Adventures in Onionism

I'm pretty happy that I managed to get in 60.4 this week. Added bonus: I didn't make too much of a fool of myself in the first week of class (I think). I didn't have time for anything super long either day of the weekend because gf was visiting and we went to NYC. Somehow I managed to wake up an hour before everyone else and ran around Upper Manhattan for 11 miles, however. I enjoyed the river trails (paved bike paths, though on the Harlem River side, I chose poorly and got stuck on an ugly narrow stretch between traffic and the river, and it seems likely that there are much nicer paths just on the other side of the road up a hill. I also managed to get in a fast 10K with the store's run club on Thursday and 9 with a new local running partner on Friday.

Do we ever really know anything for sure? Certainly not the best running form . (More NYT Well Blog from Gretchen Reynolds on studies of shoeless Kenyan running form)

65.9 miles for the week. Basically 6 every weekday morning, 15 yesterday, and 19 today. Yesterday I followed Crum Creek north further than I ever have before, skirting some water treatment facility land and paralleling the creek on pavement for a mile or two on the aptly named Crum Creek road before getting back in the woods. There are definitely no trails that far along it, but hopefully with better weather someday I'll just keep going in/along the creek until Springton Reservoir and be able to connect without much more than a few miles of pavement to Ridley Creek State Park. RCSP is where MRB and I ran today (see below). I don't know. It's nice and all, and the weather was gorgeous, but we came close to maxing out the park in one day, and the trails don't make any sort of natural topographic sense, in that they don't follow obvious ridges or streams. If the trails weren't color coded and well blazed, you'd basically have no idea where you were. Wissahick...

Or rather, make no difference. I was looking for bad observational statistics articles to share with my stats class which starts next week, and accidentally found stuff that's apparently good: RCTs about shoes . Motion control shoes may control motion, but they may injure you, or at least not help you. N=81 said they injured women, N=~1300 said they make no significant difference.

63.2 miles for the week. A nice 15 with MRB in Philly today (the standard Kelly Drive loop) and 13 yesterday trying to see if I could follow Crum Creek from my house to the Delaware River all on petroleum pipelines and interstate underpasses (almost, but not quite). Obviously I've run more than that in a single day on almost a dozen occasions, but I'm not the world's most consistent trainer. So if you don't count race miles, or random " hey, let's run from campus to Mt. Diablo and back " runs, I may never have trained more than that. Definitely not on a regular basis, and definitely not since I got my Garmin watch last May to keep track of it all for me. I mean, maybe summer of '06 training for my first 100, or maybe fall '05 before my PR at the St. George Marathon, but I'm not sure. Although most of Runner's World 's training plans now cost money to access, I was luck enough to download a bunch in fall '11 when I thought I might ...

60 some-odd years ago my grandparents built a cabin in the Muskoka region of Ontario. I went there as a kid a bunch of times, but I hadn't been since 1995. Scratch that, my sister and I went in 2001. So it hadn't been as long as I thought, but I'd never been in winter, so I took a few days and went before I really have to buckle down to get ready for the coming semester. The view across the lake George initially didn't like the weather, but loved playing in the snow on the lake The interior I totally overestimated how cold it would be. It's only at 45 or so degrees latitude, while a bunch of the US goes to 49. There also wasn't as much snow as I expected; Alaska this is not. But the lakes do freeze, which I guess is what matters. The one sunny morning I guess woodpeckers don't migrate. My catharsis   George was underwhelmed with Niagara Falls on the return drive. I assume I stopped here a...

I've never seen George so excited about a stick before. Wait. It's a deer leg. No wonder. Greetings from a donut shop in Huntsville Ontario with wifi. I need better fitting x-country ski boots. Otherwise, splitting firewood in freezing temps is every bit as awesome as I imagined, though I don't know why in heaven's name the cabin needs 22(!) patio chairs. I think there's a show on cable about this sort of thing.