see I started steady and just ahead of pace and from miles 3 - 14 was enjoying the long downhill and running almost a minute ahead of my pace. By the time I had completed 16 miles, I was a almost 16 minutes ahead of my goal pace. There was a really great street party going on at mile 16, and at mile 17 I ran past the home of friends Phi and Sean, who lived up to their promise of having a mimosa waiting for me. By this point in the race I had eaten bananas, an orange, potato chips, pretzels, gold fish, vanilla power gel (gross), Skittles, and of course lots of water and Gatorade. But that mimosa went down better than any of it. Sean warned me that I was about to head into a not so great neighborhood, and suggested this knowledge may encourage me to pick up my pace (The Baltimore Sun had likewise been thoughtful enough to share information about where the marathon route intersected the worse areas of crime in the city). So I lost a minute enjoying that mimosa, and headed into the second hilly portion of the course, and as you can see, I began falling behind my goal pace, happily not by much, and not by enough to get behind the time I had banked in the first 16 miles. Miles 20 - 23 were the hardest, running around Lake Montebello, but then the course leveled and the long downhill to the finish line at the Inner Harbor began. The crowd grows, the cheers get louder, someone always seems to be offering a beer by this point, and the knowledge that the finish line is within reach provides a finishing surge. Jennifer, Colleen, and the neighborhood gals who had completed their 5k hours earlier were there at the end to see me finish, and I ended up right behind Jay who was finishing his half-marathon (he'll join me again for his second marathon in February).

An explanation for the 5 minutes that this chart says it took me to run the final two-tenths of a mile, I promise I did not drop off that much. As I ran, I found an increasing gap between the point at which my Garmin was telling me I had hit a mile point, and the actual mile-marker for the race. First it was a tenth of a mile, eventually a quarter mile, and by the end my watch fully three tenths of a mile ahead of the actual mile markers. My only explanation is that the accumulated drifting from side to side along the race course added this extra distance. So the splits in this chart reflect my Garmin time, while the final result of 4:50:26 was my official race chip time. I forgot to stop the timer on my Garmin until I was in the chute after finishing, collecting my medal and a drink, but when I did it had my time at 4:51:20 for a distance of 26.56 miles.

Thanks Baltimore for the great running weather (overcast with some light rain, felt great), great fan support, and mostly to my family and friends who have turned running into an activity at which we motivate, participate, and celebrate together.