Good Morning Internet

I did it! After months of (barely) train­ing and wor­ry­ing too much, I made it across the fin­ish line and com­pleted my first met­ric Seag­ull Cen­tury on Sat­ur­day. That’s 100 kilo­me­ters, or 62 miles. It’s been six or seven years since I’ve done it and, shock­ingly, I think I logged my best time yet, com­ing in just a few min­utes over five hours.

Con­grats to my par­ents, who both also fin­ished the met­ric cen­tury, and beat my time, too!

The weather couldn’t have been bet­ter this past Sat­ur­day. It was a clear, warm day, with no seri­ous head­winds until the last 20 kilometers.

Along the way, I used Cycleme­ter on my iPhone to track my progress and post updates to Twit­ter. It’s an ridicu­lously cool app. It tracked my posi­tion via GPS and gave me reg­u­lar updates about my speed, time, and dis­tance through my head­phones. Plus, any time some­one replied to me on Twit­ter or Face­book, it read the mes­sage to me via friendly robotic voice. I was sure my bat­tery wouldn’t make it the whole way through the cen­tury, but I was hap­pily sur­prised to dis­cover I still had a few per­cent of bat­tery life after I crossed the fin­ish line. I’m not sure if that’s a tes­ta­ment to the improved bat­tery in the iPhone 4, some code magic in Cycleme­ter, or a com­bi­na­tion of the two, but I was really impressed.

More than once, I got hilar­i­ous tweet fed to my head­phones from peo­ple that cracked me up on my bike, undoubt­edly mak­ing me seem like some kind of nut to any­one cycling around me at the time.

At the risk of sound­ing com­pletely sappy, the real-time notes of encour­age­ment really helped moti­vate me. I was sur­prised so many of you were awake that early on a Sat­ur­day, and com­pletely hum­bled by your sweetness.

Cross­ing that fin­ish line felt great. I had a nice cool-down walk around Sal­is­bury Uni­ver­sity, my alma mater, and barely rec­og­nized some parts of cam­pus. That place has grown a lot in the past eight years.

After clean­ing up and sleep­ing hard after din­ner, I was sur­prised at how refreshed and ener­getic I felt Sun­day morning.

I’m feel­ing really moti­vated today. Who knows, if i can keep up this kind of men­tal momen­tum, maybe I can get myself into shape for the full 100-mile cen­tury next year.

In the mean­time, here are some pho­tos and videos from Seag­ull Cen­tury 2010!

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• Tom Green at the DC Improv

That’s my friend Josh on the left, Tom Green in the mid­dle, and me on the right.

Let’s flash back to 2001. Tom Green’s movie, Freddy Got Fin­gered, was play­ing in the­aters. Josh and I, both stu­dents at Sal­is­bury Uni­ver­sity at the time, drove to the mall to see the movie on open­ing night. Besides for me and Josh, there was only one other per­son in the the­ater. That other per­son, clearly not some­one with the capac­ity to appre­ci­ate high art, walked out mid­way through.

Josh and I loved it. In fact, we still love it. The movie is absurd, sur­real, some­times gross (yet never scat­o­log­i­cal, which is why I can call it high-brow), and very hilar­i­ous. But clearly, it’s not for every­one. Here is Roger Ebert’s reflec­tion on Freddy in his review for Steal­ing Har­vard (which is a crim­i­nally under­rated movie):

See­ing Tom Green reminded me, as how could it not, of his movie Freddy Got Fin­gered (2001), which was so poorly received by the film crit­ics that it received only one lonely, apolo­getic pos­i­tive review on the Tomatome­ter. I gave it—let’s see—zero stars. Bad movie, espe­cially the scene where Green was whirling the new­born infant around his head by its umbil­i­cal cord.But the thing is, I remem­ber Freddy Got Fin­gered more than a year later. I refer to it some­times. It is a mile­stone. And for all its sins, it was at least an ambi­tious movie, a go-for-broke attempt to accom­plish some­thing. It failed, but it has not left me con­vinced that Tom Green doesn’t have good work in him. Any­one with his nerve and total lack of taste is sooner or later going to make a movie worth seeing.

So, hear­ing that Tom Green was on a world-wide com­edy tour, we drove down to the DC Improv to see him per­form. We had no idea what kind of a crowd would show up for him, but we were delighted to dis­cover that the place was packed with kin­dred spir­its. Peo­ple were elec­tri­fied for Tom Green, and his stand-up act was awe­some. He told some sto­ries from his child­hood, the MTV days, the five months in which he was mar­ried to Drew Barrymore.

After the show, he took time to sign auto­graphs, take pic­tures, and chat with fans until every­one had left. He couldn’t have been a warmer, friend­lier guy.

I don’t want to spoil his act, so I highly rec­om­mend you seek him out if he’s com­ing to your area. If you can’t see him live, word is that there will be a tour DVD next year.

Speak­ing of next year, Tom Green has revealed plans to release a director’s cut of Freddy Got Fin­gered in honor of the movie’s tenth anniver­sary. Yes, please!

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