This past weekend I worked a booth at the Oklahoma City Marathon Expo and shot the race as I routinely do.  It’s one of my favorite races to shoot for a couple of reasons.  The first reason is that it is simply a wonderful event that was created out of a horrific tragedy.  Every year, survivors and family members of victims run the marathon to remember those 168 who died on that fateful April day.  The race start takes place at the bombing memorial.  This is a truly majestic place and one heck of a memorial to those lives lost.  I have spent several evenings in my lifetime just walking through the memorial.  I actually fell in love with my wife as we walked through the memorial only a few days after we first met.  It will always hold a special place in my heart.  The second reason is that this is the first race I ever took photos at.  My dad started running the event in 2008 and I had just gotten into digital photography.  I lugged my camera around for three years in a row getting finishing photos of my dad.  This is no easy feat as there are high fences surrounding the finish line and the bleachers are typically full.  It has been a whole lot easier these past three years as I have had media credentials to get my at the finish line.  This was our first year working the expo and it was a crazy!   We saw over 100 patients in two days and had over 150 sign up.  The line was over 2 hours at several points and many people simply could not wait.  I primarily did very fast evaluations to tell the runners why they were in pain and then I did a few minutes of Active Release, Graston, or FAKTR treatments on them followed by Kinesio or sports taping.  I can’t count how many times a runner would say something like , “That’s amazing!” after applying one of my highly specialized tape jobs.  We were able to get a lot of runners through the race who may not have been able to otherwise.  My lovely wife and mother-in-law took care of the people walking around as I went to work non-stop for about 8-10 hours each day.  I got a few minutes for food and a restroom break, but that was it.  I absolutely love that kind of flow for two days, but I could never do that in my office.  I like about 20-30 minutes with my patients and 10-15 just isn’t enough.  By the end of the day, all of the patients started to run together in my mind and I couldn’t keep straight what treatments or tape I did on who.  It wasn’t until I saw many of my tape jobs in my race photos that I remembered what I had treated on those individuals.  Jason Shackleford of KJRH Channel 2 in Tulsa stopped by to do a brief interview with me while I was working on a patient.  Trani Matthews of Tulsa Runner and Sean Call of Oklahoma Sports and Fitness were also featured in the interview.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)

On Sunday the weatherman had predicted 50% chance of thunderstorms but we lucked out with a light drizzle/rain that started about 2 hours into the race.  Last year was the absolute WORST marathon conditions imaginable as there was a constant cold rain, with high winds and hail.  Click HERE to read that blog.   I stuck around for about three hours and primarily got shots at the start and finish.  I was so worn down from the expo that I just didn’t feel like getting out on the track.  I also wanted to get photos of the first half marathoners at the finish as I have missed that in years past.  I was able to photograph about half a dozen of my patients crossing the finish line which was a great feeling as a few of them have battled so courageously over the past couple of months fighting off chronic injuries.  Sunday was a big day for them, and a triumph on many levels.  I was so proud of them all and the hugs I got at the finish line were among the highlights of the weekend .  I did not stay long enough to see all of my runners finish the marathon, but they all did fantastic and I’m proud to call my self their doctor.  I Borrowed a Canon 1D Mark IV from Canon CPS for the event and was fairly impressed by its low light performance as most images are shot at 3200-4000 ISO due to the rain and overcast.  However, the autofocus was simply poor and even with the settings dialed in for running, I had a majority of my shots out of focus or very soft on the focus.  I had previously considered getting a 1D Mark IV in leu of the very long delay on the 1D X, but have now decided it’s worth the wait if the autofocus is improved.  This marks my 5^th race to shoot this year and I’m right on track for the 10-15 I have planned for this year.  It’s going to be interesting to see how good the photos get after I add the 1D X to the mix.  I’m excited to say the VERY least.  I hope all of you who partook in the race this weekend had a great time and paused to remember those 168 lives who were lost 17 years ago.  We run to remember them, and I hope that you thought of them as you ran towards your goals!  For all of those that I had the opportunity to work on at the expo, I hope that it was worth your time and I hope you have a new found respect for chiropractors as we’re not all that bad.  HA HA!  Enjoy May everyone, I’ll post soon on some new things happening!   -Barnezy-

A few weeks ago, Runner’s world Tulsa hosted the first annual “Run Tulsa Pink 5K” run at the OU Shusterman Center in mid-town Tulsa.  There were around 1,000 people at the event and a whole lot of pink!  There was a mile fun run for the kids (and some adults), as well as a 5K.  I had around a dozen patients (past or current) running in the event and it’s always great to see my patients enjoying the things they love!  I shot the event solo with a Canon 7D and my 200mm f2 and 8-15mm f4 fisheye lenses.  I am really missing my Canon 1D rig these days but am hopeful that its replacement (The Canon 1D  X will be arriving within the next month or so.  The 7D is not bad, but the autofocus and low light abilities leave much to be desired after coming from a pro rig.  I borrowed a 1D Mark IV from Canon CPS for the OKC marathon this past weekend and it was better, but nowhere as good as some of Canon’s pro bodies from 2006.  You would think technology would get better in time.  I digress.  Kathy and Brian Hoover of Runner’s World Tulsa put on a fantastic event and I was surprised how busy it was for a Sunday evening race.  After the 5K, there was food, music, and awards and several hundred people continued to hang out till late in the evening.  It was a great event and should be even bigger this next year!  This was my 4^th event of the year and I’m steadily on pace for the dozen planned races for 2012.  It seems like I get invited to a race every month so I may end up shooting close to 20 this year.  One thing about living back in Tulsa is that these races are a whole lot easier to shoot.  I’m planning on covering the Dirty 30 next weekend and possibly a triathlon and bike race very soon.   I’ve never really covered a bike race or triathlon so that could be very interesting!  On another note, I’m getting busier and busier in the office, but I’m still finding time to run and workout a few days per week.  The summer is right around the corner and I plan on getting pretty serious as I’d like to run a 10K this summer and perhaps a 15K this fall or winter.  I’ll post soon on an update to my running.  I hope you all are well and enjoying the weather before it gets HOT!  Keep moving!  -Barnezy-

Last week my good friend Jared stopped by the office to take me to lunch in a very unique car.  Jared is the son of a local car dealer and one of my best friends.  They had recently traded for a Z06 Corvette which was just a little different than all of the ones they had traded for before it.  This Z06 Corvette was painted in “Apache” black.  Apparently the previous owner was once an Apache helicopter pilot in the armed forces.  The car had a very unique look, but the biggest surprise came underneath the hood.  The standard LS7 505 horsepower Z06 engine had been swapped for a GM 454LSX crate motor which had racked up 660 horsepower on the dyno.  When Jared told me about the car and that it had been professionally modified my first question was whether this car could get all of that power to the pavement.  The answer was a resounding yes!  You may remember a few years ago when I test drove a Z06 on a highway on ramp to see if GM’s 0-100 mph claims were true.  You can find that video on HERE on my website.  This car absolutely obliterated that stock Z06 and I would absolutely see what this car is capable of at the track.  If Jared likes it enough, maybe he’ll buy it and keep it for a while as opposed to selling it at the dealership.

This past Friday evening, Ali and I went to watch Corey White open up for Roy Clark in front of a sold out crowd at the Hard Rock Casino’s “The Joint.”  I met corey last year while shooting for The Matt Roberson Band at the YEC event in Norman, OK.  He’s a really nice guy from Bixby, OK who is an exceptional singer/song writer.  When he asked me if I wanted to come to the show and hang out backstage and take some photos I was pretty stoked.  He has opened for Roy Clark on several occasions, but this event was a little different as it was Roy Clark’s 80th birthday celebration.  Because of the nature of this event, Corey only had time for three songs but the crowd absolutely loved him.  This was the first time I have ever got hear him sing live.  I shot everything on my Canon 7D with my 200mm F2 IS and 8-15mm Fisheye lenses.  I’m still waiting on the Canon 1D X which has now been officially delayed until June at the earliest.  In light of this, I contacted Canon Professional Services and asked to borrow a Canon 1D Mark IV to shoot the OKC Marathon later this month.  I also have a wedding or two to shoot this summer so I may have to borrow a Canon 5D Mark III or Mark II for those events as the Canon 7D will not be enough.  On another note,  I’m currently sitting on the couch watching the aftermath of the Oklahoma tornados from yesterday.  We are very relieved that Tulsa was spared this time around.  This past week was the busiest I’ve had yet in practice so I’m a little run down, but this quiet weekend at the house has allowed me to recover and make a serious dent in my “to-do” list.  I hope you all stayed safe this weekend and check back soon for a really cool video I shot in a very fast car this past week.  -Barnezy-

This past weekend  ventured out the the Jenks Aquarium for the 2012 Aquarium Run.  There was a 5K, 10K, Half Marathon and Fun Run.  I had a few patients running in the event so I thought it would be nice to swing by and nab a few pics before I snuck out to Lawton to see my family for Easter Sunday.  To see a gallery of the prints, click HERE.   We have only been out to Lawton twice since my parents moved there so it was nice to be back.  For Sunday lunch, we gave mom the day off and headed over to Meers to eat one of the best burgers in Oklahoma.  It’s a a longhorn burger which is lean, but still incredibly juicy!  After lunch we drove through the wildlife reserve in Medicine park and visited the Holy City which has attracted millions of people over the years.  It was a very interesting place that serves as the backdrop for a yearly play that thousands come to see.  It was a short time in Lawton but it was a lot of fun to be with the family.  On a running note, I”m up to 3.5 miles in the Newton’s so hopefully I’ll be able to run a 5K in them in May or June.  There is the potential for very dangerous storms in Oklahoma today so hopefully I won’t be writing a blog about that this next week.  Be safe this weekend Okie’s!

This past weekend I travelled to Oklahoma City to spend some time with the in-laws as well as to shoot an event called the “Princess Run & Little Dude Dash.”  I was contacted by the director of the event a few weeks ago and he basically told me that it was a festival for kids that included a running event for the girls as well as the boys.  IT was held at the Devon Boathouse just south of downtown Oklahoma City.  This is a phenomenal facility and an Olympic training center for rowing.  I would have liked to spent a few hours just taking photos of the boathouse, but I was only able to nab a handful of shots while I was there.  A good friend of mine, Abraham Wright spoke to some of the kids before the event and gave a very nice Gospel presentation.  Abraham played along side me at NEO and then he later played at Colorado and for the Miami Dolphins.  He was the nicest guy at NEO and that trend continued as he spoke to those kids for 20 minutes.  The festival was great with face painting, jupiter jumps, bicycle courses, etc.   The OKC Barons had a booth where kids could try to hit a hockey puck into a dryer.  There were also some people from the boathouse giving kids rowing lessons and having a “row-off” contest between kids.  The OKC fire department was there with a firetruck from 1910.  The kids were ringing the bell and winding up the alarm.   The races were great and many of the parents accompanied their kids on the one mile run.  It was a great event and the kids seemed to be having the time of their lives.  Hopefully I’ll be around next year to cover it again.  If you’d like to download or order prints of the event, you can do so HERE.  I’m covering the Aquarium Run here in Tulsa this weekend and then spending some time with my family for Easter.  I had a patient ask me if I was working on Good Friday this week and my reply was, “Jesus didn’t take the day off!”  HA HA!  I look forward to serving my patients in a much smaller capacity than He did.  I hope you all enjoy this wonderful Easter weekend and try to look through the bunny rabbits and see the beauty of a God who saved us from ourselves.  -Barnezy-

This will be more of a personal blog than I’m used to writing as most of my blogs are about events I’ve covered or seminars I’ve attended.  Vary rarely do I just talk about me so this should be interesting. Where do I start?  My history of running goes back quite a ways.  When I was just a young boy I was always running!  I was the fastest kid at recess and and could always seem to run a little longer or faster than my classmates.  This trend continued into middle school where I was a very fast 400 meter or 800 meter runner.  In a 3200 relay in 8th grade I ran just a few seconds slower than what won state in high school that year.  I was never the fastest sprinter or the best distance runner, but I found my sweet spot in those middle distances.  I only ran two years of track and gave it up to focus on football where I thought I had a real chance at a scholarship.  Through high school I was always touted as the fastest defensive end in the state.  I ran a 4.5 yard dash in high school, but I played at a 4.4 or faster.  I don’t know if it’s that I never really warmed up well for a 40 yard dash or if I just rose to the challenge in a game, but I even surprised myself with the things I could do on the field.  I ran a little with my dad during those years and we tended to like running the 5K at Lafortune Park in Tulsa.  Fast Forward a few years and I’m now in college and I’m still really fast but MUCH heavier.  I was a very agile 210 pounds in high school and I gained about 40 pounds during my first year or so of college.  Adapting to that kind of change is not easy, but I was still able to keep my speed.  I always looked forward to wind sprints for some odd reason.  I think I just really enjoyed running as hard as I can until I have nothing left.  I remember one day in particular when I was playing football at NEO.  We would do track workouts in the spring and we would run 400 meter dashes once a week or two.  We would usually run six of them at a sub minute pace right after doing heavy squats.  Not sure who came up with the workout, but it was brutal.  I was always stuck running with the fast guys instead of my lineman.  I was never beaten in a 400 and a lot of that had to do with most of those guys not having the work ethic I did.  One day, our star linebacker (who had been lazily running the first 5 400′s challenged me on the last 200 meters of our 6th and final 400.  My legs were pretty gone and this guy ran a 4.5-4.6 forty as well.  He kicked in on me and I took off, after 100 yards or so I hit another gear and just took off and he gave up when I started pulling away.  Even though I had beaten him, I kept picking up speed until I crossed the finish line.  I went straight over to the grass and about collapsed.  I remember laying in the training room completely exhausted as the training staff literally came by me and dropped ice on my hamstrings.  I fell asleep right there on the floor and slept for at least an hour.  That’s just one story, but I thought it was pretty funny.  In a lot of ways, I’m like a racehorse and would run until my heart exploded if it weren’t for having some common sense.  When the blood leaves my face and arms and they start to go numb, I know I’ve only got a minute or two before I faint so I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing when to start slowing down.  I don’t know if anyone else ever experiences this, but my body seems to be really good at sending the blood to my legs when I ask for it.

A few years later after I had retired from football due to multiple injuries, I was taking a sports testing class at The University of Tulsa.  We spent a week testing VO2 max in a variety of ways including, treadmill tests, walking tests, 2 mile race tests etc…  When I got the results of my VO2 max everyone was pretty astonished, but that number made a lot of sense to me as I thought back on how no one ever seemed to be able to keep up with me in certain distances.  That number was a 69 in one test, and in the actual treadmill test it was a 79.  The simplest definition for what a V02 max is simply your body’s maximum capacity for transporting and using oxygen during incremental exercise.  The higher the number the better.  I found out that I was in good company with a VO2 max of that level.  Here are a few scores that were comparable to mine.  Steve Prefontaine (84.4) , Jim Ryun (81.0) , Lance Armstrong (84.0).  This testing was done about 6 months after I was done playing football so if I had actually been in better shape I would have probably scored even higher.  A lot of this is genetic gifting, and the rest is training.  I have left ventricular hypertrophy of the heart sometimes called the “athletes heart” that allows my body to pump more blood than most humans walking around on the earth.  Every time I have an EKG hooked up to me the alarms go off like crazy!

Fast forward another 5 or 6 years and my dad picked up running again.  He started running with a group at Fleet Feet Tulsa and really got into it.  He had me come to his events and photograph him for his scrapbook.  This is how I got my start shooting these kinds of events.  For about three years I have been watching people running past me wishing I could run again.  Football left my body so beat up that I really didn’t run leisurely from 2004 till 2012.  I might have gotten 10-15 miles in per year on average.  Something always seemed to end up hurt within a week’s time when I started to run again.  I told myself that I would just never be able to run again but some of that started changing about midway through my chiropractic education.  During school I learned that I had a lot of muscular imbalances that were predisposing me to these injuries.  Looking back at my college career, if I had known about these imbalances I had, I would have trained different and would have been able to play with a lot less chance of injury.  When I started my chiropractic practice in 2011 my first 20-25 patients were pretty much all runners.  I worked tirelessly to get them back on the road all the while wishing that I were able to do what they do.  After a few months of patients asking me to get out there and run with them I finally cracked and started to believe that I could do this!  I started researching new ways to run.  In analyzing my patients running forms I kept seeing correlations in their form and the injuries that were derived from them.  I looked at my two fastest runners who were the least injury prone and noticed some key differences.  I stumbled upon Chi Running in about September last year and studied it a lot.  I took a local class here in Tulsa from a personal trainer named Jane McClain.  I took 6 of my female patients with me who were suffering from running injuries and we all learned the new running form and have all switched to that style of running.  I know that I’m my own worst enemy when it comes to getting hurt by pushing myself to hard to I joined my local Fleet Feet “No Boundaries” running group in February and started running 2-3 days per week.  I took my time implementing the things I learned from Chi Running and it wasn’t long before my legs and wind started to come back.  I had planned to run a 5K this summer, but one of my patients signed me up for a 5K and dragged me out to Veteran’s Park at 7am on a Saturday earlier this month.  She won the event and I surprised myself running a pretty decent 5K for it being my first one ever and for only running for a month.  I don’t think I had even run that distance without stopping until that day.  My patient then took me on a 3 mile “cool down” and from that moment on I made her my unofficial running coach.  She’s a sub 3 hour marathoner and a sub 18 minute 5K runner and has won a lot of races, but what I love about her the most is her attitude toward running.  She has been sending me workouts that I will soon start implementing as I try to drop 2 minutes off of my 5K by the fall.

So it’s been a long journey for me coming back to the sport of running.  I’m easily one of the heavier runners out there as I outweigh most of the elite guys by at least 50 pounds.  I’ve even slimmed down 40-50 pounds since college and it’s making life a lot easier on my joints.  I’m really looking forward to this year and think that I may be able to get this old body to be fast again.  I feel that I was born with a gift.  It served me well in football but I’ve never got to see what this beat up old body is actually capable of on the track.  I don’t know if I’ll ever be a marathoner, but my immediate goal would be to break 20 minutes in a 5K and then ultimately run one much, much faster. I think I have the capacity to run a 15-16 minute 5K if my body will hold up.  Only time will tell.  For right now, Im just really enjoying running again!  I’ll be posting periodically on my “training” and race results, but for the most part you’ll see photos from the big races because that’s my priority.  I’ll run in a few small 5K’s here and there, but photographing them is still a lot of fun for me!  I’ll see you all out there!  -Barnezy-