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Showing posts from February, 2013

Run Log: Feb 18-24, 50-mile PR

86.9 miles for the week. I ran all 7 days, if you count the mostly walking to Target that one day. I ran NJ Trail Series' Febapple 50-Miler yesterday. (They run the same course called the Mayapple in May, hence February's name.) As I mentioned here earlier, I was hoping to PR and perhaps go below 9 hours. In the end I finished in sixth place in 9:05. Only twenty people or so finished the 50 miler, with another twenty of those who started dropping down to the lower distance races. When I started the race I felt pretty good, so as I am wont to do, I made my goal a little faster, hoping to maintain constant 10-minute-mile pace and finish in 8:20. I managed to do that fine for the first 25 or so, but my stomach didn't want any more glucose after five Gu gels, and I started getting pretty tired. This seems pretty similar to what happened at Wasatch, where I puked after 25 miles. I'm pretty sure I would have done the same yesterday if I'd forced the issue. I'd l...

Screw Shoes

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Screw like a noun, not a verb. It's icey out there.

Climate Rally

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Swarthmore students arranged a couple buses to go to the 350.org /Sierra Club/Hip-Hop Caucus rally against the Keystone XL pipeline , so I went along for the ride. It was extremely cold, but I made a witty sign and my sister and niece came out, and we had a great time (4 hours seems like the appropriate amount of time for me to spend with my family). Here are some pictures: Why that exact number, I don't know. This is probably my favorite picture. George's hounddog brother from another mother! People really came from all over. I haven't heard an NPS estimate of how many people came, but organizer self-estimates were between 35 and 50K. Given the high temps around freezing, with a wicked wind coming off the tidal basin, I think that's pretty great. Word. E & N with my sign Crazy guy unaffiliated with the rally The Lorax Trying to get a shot of the size of the crowd Lots of polar bears in attendance, this one had the mos...

Run Log: February 11-17

Ugh. I only ran 52.6 this week. I missed Monday by flying back from SF, and Sunday by going to the climate change rally in DC. My hamstrings were sore and I was limping a little walking around the hallways at school Tuesday and Wednesday, but I ran 10 on Thursday and felt great, running sub-9's. Then alum Jonathan Franzen spoke on campus, and he was great. But Saturday I felt like garbage and was really slow. I knew I didn't have it in me to run a bunch of loops in Crum, so I tried to run an out and back along a road route (it's much easier to force myself to get home from far away then it is to run another loop when I'm at my front door), but I sucked at following the signs for the supposedly bicycle safe route from my house to Philly, and there weren't always sidewalks, so it wasn't George's favorite. I still managed a slow 15. I think I might be getting a cold. Suboptimal for both school and running my 50-miler this weekend. I'm also listening...

Run Log: Februrary 4-10, 50K PR

Mileage was low this week, with zeroes on Monday, Friday, and Saturday. I would like to have two of those three back, but far more importantly, I ran my first race of the year on Sunday: Coastal Trail Runs' Golden Gate 50K . As I previously mentioned, I was hoping to break 5 hours. 30K and 50K runners started together, so I made sure to be close to the front because I didn't want to be part of a traffic jam on the single file staircase about a mile in. Unfortunately I was a little bit thrown off by my Garmin not booting correctly. Most times that I charge it, the first time I use it after that, it takes 10 minutes or so to boot correctly and even start looking for the satellites. Having run into this before, I turned the watch on a solid half-hour before the race started, and to my surprise, everything seemed fine. So I turned it off to save batteries, and then five minutes before the start when I turned it on again, it decided not to like me. It kicked in 6 minutes into the ra...

Berkeley

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Computer Boringness, Classes

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Bought a new Western Digital 750 GB hard drive for my laptop, and an enclosure for the original 160GB drive, which I'll now use as a Time Machine backup for my Swat Macbook Pro. (I have 3 laptops, I now have 3 back-ups). By dint of my Swat machine not having an insane amount of music on it, 160GB will be plenty of space to back up all the research I could ever imagine myself doing. I loaded the new 750GB drive with my latest Time Machine backup, and aside from the fact that TM doesn't recognize that this computer is the same as the one it was two hours ago and is now doing a backup from scratch that will take hours and eat up a ton of space, everything is fine. (This is apparently avoidable with a few terminal commands , but it seems like a pain and it's really no big deal.) Dropbox and Google Drive also didn't recognize that the computer is the same, but that was as simple as logging in again. In conclusion, I'll never again have to bother deleting movies and T...

Run Log January 28-February 3

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70.1 miles for the week. Low mileage Monday and Tuesday thanks to icy roads, but 10 and 13 on Wednesday and Friday (non-teaching days), and 17 and 18 yesterday and today. Yesterday I just ran in Crum, but a local running partner and I met up halfway through, so it basically felt like I'd gotten reinforcements, and doing loops enough times to get my mileage was no problem. (It's usually a little boring to run enough loops in Crum to get more than 10 miles.) Today I had a friend in Philly with me for just the start, but it was pretty easy to get the mileage since I was doing an out and back and wanted to get to the Wissahickon, since I'd never connected Kelly to the park before.   I'm running a 50K next Sunday in the Marin Headlands while gf and Gazelle run a half marathon. I'm going to be pretty upset if I don't break 5 hours. There's a 4% climbing grade, which is pretty nuts, but I think it's equally nuts that I have yet to break 5 hours. 31 9:40's...

Time Machine

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I just saw the play Assistance at the Wilma Theater courtesy of my stage-manager-with-connections housemate. I dug it. Over-the-top annoying comedy in the first scene or two, but then it settled down a bit, and there was great chemistry between the leads. Anyway, Apple's Time Machine is weird. It's on the mind because gf's hard drive crashed last weekend when she was visiting. And somebody asked me for some grad school materials, which I realized are no longer on my machine thanks to my reformatting in Kenya that one time . So I go into Time Machine to look for them, and post-Kenya backups are there and look fine, but pre-reformat ones look like this--Damn! The shift-apple-4 screen grab doesn't work inside Time Machine, so here's a pic from my phone: Anyway, the point is that they're "there" but they're black or transparent and you can't click on them. If you look directly on the drive, they're there. Weirdly, if you search in the Fi...