Run to Win

Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner is a book that I picked up on a whim a few weeks ago while browsing through a bookstore. The lady and I were waiting to meet some friends down the block and it seemed like a good place to get out of the rain.

I loved this book. It was a lot of fun to read. I was constantly pausing my reading to read a passage to my girlfriend, which usually elicited one of two responses. “That guy is crazy” was the most popular, but there was quite a few “You better not think of ever doing that, honey” sprinkled in too.
(Click here to continue reading…)

I am beginning to test layout ideas for the website. Obviously, it is in a very rough state at this point, and it is not going to be a huge departure from normal. I only have a few goals I want to flesh out, and then I am going to adapt a skin for the blog to be encompassed by it, and I will leave it be until I actually have some content for it.

The general idea will be for a logo to show in the top left, and an ad or picture to show in the top right. The navigation will then go below those. There will be a footer the full width at the bottom of the screen.

The main content will either have a sidebar on the left or right that is a fixed width, and then a variable width content window that will work with most web browser sizes dynamically. I may limit how wide it can grow, but I probably will not. I may make a choice for where the sidebar goes, or I may let the user decide in their profile. The side bar will have dynamic content or extra navigation based upon what area of the site you are in. If I get fancy, I may make the side bar a constant on the side or just have the content area scrollable, but I am not sure yet if I will get that fancy and that can wait until after I have something useful.

The general exercise here is to see what sort of constraints I will have, and to start getting something solid. I am still waiting on a friend to provide the logo for me. The DB design is beginning to get fleshed out, but I want to make a few mock up pages before I set anything in stone so that I can help solidify my thinking.

The Greater Portland YMCA Back Bay 5k was Friday night. Erin and I ran down to the start as our warmup, and then hobbled our way through the race. The weather (somewhat) cooperated; for a change it was not raining. There are rumors that this afternoon the sun even shone for a few minutes at a time. I do not believe them, though; my windowless office speaks otherwise.

Obviously, running only 2 days a week as I have been, I did not do as well as I did last year. Last year I came in 4th place, and my teammate that I was trying to beat won the whole thing. This year, the competition was much better, my time was much slower, and the only people on my team that were running were Erin and myself. A few of our teammates were working the finish line, and one of them forgot about the race and had just finished her run when her son had her drive him over. He beat me by not quite 2 and a half minutes.

I came in 15th overall this year, 4 outta 20 for the open division. I ran a five and a half minute, two six minutes, and a half a minute splits for an 18:09 or 18:10 or so. I am about to start upping my mileage, so my times should start dropping. Oh well, I dropped a minute off of my last race.

Having finished one phase of my training, the question is whether I should take a little time off before starting the next phase. Two weeks of low-weight, high rep total body workouts, 3 weeks of mid-range reps split into upper/lower (although I skimped on the lower body workouts since I am still running and do not want to hurt myself), and now I have 4 weeks of mixed workouts with higher weights and lower reps. The first two weeks were 18-20 reps per set done in a 12 exercise circuit. These past three weeks were 8-12 exercises per set done as straight sets. The next month will be 4-6 reps per set.

The problem comes where I want to increase my running mileage. My coach suggests that I sneak the runs in before I begin my lifting, but I am already getting up at 5:30 to work out every morning and I am not so sure I want to get up any earlier.

I am going to continue to swim twice a week. This morning is my day when I usually just swim, but I am thinking of running the YMCA Back Bay 5k this evening. I will be out of town this weekend, including Monday.

I am undecided if I am going to go to the gym when I get home on Monday or if I will just wait until Tuesday (or even Wednesday) and take a little rest first. I will probably play it by ear after the weekend.

Man, this weather has been awful. May has been an average month in terms of inches of rainfall, but from mid-april through until this week, it has only rained on Wednesdays and weekends. This past weekend it started to rain, and it is not supposed to stop for at least another week. I am getting moldy here! What’s going on?

I really hope that the summer makes up for it. It did nothing but rain and be chill last summer.

Some things that you find are just too cool. While reading the latest issue of “Make Magazine” (from O’Reilly Press), I saw an article about a cockroach powered robot. The cockroach has no brain, but is basically controlled a bunch of nerve cells throughout its body. (They can live and function without their heads until they starve to death some days later.) The cockroach acts as the CPU in a robot. It is velcroed onto a ping pong ball which is acts like a trackball or mouse. Instead of horizontal and vertical axes, however, it uses left and right axes. As the cockroach moves, the robot moves. When it gets near something (such as a wall), a light diode will turn on which will cause the cockroach to go in a different direction and allow it to avoid running into things.

The project is called “Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” and further details and plenty of pictures can be found on their website.

I got an email from the RIT Alumni Association that had a drawing of Ritchie the (cartoon) tiger holding a thermometer that denotes the number of donations that the school has gotten this year. For personal reasons, I found this picture extremely amusing, so I forwarded it along to a friend of mine that I thought would appreciate it. He suggested that it looked like the work of a former teammate of ours, so I did a search on the internet to see if I could find his email address. I found his web site instead. He has some really good stuff, some of which I had seen before and some of which I had not.

One of the galleries that he had was of the RIT Coast to Coast Run, or rather, of the sketch book that he kept on the run. I was jealous as hell that I could not participate with them, and followed the blog that they had up very closely the entire trip (I could not find a copy of it that is still online, sorry). It was nice to see everything from a new perspective, and I am looking forward to looking through it close enough to be able to read all of his comments in the margins.

And to think, if I had run the Coast to Coast with my old team, I might not have pulled a muscle in San Antonio.

Mid-day workouts are great. You do not have to get up at 5:30 in the morning in order to have time before work to get it done. You do not have to delay dinner until 8 or 9 o’clock at night due to working out after work. You get the warmest part of the day to work out in (most of the time).

Of course, not everything is great about mid-day workouts. You do not get as long to do the workout. You will most likely need to spend half of the time that you do have in various states of changing, showering, or traveling to/from a place that you can do the workout.

That said, I like doing the 20-30 minute workouts in the middle the day whenever I can. The gym that I go to is about 3 or 4 minutes by car from where I work, and the community pool is about 2 minutes away. That gives me time for a 4 or 5 mile run or a half hour swim. Most of my weight lifting workouts can not really be done in the time available, but when I do do them at lunch time the crowds are much sparser than in the morning or after work. They get so bad after work that I will very rarely bother, unless I happen to work late and planned ahead for it.

I tried my first mid-day swim today. I had been going at 6:00 or 6:20ish in the mornings that I swam, and the crowd has not been too bad. A few more people than there were today at lunch time. I am told by both groups that it is busier than usual, so maybe that is just the season. I felt good for having had the extra few hours of moving around before swimming. I also had a few hours of breakfast/snacking in me, which I am sure was one of the reasons that I felt so good while swimming. On Wednesday I was a bit tired.

The only real problem was that my “sleeping in” until 6:30 did not really work because the cat figured that I was supposed to be getting up at my normal time an hour earlier (despite my feeding her at 4:00 this morning). I finally got her to settle down at about 6:25, and then I dozed off until a quarter to seven. Not the end of the world.