Thanksgiving Recovery Post
It has been a quite a busy, but enjoyable week and I hope your holidays were as fruitful as mine! As I've mentioned before, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because it centers around three Fs for me: family, feasting, and football. I handily accomplished all three this past week seeing all of my immediate family and some of my extended family, watching more football in a three or four day span than I thought was possible, and eating my weight in sweet potato casserole - maybe a slight exaggeration. This year, I am also able to add a FOURTH F for fitness! I ran my first "official" 5k race Thanksgiving morning with my parents, my girlfriend, my brother, and his wife. The weather was really almost as bad as it realistically could have been at 9:00am on a day in late November; the sky was dark, rain was coming down, and I'm pretty sure the temperature was below 40 degrees. It felt like it at any rate. Weather aside, I had a great time and I believe everyone else did as well, though it was a little macabre to run through a cemetery in those conditions. As my dad said, running in that weather just makes it a better story.
To add to a busy week, I played another show last night with the Sam Brown Band and Menteur at the Local 506 in Chapel Hill. I think somehow we managed to perform with even more people for the Menteur set than the last show at The Cave, but I never heard a final count. Both sets were really fun, as always, because I end up playing with different sets of musicians each time, so there's a real fresh and challenging element that I feel like helps me get better as a performer and a drummer. Playing with a set band, like The Slip Slams, is a very different challenge for writing and improvising, but it's also nice because I've been playing with the guys in The Slip Slams since high school and we lock in well during jams. One of the really fun things about Menteur, though, is that no one can have an ego about what's going on. Once you get that many drummers, guitarists, bassists, horn players, what have you, going at it on stage, there's no way for any one person to do something to show off; making it all about how you contribute to what's going on around you and how you lock in with the other people on stage. There should be audio recordings for both the Sam Brown set and the Menteur set coming soon, so I'll definitely put those up in a future post. Keep an eye out!
Later this week, I am going to list the things that I don't understand how anyone who runs much can live without! The podcast I work on, What Else Sucks, is also now on iTunes so give us a listen and subcribe if you like it. You can also find us through the web if iTunes isn't your thing - if that's the case, let me know where you go for your podcasts because I'm looking to expand where we make it available!