Week One of Training & Lancaster Vidjam Madness
So it was an eventful week in both the realms of film-making and fitness. I had the most prolonged Vidjam experience I’ve had since I started participating in the competitions. I also buckled down and officially started my marathon training in earnest. So this was a pretty busy week, but good in its own right.
Being that this is primarily a Vidjam blog, I’d be remiss if I didn’t start with my experiences with last weekend’s competition. The shoot was a wonderful mishmash of a lot of fun people I’ve met both doing Improv and Standup. The theme for the weekend was “Who Are You?” and we settled on an idea revolving around a guy getting ready for a date, and having five personalities in his brain sabotaging his efforts with conflicting advice. WebFX was gracious enough to let us shoot in their offices too! Being that most of us are improvisers, we made the decision to just work with an outline and not a specific script. It was a really fun process that allowed for a lot of creativity, but in the future I’d probably recommend against working without a script for a 48 hour competition. Not to suggest the stuff we shot wasn’t great (it was hilarious) it’s more of a structural problem of having too much stuff to choose from and include into the movie. Considering most of us have a single day to edit, and the movies can only be eight minutes long, it bogs down what has to be a quick post process. So that was my lesson learned for this last weekend.
Which leads me to…
This will also be the first movie I’ve submitted for Vidjam that will not be eligible for the judging and awards process. I’ve been lucky to basically never have any technical issues with premiere, and this weekend caught up to me in that regard. Basically, my premiere would crash about five minutes into any export, and then upon restarting the program, would display this message and crash the computer. This persisted for days past the submission deadline, and after talking it over with some friends proficient with premiere, I uninstalled and reinstalled all my drivers and premiere itself. This worked! And the movie finally was exported Friday night. I’m definitely a bit bummed we’re not eligible for any awards, but it was still a fun, stressful, and exciting weekend with some of my favorite creative people in Central PA. And that’s always the point really. It will still be screened at the Lancaster Vidjam showing, so definitely come out Wednesday night to see mine and a lot of other people’s awesome movies!
So, lesson learned. Make sure you’ve got a complete backup of your 48 hour project and a friend willing to let you use their premiere. Or end up like me.
DAY ONE
So this was the technical start to my first week of training. I was super anxious over the whole Vidjam crashing in Premiere thing that I decided the only sane thing to do was to take a head clearing bike ride. It was pretty tame by my standards, and was really just the Harrisburg Greenbelt with a few added segments (like doubling over the Harvey Taylor Bridge). The average speed was a good bit lower than what I’ve worked up to, but it was mostly meant to be a relaxing bike ride. So I listened to a lot of This American Life, Snap Judgement, and various Final Fantasy Soundtracks, and got 27 miles closer to my yearly goal. Biking doesn’t generally give me as good a cardio workout as running, but I still love it to death.
DAY ONE
This was the first of the run days, and boy was it a doozy. My surrounding area right now is very hill-centric, and at 198 ft for a half hour run, Monday was actually one of the easier days incline wise. As terrible as I felt afterwards, my pace was still fairly respectable overall, even though this was the shortest run I took during the week (and probably the shortest distance I’ll do overall.
Still, after just one run my core felt a lot stronger than it had been the last few months of doing spot Insanity Workouts and short, fast treadmill runs.
DAY TWO
And Boy was I sore after the first day. I woke up feeling like this would be a significantly worse run than the first day, but still was aiming to up the total distance by about half a mile. In the end, I did a little better than that, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much faster I ran, despite running half a mile and fifty feet of total elevation more. It seems to be a running theme this week that my best days were the days where I was feeling the worst. And it’s another reason I’ve found Strava to be so invaluable. It’s reassuring to know that, like literally everything I’m worked up about in life, it’s never as bad as you think it is. Sometimes it’s surprisingly good.
DAY THREE
I also have a habit of naming my runs really negative names, which strangely grounds me. I was feeling a bit better the morning of day three, and only took a single cup of coffee in the morning, so I thought I’d be doing much better. After being surprised by my pace Day 2, I decided to bump up the mileage and still incorporate a portion of the run into reservoir park. The result was the most elevation gain and longest run of the week. I actually posted a ridiculously good pace of like 8:40/mile for the first 2.5, but then I burned out hard and averaged somewhere between 11 and 12 minute miles the back 1.5 miles. Some of the hills for this particular circuit were really awful, and I believe it’s something I’ll only utilize for shorter runs going forward. I still managed to get in under 11 minute miles for my average, which made me happy.
DAY FOUR
I took off to go to Knoebels Grove with Jasmine, and perhaps being on my feet all day was not the best use of an off day, but my soul requires one trip to Elysburg a summer. So I had to appease it.
DAY FIVE
This was maybe the most satisfying run of the week. I worked a rare 8–4 day at work, so I decided to drive down to City Island and take a run around the city. I had to take a walk break very very early on because my feet were killing me. I’m chalking it up to spending a day walking around Knoebels Grove, but in reality I probably need better insoles for my running shoes if I’m going higher in miles every day. This also may have been a signal to try out those compression socks I’ve been using as a drink coaster the last two months. It’s also notable this was the flattest run of the week, only just getting to 100 feet of total elevation gain. Still, I kept a damn good pace across Harvey Taylor and into Wormleysburg for my four miles on Thursday, and like most runs I thought I did poorly on, I paced much better than I thought. I was pretty tired, and dreading my last run of the week. For good reason.
DAY SIX
I was exhausted and drank two cups of coffee before starting this run, and it showed. Originally I intended to only run 3 miles to relax into the weekend. However, I planned my time poorly and needed to run the extra half mile back to make it to work on time. To be fair, the elevation gain was still pretty high here for a 3.5 mile run, and it was humid as hell (like all week), so I think my runs will improve as the weather gets cooler. Next week the temperature range is supposed to be much much cooler, so we’ll see if that’s the case, or if I’m just in worse shape than I realize. It’s also worth noting I had two Gin & Tonics the previous night after hanging out at the Harrisburg Improv Theater, and though I didn’t feel worse for the wear perhaps that had some effect on my worst run of the week.
DAY SEVEN & BONUS
My Marathon training guide says to cross train one day a week. And I love biking, so I figured that was a logical step to recover a bit and have some fun. My friend Shanna also convinced me to try out stair running with her as a way to sort of switch up from long distance running to high interval running. After some debate and naivete, we settled on doing sloping reps of stairs, starting at six in a row, followed by a walk and then a set that was one less than the previous until we got to one (ex: 5 in a row, walk, 4 in a row, walk…etc) and it kicked my ass like no run this week did. We maybe only ran half a mile total, though I estimate our elevation gain was around 400 ish feet. I sadly didn’t track it, but I intend to next week.
Also notable was that with today’s bike ride, I officially hit my goal for the year biking. I set a fairly meager goal of 1,200 miles around New Years (100 miles a month) and far exceeded that. Even more notable is that at the start of April, I had biked less than 200 miles, meaning I’ve biked more than 1,000 miles in less than five months. Not too shabby!
And now that that goal is out the way, I’ll feel less guilty about skipping bike days to do more runs. Because, even though they are far less enjoyable, the runs give me such a better workout. And I need a lot of work to make it 26.2 miles in November.
So, that’s it for this lengthy Update! I’ll probably do more blog posts during the week from now on in an attempt to not bore everyone here to death with so much text. TL;DR is my worst nightmare, so I’ll keep things more succinct from now on. Also, please come out to the Lancaster Vidjam Screening this Wednesday! My film will be playing as an exhibition, and there will be so many other great movies. So make it a point to come out!
