Last weekend, we headed up to Humboldt County to run the Avenue of the Giants half-marathon. It was quite a crew – my dad came from Istanbul, my buddy James came from Raleigh, Matt came up from San Jose, and then Micky, Amelia, and I filled out the group.<\/p>\n
We found a place in Ferndale, and setup base camp. There was no wireless, which made for a desperate attempt to steal from the neighbors, which went exactly no where. That did mean though that we spent a lot more time just hanging out, playing guitar, and chasing Amelia around the house. There was a cute little grocery store in town where we got our food for the weekend, and spent the day before the race checking out the North Coast.<\/p>\n
Massively windy. Massively beautiful. Don’t know that a coastline like California’s can be rivaled. There’s something to the cliffs and the sheer coldness of the water that makes for this beautiful yet distant combo. Unrivaled in what I’ve seen.<\/p>\n
On to the race!<\/p>\n
The race sucked. I just didn’t train enough. I got to 7 miles and some steps at a perfect pace. I was really happy with what I was doing, and then I just couldn’t keep going. I hit neither my time (2:28:56) nor my objective to not walk (about half-a-mile over the course of the race). There was an epic hill at about 1.8 miles to go, and it just knocked me flat.<\/p>\n
BUT<\/p>\n
I ran the last half-mile as hard as I could, and Amelia and Micky were both at the finish line to cheer me on. It was quite awesome. That was by far the best part of the whole thing.<\/p>\n
Lessons learned for next time:<\/p>\n
Don’t know when it will be, but looking forward to the next one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last weekend, we headed up to Humboldt County to run the Avenue of the Giants half-marathon. It was quite a crew – my dad came from Istanbul, my buddy James came from Raleigh, Matt came up from San Jose, and then Micky, Amelia, and I filled out the group. We found a place in Ferndale, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[4,15,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQyAq-8O","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":543,"url":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/2012\/05\/05\/avenue-of-the-giants-prerace\/","url_meta":{"origin":546,"position":0},"title":"Avenue of the Giants - Prerace","date":"May 5, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm running my second half-marathon tomorrow. Goals are: Don't walk over the 13.1 miles Finish in under 2:10 Stay tuned, and I'll update tomorrow as to what happens.","rel":"","context":"In "just thinking out loud"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1296,"url":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/2014\/10\/29\/22-days-til-30\/","url_meta":{"origin":546,"position":1},"title":"22 days til 30","date":"October 29, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Giants win!! I've been here for all three World Series championships and I even had tickets back in 2010. It's such a cool thing to be part of. And the games were amazing. But this year was different. The whole family got into it. Micky had a debate about who\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "just thinking out loud"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":606,"url":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/2013\/01\/30\/back-in-the-grind\/","url_meta":{"origin":546,"position":2},"title":"Back in the grind","date":"January 30, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"This real world thing is tough! It's really amazing how quickly we got used to not having a schedule, demands on our time (outside the babies), and responsibility. But we're back, and it's full steam ahead. We've run the numbers (and boy are they big numbers), and realized that we're\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life Updates"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1608,"url":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/2015\/06\/01\/happy-4th-birthday-my-darling-amelia\/","url_meta":{"origin":546,"position":3},"title":"Happy 4th Birthday my darling Amelia","date":"June 1, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Photo gallery of the last few days: Some key highlights of your life as a 3 year old: You learned to love swimming when we went up to Russian River for the Sonoma Race weekend You went to go see Frozen in the theaters You started at CDS as a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "just thinking out loud"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":470,"url":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/2011\/08\/15\/storytime-and-picasso\/","url_meta":{"origin":546,"position":4},"title":"Storytime and Picasso","date":"August 15, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I tried to give Micky a bit of a break this past Saturday, and so Amelia Rose and I went to the local library for story time. We were the youngest ones there by about 6 - 7 months, but it was still lots of fun. We did a few\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Fatherhood"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":711,"url":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/2013\/12\/08\/iso-recipe-for-freezing-kids-in-this-moment\/","url_meta":{"origin":546,"position":5},"title":"ISO: Recipe for freezing kids in this moment","date":"December 8, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"What a wonderful week of Amelia and Luka. We spent last week in North Carolina visiting family and friends. It's amazing to me how much they trust Doruk even though they barely see him. Maybe a month ago I would have said barely know him, but after this past week\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Fatherhood"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onvural.net\/melih\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}