This Week Last Year: Vermont, Complete Running, and Lance

There were basically three topics on my mind this week last year. The Vermont City Marathon, the Complete Running website, and Lance Armstrong.

• I ran the Vermont City Marathon in Burlington over Memorial Day weekend last year. I had a lot of fun. You can read about the Vermont City course, as well as take a look at all of my splits for the race. I also wrote up a summary review about the marathon and how it was organized.
• At this point in the season last year, I still thought that I was going to be running two marathons two weeks apart in the Autumn. As such, I ran in the Back Cove 5k on Wednesday night despite having run a marathon on the previous Sunday. The race series has a website this year:
• The Complete Running website had a few ups and downs; their “running blog recents” functionality was a huge resource hog that wound up costing more than it was worth. Despite upgrades, they just didn’t have the horsepower to keep the service up. Eventually, the entire site went away to be replaced by the Complete Running Network, and has recently replaced the running blog recents functionality with an RSS feed handled by a third party.
• In doping news, Lance Armstrong was exhonerated and an impartial judge found that not only was there no evidence that he had cheated but that the entire thing had not been handled in a professional or legal manner. Lance also took Bode Miller and Dick Pound to task in Men’s Journal. He predicted in the article that the witch hunt wouldn’t stop, and he was right.