This coming Sunday (the 23rd) will see CrossFit Center City (the gym that I go to) host its first Olympic-style weightlifting meet. There have been some quasi-competitions before but no real meets with a real platform, judges, timing rules, bar loaders, sessions, etc. And, in addition to it being the first USA Weightlifting (or USAW) sanctioned meet, it is also going to be called The hookgrip Classic, as I mentioned in my prior post. I’m pretty excited for it, hopefully everything will go well.

Since I know my blog readers want to hear about this: my lifting update is that I have been lifting better than ever recently. For a quick recap of the last year or so, I basically started lifting daily around Halloween of last year. At the time, I was struggling to squat 70kg (154lbs) — which is really bad for an adult male. In roughly four months, I took my squat from 70kg to 150kg/330lbs. Here is the video from Feb 24th where I squatted 150kg. I was quite happy with my progress at this point especially given that I deadlifted 184kg/405lbs on Jan 21st, 2012 (ie, about three months after I started). To go from being really weak to a 330lb squat and a 405lb deadlift in roughly four months is quite good, in my opinion. Here’s the problem — I didn’t progress at all from late Feb until roughly early September. That’s over six months of no progress — even with close to daily workouts (almost every weekday, scattered weekends). That’s not what’s supposed to happen. Of course, eventually it will happen, but 330lb squat and 405lb deadlift is not where progress should level off for a 29/30 year-old who is committed to training.

So, anyway, I had to try to figure out what was going on. For most of the time since March, I had bad left quad pain (also in right, but not as bad as left). It essentially felt like my quad was tearing apart when I got down into a squat. I tried to stretch it, foam roll it, lacrosse ball roll it, get massages, warm it up a lot, get ART (aka Active Release Technique), roll it with “The Stick” (a myofascial release tool), etc. I tried a LOT of things to get my quad better. I even took time off when I went to Guatemala in May but it still didn’t get better. Maybe just mildly but it got worse as soon as I started lifting again. I went to go see a joint doctor and he said that my knee was fine (I had some pain in my knee too, although most of the pain was in the quad). I tried everything I could think of. It would occasionally get better for a day or a few but it always came roaring back — and badly. As I said above, I made no lifting progress during this period. I actually went backwards. I did do a 151kg squat (332lbs) once but that was during a short period in late March when things were oddly good. But other than that period, I was struggling with weights that were easy just a month before.

So, for me, the big moment was when I went to London for the Olympics in early August. About two days into the trip, I woke up with ZERO quad pain. For the prior six months, even during the times when I wasn’t lifting, I still had some quad pain. For instance, in Guatemala it was still pretty bad although it definitely did not hurt as much that week simply due to a lack of lifting. It was actually an amazing feeling to wake up with no pain like that. I had gotten so used to stumbling around that I really felt like a totally new person. The pain didn’t show up again for the rest of the week in London either. I thought things through and realized something. I started taking protein shakes in early March and I’d taken some form of whey protein basically straight through from March until London. Even in Guatemala I’d eaten whey protein bars. As silly as this sounds, I actually began to think maybe it was the protein that was causing the issue. So when I got home from London, I decided to start lifting without any supplemental protein. I would just focus on trying to eat a good amount of protein. And, whaddya know, no quad pain since! I’ve been lifting literally every day for the last few weeks and no pain at all. Of course, my legs are a bit stiff in the morning and when I’m getting warmed up but that’s totally normal. That has all built up to today where I set a bunch of PRs in my squat. I squatted 137.5kg/303lbs for 5 reps (2 sets of 5 actually). And I squatted 147.5kg/325lbs for a set of 2. And I squatted 155kg/342lbs for a set of 1. All of those were personal records. After my terrible last six months as far as lifting goes, I could not have been happier about how today went. Hopefully the injuries will stay away and I’ll be able to keep making progress.

/lifting talk

So, like many others, I have watched all of the recently released Lederer Files videos. Before I get into the whole issue of whether Howard is telling the truth, I have to say that I think PokerNews did a pretty good job overall. I know that Matt Parvis missed a couple of opportunities to really stick it to Howard but overall I think he asked good questions. There were definitely a bunch of times where Howard pretended to forget things that he clearly could have remembered. I don’t necessarily blame him for doing that. He didn’t want to throw a ton of specific people under the bus because they were shitty FTP owners who didn’t care about the site. He just threw essentially the whole ownership into one big category although there were a few exceptions. That’s fine with me although I also get why people out there want to know who said what and at what points. It sounds like there were a bunch of owners who cared more about their distributions than getting the players paid. And that is fucked up. It would be nice to know who those people were, specifically.

Now, in terms of whether Howard is telling the truth. I think, generally, yes. I don’t think he is outright lying about major facts in the post Black Friday time period. There were simply too many people involved for him to lie about what was discussed on member calls, with the DOJ, with PokerStars, etc. I put the chances of him lying about those things at sub 1%. What I do question is how much he knew about the processing issues and the so-called “backlog” prior to Black Friday. I have a hard time believing that it was never brought to anyone’s attention. Now, do I think there are emails and various extensive evidence of the backlog being communicated to Howard? Probably not, no. I don’t think he would go on record saying that he didn’t learn of the backlog until April 7th if there was significant evidence out there to the contrary. But I think he had to know of it. Just my guess and I have nothing to back that up other than it not making sense. One thing that I should mention here is that I knew of a person who had a TON of uncollected eChecks with FTP. To the tune of north of 100,000. I knew a lot of other people with 5,000 to 10,000 in uncollected eChecks. I just can’t believe that I would know about FTP not collecting deposits and Howard wouldn’t. That doesn’t make sense to me. Now, of course, the backlog and the net cash are two totally different issues. I don’t have a hard time believing that Howard wouldn’t have known that the backlog (and even without the backlog) caused a massive net negative cash balance in the company. In order to know that, Howard likely would have needed a significant set of numbers to be pulled from several places (bank accounts, processors accounts, player accounts, etc) and unless there was a specific net cash report that he was getting (which he wasn’t, although he did get other reports) then I don’t see how he would know the net cash. Now, should he have known this? Absolutely. He was negligent as a board member in my opinion. But it’s harder than you might think in a company the size of FTP to just figure out the net cash. It’s not something you can just “figure out” or keep track of in your head or whatever. You need the report to be pulled. So, because I don’t think he would lie about not receiving reports when he was receiving them, I doubt he saw a report that specifically showed net cash.

So that’s my opinion. Overall I’m glad that information is starting to come out about FTP and I look forward to having the brand be run by the one company in the world that has a shot at reviving Full Tilt. It’s amazing how well PokerStars comes out looking in all of this. Not only did they have plenty of money to cover their US deposits, they paid them out quickly, they rescued hundreds of millions of dollars for the poker economy and they are going to re-establish one of the formerly great brands in poker. And, actually, I have a bit of a theory for one of the reasons that Stars is so much better run than, say, FTP. As you may know, the PokerStars ownership is consolidated in the hands of a few. More specifically, it’s consolidated in the hands of the Scheinberg family. Isai Scheinberg was one of the people indicted and he’s generally regarded as the founder, primary owner and brains being the PokerStars operation. And his son Mark, who I assume has a good chunk of ownership as well, is very very involved in the operations of the site. He is referred to publicly as PokerStars’ Chairman. Either way, Isai, Mark and a few others were the primary people receiving money from PokerStars’ operations from 2001 (when they first started operating, although they were quite small then) until 2011 when Black Friday happened. That’s a lot of years to build up profits. And, unlike the many FTP owners who by all accounts are degenerates (obviously not all of them), I assume that Isai and Mark didn’t need anywhere near the amount that PokerStars was able to provide them with. In addition, as owners, they are very involved in the day-to-day from everything that I can surmise from the DOJ documents and just what PokerStars employees have said. So while I definitely heard about uncollected eChecks with PokerStars as well (although not to the same degree, or close to it), PokerStars was simply so far ahead of any backlog of any kind that they may have had. I haven’t read all of the DOJ documents so this sort of thing might be out there — I don’t know. But don’t ever underestimate the value of having professionals run a company. UB/AP and FTP are what happen when poker players start companies. I’m not putting UB/AP and FTP on the same level but at the end of the day they screwed up because of bad management. Both businesses were more than capable of being extremely profitable so it isn’t like they failed because of actually being a poor business or product. PokerStars is what happens when a professional (although Isai definitely has a strong interest in poker from what I know) starts a company. But I think a large factor is how the ownership and management was structured in the two companies, in addition to the types of people in place.

Anyway, that’s my comment on the whole thing. I ended up doing about a four hour interview with Scott Bell from the UltimateBeat documentary project. We’ll see which parts of my comments end up in the final project. It was very difficult to remember a lot of the small details from four (UB) and five (AP) years ago but overall it went pretty well I think.

Have a nice weekend!

In a couple of days I’m going to be interviewed for the UltimateBeat project (linked to their kickstarter). It’s a documentary about the UltimateBet scandal that took place mostly in 2008 although the cheating spanned a number of years prior to the scandal itself. I’ve always felt like my role in uncovering things at both AP and UB was a bit overstated in the poker community. In reality, I didn’t do most of the work (especially with UB) or spend a lot of time on things. I basically just swooped in at various points and found something or other that was important — and got more credit than I deserved for it. One of the big things in the UB scandal was this post where I realized that it was Russ Hamilton’s house that was listed as the address of record for a number of the cheating accounts at UB. It still didn’t really prove anything but it definitely made people realize that there was a better possibility that Russ Hamilton was involved. Oddly enough, that house appears to have been sold about two weeks ago! Funny timing. I wonder if the guy who bought it has any idea of its history. I won’t write the guy’s name or address on this blog because I don’t want it to ever pop up in search results if he’s ever doing some curiousity googling.

One thing I guess I should explain is why I would do this interview when I turned down 60 Minutes several years ago. The reason is that I didn’t really trust 60 Minutes to present a fair picture for online poker as a whole. I said that I would do the 60 Minutes interview if they would devote half of the segment to covering PokerStars and, as I knew they would, they said no. The mainstream media is generally more concerned with showing the problems with an industry. Of course, UltimateBeat will just cover the scandal and probably not talk about the better half of online poker. So why am I do this interview? First, the main difference for me is that it’s a documentary being done by 2p2ers who know online poker. I can be pretty sure that they won’t condemn online poker as a whole. Second, my view in late 2012 is different from my view in 2008. In 2008 I was more concerned with defending the unregulated (except by dummy organizations) online poker climate because I still believed that online poker sites would be smart enough to run their businesses intelligently. I thought that UB/AP was one lone rogue organization and that the Stars, FTPs, etc of the world were fine and deserved to be cut some slack because they were operating in such a difficult climate with regards to processing and such. Well, things have changed. FTP was exposed, unregulated poker in the US is all but dead and it’s basically now just a waiting game to see what sorts of regulated options pop up. Stars proved itself to be the only professionally run poker site that was operating in the US post-UIGEA. Either way, I no longer really care about protecting unregulated online poker’s reputation. Not only was it proven to be unsafe (although, I think it would have been different if there weren’t so many issues with processing) but it’s all but gone. So whatever. I don’t mind if people are scared off from playing on a random offshore site simply because they don’t really exist in any significant manner anymore. At the time, I really believed that Stars/FTP/etc were safe options and that the US gov’t was to blame for forcing them offshore. I never intentionally wanted to protect some site that I thought was doing something illegitimate.

So, other than UltimateBeat, I’m just doing the usual stuff. Lifting, eating, sleeping, etc. I’ve got a few trips booked. First I’m headed to Vegas in about a month. I’ll be there for a week but I’m mainly going for things related to lifting. My friend John Broz (a really good Olympic lifting coach and a great guy) is based there and I’m going to be lifting at his gym for a week along with doing some things related hookgrip.com (my new lifting website that’s launching sooner or later). In addition to the Vegas trip, I’m going out to California in late Nov/early Dec for a lifting competition called the American Open. I’m not nearly good enough at Olympic lifting to compete in it but I’ll go to take pictures and such. I also have a bunch of friends who will be competing so it’ll be fun to support them. And, speaking of lifting competitions, my gym (called CrossFit Center City) is hosting a local Olympic lifting meet on Sept 23rd and they decided to name it “The hookgrip Classic” because I loan the gym a lot of Olympic lifting equipment. Pretty cool! I’ll be in attendance.

I’m also realizing that I have too much stuff. Just too many random possessions that I don’t use. It isn’t like I’m on the level of someone on Hoarders or even close to that but I tend to buy things and try them out and then move on. Sometimes I come across something awesome that I use a lot and I’m really glad that I bought it. But oftentimes I buy something and then realize I don’t actually like it and just stop using it. Just to be clear, I don’t mind doing this. I think it’s worth taking shots with some things because they can improve your life a lot. But at some point it’s time to clear out what I’ve built up and discarded. For instance, I have a $300+ electric razor — but I prefer wet shaving these days. And I have a 20+ hour external Mac battery (used to be called HyperMac, now called HyperJuice) but I really just don’t use it anymore with the battery life on my laptop. And I have MyVu glasses for watching iPod/iPhone video. And a lot more things kind of like that. So I think I need to go on an eBay/craigslist purge over the next several weeks. I’m looking forward to it. I did something similar before I moved from Vegas (I figured there was no point in moving a bunch of stuff that I didn’t really use) and it felt great to cut down on useless (to me) possessions.

I’ve been keeping relatively busy since the Olympics. This past weekend I went to an outdoor retreat sort of thing at a camp called Indian Head in Equinunk, PA. The retreat was being run by a local outdoor adventure company called Trap Door Athletics that was recently started by two of the members from my gym. They asked me to come along and take pictures for them and I agreed because I love action photography, especially outdoors. It would take awhile to write a recap of the weekend because there were a lot of events from Olympic weightlifting to gymnastics to a ropes course to an obstacle course and so on. I didn’t participate in much due to the photography stuff but I did do a little bit of weightlifting on Friday — including a 401lb deadlift in flip flops. It wasn’t a personal record or very tough but it was a personal record in flip flops! Although, except for the excess padding in flip flops, they are not really a bad piece of footwear for deadlifting. Anyway, there are a few hundred pictures (including one of me deadlifting) in this album so you can check it out to get a feel for the weekend. Everyone seems to really like my photography so I’m happy about that.

Speaking of photography, I’ve amassed a nice little lens collection. At this point I have my 70-200mm f/2.8 VR II (my main workhorse), 50mm f/1.8 D (a cheap lens, but good), 85mm f/1.8 D (really good portrait lens) and 17-35mm f/2.8 (one of Nikon’s two top of the line wide angle zooms). I also have the 1.7x teleconverter which I used with my 70-200mm at the Olympics to give myself 340mm of zoom with a max aperture of f/4.8 (using the teleconverter decreases the max aperture of a lens). A few days ago, via Craigslist, I expanded my lens collection in a big way. Literally. I added this beast:

That’s the Nikon 300mm f/2.8 AF-S II lens. It was manufactured from 2001-2004 and has since been replaced by a lens with VR which is basically something that helps to compensate for hand shake while holding the lens. Outside of the VR addition, this lens is essentially on par with the latest lens that’s being sold today for nearly $6000. I got it for way less than that. And given that high-end lenses tend to hold their value VERY well (think 80%+ value retention) I got a very good deal. In fact, the exact lens that I bought recently sold on eBay for $1000 more than I bought it for. I anticipate using the lens relatively rarely. Maybe once a year. I will use it at weightlifting meets where I need a lot of reach and I need f/2.8 in order to get enough light to stop the action. And if I ever get into indoor action photography other than weightlifting, this lens will be incredibly useful. It’s not quite as big/heavy as it looks. It weighs about 5.5lbs and that big thing on the top of it is simply a hood that’s used to prevent dust accumulation and to keep out unwanted light. The reason the hood is so big is because it’s a super telephoto so it essentially doesn’t need to see anything outside of the field of view that the hood restricts it to. It’s akin to cupping your hands over your eyes when looking at something. Anyway, I am pumped to have this lens in my collection. I will still use the 70-200mm for almost all of my shooting though.

Outside of the weekend in Equinunk and the lens, I’ve just been spending a lot of time with the usual lifting stuff. I have made a bit of a dietary change over the last month and it has worked wonders for me. I have had a lot of bad quad pain since early March. Basically March, April, May, June and July. It had gone on for a loooong time. It would get better and get worse in cycles. A few times I thought I’d found something that was helping but in the end it always came back. I made almost zero progress on lifts during that timeframe. In late February I squatted 150kg/330lbs. To date, I still haven’t done more than 151kg. So from the start of my training in essentially early Nov of last year, I progressed up to a 150kg squat (from basically 70kg, LOL) in four months. Then I made zero progress in five months. While I know that progress slows down, 150kg isn’t heavy enough for progress to stop. Especially considering that the squat is the core of my training programming. My lack of progress is basically attributable to me not being able to train properly because my quad kept giving me problems and messing with everything from my form to my ability to recruit the proper muscles during the lift. Anyway, I thought it over and the only thing that I added to my diet around the time I started to have the quad pain was whey protein. In March I decided that it would be a good idea to have a post-workout shake and I had one after pretty much every workout from March through when I left for the Olympics at the end of July. So I let my quad recover over the nine day period that I had off during the Olympics. And when I came back, I just cut out the post-workout shake. I know how silly that sounds given that you need protein to recover. But the fact is that I went from 70kg to 150kg in four months without whey protein and it was worth it for me to see if cutting it out helped. Well, three weeks later I can say that the quad pain has not come back. At all. My squats feel great and I’ve been hitting 140-145kg squats with regularity and they don’t feel that bad. I did a 130kg (286lb) front squat the other day (video) and as you can see it really wasn’t that hard either. So given that I’ve deadlifted 182kg, squatted 145kg and front squatted 130kg all in the last week, I’m feeling better about making some real progress over the next few months. I really want a 182kg squat and 227kg deadlift. If the quad pain doesn’t come back and I stay relatively injury free, I know I can hit those numbers pretty soon. For right now though, I am going to focus on the next “CrossFit Total” workout at my gym which is happening in October (see my post from the last one, in January). At the last one I did 142.5/184/58 (or, in lbs, 315/405/130 = 850). At the time I was SURE that I would hit 1000 for my total at the next one. I’m not so sure about that now after five months without much progress at all. We’ll see how training goes but it will be close. I definitely want 155/195/70 (or 341/430/154 = 925) at least because I feel those numbers are totally within reach. The next 75 pounds will be tough going in two months or less. I will try my best though!

I just got home yesterday from an awesome trip to the Olympics. I had some issues on the way over with United canceling (!!) my flight to London which caused me to miss the first weightlifting event that I was supposed to be at. But once I got to London, everything went very smoothly. I normally post a bunch of pictures on my blog but at this point I have already put up a lot of pictures on Facebook and I don’t really want to spend the time to move them all over and recaption all of them. So I’ve made this album public — it has all of my non-lifting pictures. And for pictures of people actually on the weightlifting platform, you can take a look at the hookgrip facebook page or just go directly to the wall photos album.

Overall, the trip was great. I ended up attending 8 weightlifting sessions, I got to see a couple different areas of London (I’d already been there a few times so I didn’t really need to see the touristy stuff), I met up with a number of friends and I managed to take some awesome pictures. The organization of the actual Olympics was actually very well done. The local organizers had people stationed everywhere to help explain where to go. There weren’t any bad lines. I never had to wait at all to go through security to get into the venues, it seemed like DLR trains were arriving at stations every three minutes or so, the bathroom facilities were never overwhelmed, etc. They handled the Olympic crowds really well!

It was kind of funny to see betting shops all over the place. It really reminded me of the trip that I took to the UK back in May of 2010. It’s funny to think of how different an era that was in the online poker world. Even less than 1.5 years after Black Friday, it’s hard to remember what it was like when you could play poker online in the US. Actually, on that last trip to the UK, I sat in Ray Bitar’s office in the PocketKings headquarters (an FTP subsidiary of some kind). Less than one year later he was indicted in the US and about two years later he flew back to the US to turn himself in (although he’s now out on bail). It’s crazy to think about what has happened since that last trip to the UK. I really need to catch up on the poker legal scene though, I haven’t been following it nearly as closely as I used to.

Now I’m just getting settled back into my day to day life in Philly. I don’t have any other major lifting competitions coming up for awhile. I plan on being at the American Open in late Nov/early Dec. And I will be at the 2013 World Weightlifting Championships but those aren’t until October 2013. I might go to the 2013 US Nationals but I don’t think it’s been scheduled yet so I’m not sure whether I’ll go. Now it’s just time to get working on hookgrip.com and get the actual site launched!

Not a lot has been going on since my last post about my return from Washington on the train. I’ve been doing a lot of lifting as usual. Things have been up and down with lifting. I seem to have a recurring issue with my left quad but, as of late, it has been good and I think I’ve found a way to get it to loosen up. That being said, I thought I’d found a way (very aggressive static stretching, which normally isn’t recommended) as of a few weeks ago but that stopped working so I am trying new methods. Either way, I managed to tie a squat PR today and I was close to setting a new one so I’m relatively happy with my progress as of late. I hope it continues in this direction as I will set a number of PRs in the next few months if I can keep this up. As I stated in my birthday post, I want a 400lb squat so I still have some progress that needs to be made.

Also, in relatively exciting news, I am departing for London in just under 8 days as of the writing of this post! I’m really excited about it. Really really excited. I am going to nine Olympic weightlifting sessions and I have good seats to all of them. It should be incredible. Olympic weightlifting might not look all that interesting to an outsider but it’s absolute riveting sport when you know what’s going on. There is a ton of strategy, gameplay and so on in the sport. All of the athletes will perform two different types of lifts (Snatch, Clean & Jerk) and they get three attempts at each lift with the weights of their choosing. It doesn’t matter if they make them all or miss them all — they get three attempts. Whoever has the highest combined lifts (with their best lift in each one counting) wins the medals. It’s that simple. The total time on stage for all six lifts is well under 5 minutes and the total time actually spent performing the lifts is sub 1 minute. Lots of these lifters have been training since they were 10 or maybe even before. Even if they picked up the sport later in life, 95%+ of them have dedicated almost every day of the last five years to training themselves for the London Olympic Games. That much training condensed down into one minute of make-or-break sporting theater is riveting. In weightlifting, the Olympics are everything. Even winning the World Championship is pretty secondary although it is a big deal. In weightlifting, there are Olympic medals and then there are all other medals. These are the ones that matter and they don’t come around that often. Unlike in swimming where you can win 5 or 10 medals in a single Games, in weightlifting, there are 45 medals available total. For men (8 weight classes) and women (7 weight classes) across all 15 weight classes. Medals in weightlifting are RARE. People dream about them for years and years and everyone remembers the Olympic champions. Being right there for that sort of drama is going to be incredible. So, yea, I’m pumped.

Moving on. Like everyone else I am quite saddened by the Aurora shooting but it really doesn’t make me second guess going to see a movie. I need to rant a little based on all of the people that I’ve seen writing articles about how movie theaters are unsafe and how they are going to wait to watch movies in their homes and so on. I think crazy people are going to do crazy things and you can’t predict when and where they’ll be. In fact, a lot of people think going to London for the Olympics is crazy. It definitely is not the smartest thing that I can do if I want to avoid crazy people. But living life scared is stupid. We’re all going to die it’s just a matter of when. While I theoretically have a lot of time left, there are no guarantees. So I have no reservations about going to see The Dark Knight Rises and I think that anyone who is worried about it really needs to re-evaluate their priorities in life. Actually, speaking of the Aurora shooting, I was in that very complex in June 2011 when I flew into Denver for Nick Van Newkirk’s wedding reception in Oshkosh Nebraska. I didn’t go see a movie but I drove around the town center looking for a place to work. I ended up settling on going to a Panera Bread nearby but it is kind of spooky to have been there about a year before the shooting. I feel terrible for all of the victims, their families and their friends.

Lastly, today Brent Beckley got sentenced to 14 months in prison for his role in the payment processing at Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. He pleaded guilty last December. I actually met Brent a number of times when I was living in Costa Rica and I have to say that I liked the guy a lot. I usually like to think that I can sniff out when someone is possibly not genuine. Brent didn’t indicate the slightest bit of scummy or dishonest thought processes. I know that he worked around the UIGEA but frankly I don’t really blame him for that. The online gaming industry has a stunning number of people who come off as quite shady, scummy, etc. In fact, I would say that a large % of the people that I met in online gaming would fall into that group. And among the people who actually run poker sites not named PokerStars, the number is much higher than in the rest of the online gaming world. But, even at AP/UB, there were a few legit nice guys and I actually believe Brent to be one of those guys. Of course, I can’t know how much Brent knew about the cheating scandals and so on so I can’t say that he was guilt-free in those cases. But I would actually be surprised if he in the slightest bit condoned any of what happened in those cases. Either way, I’m glad that he has some closure in the case and can get on with his life once the prison sentence is served. I’m also glad to know that he can live in the US again.

So over the past few days, I have been visiting family and friends in DC. I took the train down from Philly because it’s by far the easiest and most stress-free option, not to mention the cheapest. Between tolls, gas, parking and so on, it’s actually quite expensive and potentially time consuming to drive. So with $50 fares between Philly and DC on Amtrak, taking the train is quite easy. That is, it’s easy until it’s not.

Last night there was a very severe storm in DC that knocked out power for hundreds of thousands, downed hundreds of trees, spread various debris everywhere, etc. Even the Amazon Web Services data center in Virginia had a bunch of power problems which caused all sorts of outages all over the internet. Amtrak has been really affected as well. Basically all day, trains have been barely running in the DC to Philly corridor. The Amtrak employees claimed to me that a few have gotten through but I’m not sure that I believe it considering that every train on that list at Union Station was listed as delayed with no estimated time of departure. I also saw a bunch of people posting on facebook throughout the day about how their trains were delayed and not leaving.

So with that information in mind, I still went to Union Station for my 8:45pm train even though I didn’t think I had a good shot at getting out of DC tonight. As I expected, I arrived there and the train was listed as delayed. I asked at the information desk and was told that “the train might or might not leave and it might or might not get there, we just don’t know anything about which trains are going to get through”. So armed with that very definitive answer, I proceeded to sit on the floor in a madhouse of a train terminal for 80 minutes with a few more trips to the desk mixed in (no more info). The website did update to say that the train was leaving 1 hour late which gave me some hope. But after it had been 1 hour and 15 minutes, I went and asked and the guy said that website estimates were totally useless and not accurate (at least, not in these conditions). He also said that if the train did leave, it would likely take double the normal travel time and there was also a good chance that it wouldn’t make it all the way to Philly because of how late it was. I asked him about taking the train tomorrow and he said that there would likely be delays all day because of all the trouble today so I would have a much better shot of getting an actual working train if I train late afternoon or evening. That basically did it for me. My brother lives 10 minutes from Union Station in DC so it seemed so much easier/better to just wait the delays out at his place instead of spending who knows how many hours waiting for a train that might or might not make it (if it ever left) and possibly end up needing to spend the night in the Baltimore train station (or area hotel) or whatever. It was already after 10pm at night so, yea, I decided that switching my ticket was the only reasonable option outside of renting a car. I thought about that option briefly but after hearing from three different people about how the streets are chaotic with lights out and so on, I didn’t think it was a good idea. Plus I forgot my iPhone charging cable and my phone was on 15% battery so I didn’t want to risk not having navigation in a city that I don’t know well at all. So that ruled out renting a car.

So, anyway, I went to the Amtrak ticket counter and asked to change my ticket. This is where things got really interesting. The ticket agent was, to say the least, a total nutjob. I’ll do this conversation style:

Her: “what do you want?!?”
Me: “I would like to change my ticket”.
Her: “Gimme your ticket”
Me: [hands her ticket]
Her: “boy you on the next train outta here, why you want another train?”
Me: “I’ve been waiting for 80 minutes and they have no idea if or when the train will be here and it’s getting late, I just want to go tomorrow instead”
Her: “What time tomorrow?”
Me: “The guy at the other desk said sometime at night would be better, what do you have tomorrow evening?”
Her: “What time do you want to go?”
Me: “I don’t know the train schedule, sometime in the evening.”
Her: “You tell me which train”
Me: “Okay, 9PM”
Her: “We don’t have a 9PM train”
Me: “Right, what’s closest to that then?”
Her: “You tell me which train”
Me: “Seriously? You can’t tell me which trains have seats?”
Her: “7pm is sold out”
Me: “Okay, that rules out that. What’s before or after that?”
Her: [grunts and looks up a schedule, then rattles off like four times and says that afternoon trains are booked]
Me: “Okay I will take the one at 9:xx” (I forget the exact time)
Her: “That’s the Acela. It will be an extra $106. Wanna pay with a credit card?”
Me: “Wait I’m not paying extra when it’s Amtrak that’s delayed. Which train can I get on for the same rate?”
Her: “We don’t do that for nobody. You gotta pay the difference. Nobody ride the Acela for free.”
Me: “I’ve been put on other trains before for no charge in the difference. I don’t need to be on the Acela, just put me on a train tomorrow and I’m fine with it.”
Her: “We ain’t never done that for nobody ever. You gotta talk to a manager. Go to 14.”
[I walk away to go talk to the manager and she's still ranting on about how "that boy want to go on the Acela for free, ain't no one go on the Acela for free, ain't nobody ever, that boy crazy, etc"]

I waited in line for a manager for about a minute at which point the manager asked me what I was doing over there (he was helping the one person in front of me) and I said that I had been sent down there to get a ticket changed. He was like, tickets changes are over there and gestured me back over to the first lady. I explained that she was the one who sent me down there to him in the first place. So he yelled down to her something like “did you send someone down here for a ticket change??” and she yelled back “yea that boy want to ride the acela for free!” at which point I started to lose my cool and I talked over her yelling (I was a lot closer to the manager so he could hear me better) and strongly said “that is NOT even close to what I said, I said that I want to get a ticket change to any train tomorrow with no fare difference”. Of course she yelled that in front of like 15-20 people standing in line but frankly at that point I didn’t care at all. So he told me to go talk to the woman next to the original agent that I was talking to. The conversation consisted of “which train do you want” “something like 8 or 9 PM” “I can put you on the 8:45″ “sounds good” “[hands me new ticket]“.

With that, my wonderful 90 minute experience at Union Station ended for the evening. I look forward to an eventful train attempt tomorrow. I’m going to try to get on an earlier train but I think it’s going to be tough at best given all of the delays today.