If you run the same short segment over and over and over again you become intimately familiar with every foot and every view and every feature. I've covered this loop hundreds and hundreds of times. It is exactly 750 metres long. I've taken as little as 3 minutes to run around it and as long as 5. I have dodged wayward baseballs, leashes, dogs attached to leashes, dogs not attached to leashes, people, bicycles, lumps of poop, puddles, lakes, glaciers, front-end loaders, vehicles that are not supposed to ever be there in the first place, rocks, cracks, holes, the ever present crowd waiting at either of two bus stops. There is the young high school boy who sits in the bus stop with his feet up, the older woman who has a different wig for each day, the old guy and his son from the retirement 'villa' adjacent to the park, Penny who walks her Newfoundlander, Freddy who walks his German Shepherd, the guy who takes his dogs into the ball field and runs round and round and round. Some people have stopped showing up, maybe they moved, maybe they bought a car, who knows. Sometimes someone shows up once and never again. The news boxes have a different front page each day, the front-end loader clears ice left outside the arena every Thursday, the garbage trucks do their pickups for the arena twice a week. Sometimes the guy driving the truck pulls in, pulls out a paper, and spends an hour reading it. The maintenance guy for the arena walks his dog every morning. The crossing guard for the school arrives at 8, but I'm usually done by then.
And they all watch me.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Monday, March 27, 2006
The Boston Taper
Yesterday I ran a 30k race as part of my last long run before Boston. I ran this race during my first 20 miler towards Mississuaga last spring, raced it fairly hard, and that worked out well for me. Doing it as my last long run this year, I dunno. The weather was stunning and I did manage to keep myself reigned in enough that at least I didn't go anywhere near my previous finish times. I did 2 slow miles before it started, ran the race just a bit slower than marathon pace, then another 2 1/2 slow miles immediately afterwards. I was all over the wall in the cooldown jog. Don't ask me why but when I bonk I get a big bright spot that shows up in the middle of my vision, and it was glowing pretty good at the end of it all. But I was upright and not suffering badly from a running perspective.
Now comes taper. Not sure how to handle this week. I'll try a little jaunt tomorrow and see how my legs are. I had a blister on my baby toe that I didn't notice until late last night when I smashed it against the corner of our sofa. Ideally this week, I go easy for a couple of days, get 8-10 miles in on Thursday and scrape up a 2 hour run on Sunday. If I'm hurting I'll just have to cut it all back until I'm strong again, hopefully no later than this time next week. My only real concern is that yesteday's runs only had me on my feet for 3:15 when I really wanted to be out there around 3:25. Odd for a race but I'd rather have finished 10 minutes slower than I did. On the other hand I never sat down or stood still between arriving at the race site at 8 am until I got back in my car at almost 1, maybe that will help.
After all this I sure hope there's 26 good miles in these skinny little legs of mine.
Now comes taper. Not sure how to handle this week. I'll try a little jaunt tomorrow and see how my legs are. I had a blister on my baby toe that I didn't notice until late last night when I smashed it against the corner of our sofa. Ideally this week, I go easy for a couple of days, get 8-10 miles in on Thursday and scrape up a 2 hour run on Sunday. If I'm hurting I'll just have to cut it all back until I'm strong again, hopefully no later than this time next week. My only real concern is that yesteday's runs only had me on my feet for 3:15 when I really wanted to be out there around 3:25. Odd for a race but I'd rather have finished 10 minutes slower than I did. On the other hand I never sat down or stood still between arriving at the race site at 8 am until I got back in my car at almost 1, maybe that will help.
After all this I sure hope there's 26 good miles in these skinny little legs of mine.
Friday, March 17, 2006
Friday, March 03, 2006
And now for something completely different
Kevin Beck calls it the 'World's most earnest parody site'. Others are even less kind. For the person that stumbles onto Richard Gibben's running site, whether accidentally or from his force feeding of every running discussion board known to man, we hope they've done their homework.
My first experience with him was somewhere in Coolrunning where a reference was made to some nonsensical study being presented and one of the posters quickly recognized the info coming from Sir Richard and then preceeded to give us the quick rundown. It seems Richard is a runner of some experience but never really took it seriously (he sounds like an A type personality) until one day he decided that he would go out and kick the running world's butt in a concerted motion as he mowed them down in his path. No doubt he bought a gob of runner literature, read it all and decided to pound out a million miles a week, cuz somewhere it mentioned all top runners do this, and warning signs of imminent injury be damned proceeded to beat his knees and legs into useless props with a sole remaining purpose of keeping his ass from touching the ground. I don't think he races anymore, given the last result I saw from him likely had him finishing just behind Susie Q Austin's butt as she celebrated her 30 minute 5k victory shortly before the finish line was dismantled.
The whole thing seems to have left him rather disgruntled with the anyone capable of maintaining a 10 minute a mile pace for more than 10 minutes. Since surely his interpretation of training methodologies couldn't possibly have been erroneous,the fault MUST lie with the likes of Lydiard and Vigil and other top coaches. He's therefore decided to declare war on what he calls 'conventional training wisdom' and show the world that there is better path to success than hard work and dedication. Now we're not quite sure what 'conventional training wisdom' is since no two people train the same but let's not interfere with a good battle.
Somewhere in my exchanges with him on CR, he decided he didn't like my attitude (one of his favorite methods of evasion is to cry 'Attack! Attack!', declare you the latest member of his sh¡t list, and you'll never get to call his bluff again). So, to allow me to continue my hobby, I 'cleverly' signed onto his own discussion board as 'okrunner' (hee hee....I sure pulled the wool over HIS eyes) so I can get my share of shitsandgiggles when debugging ASP script becomes tedious.
His global contribution to the running world, in terms of advice, is to run 3 days a week...one interval workout, on tempo run (which he likes to call a 'power run') and a long run...and no more, and a top runner you shall surely soon be. This is remarkably like the FIRST marathon training plan published by the Furman Institute, which Sir R seemed to take quite strongly to as of late, and I have a feeling FIRST rather influenced this groundbreaking work of his. Anyway, it's easy enough to disect what comes off his fingertips into typed words and show him how his logic processing unit seems to have a short or two somewhere, but you do have to step around the dozen or so unrelated responses he usually provides to try and muddle whatever the original point was being made. But stick with it, I've learned to keep it focused for him and have even managed to get him to admit he makes things up (see his disc. brd. thread on 'FIRST Training Research Update'), but I have be oh so careful in my responses lest my alias gets bunkied up with my CR ID on his list.
I'm not sure what quite to make of him. I don't know if he's making the whole thing up and laughing hysterically at our own amusement of his brilliant work, or if he actually believes what he's peddling. Either way, like a dog that you can get to chase his tail, it's always fun to poke a stick at him now and again. Beck may have it right.
My first experience with him was somewhere in Coolrunning where a reference was made to some nonsensical study being presented and one of the posters quickly recognized the info coming from Sir Richard and then preceeded to give us the quick rundown. It seems Richard is a runner of some experience but never really took it seriously (he sounds like an A type personality) until one day he decided that he would go out and kick the running world's butt in a concerted motion as he mowed them down in his path. No doubt he bought a gob of runner literature, read it all and decided to pound out a million miles a week, cuz somewhere it mentioned all top runners do this, and warning signs of imminent injury be damned proceeded to beat his knees and legs into useless props with a sole remaining purpose of keeping his ass from touching the ground. I don't think he races anymore, given the last result I saw from him likely had him finishing just behind Susie Q Austin's butt as she celebrated her 30 minute 5k victory shortly before the finish line was dismantled.
The whole thing seems to have left him rather disgruntled with the anyone capable of maintaining a 10 minute a mile pace for more than 10 minutes. Since surely his interpretation of training methodologies couldn't possibly have been erroneous,the fault MUST lie with the likes of Lydiard and Vigil and other top coaches. He's therefore decided to declare war on what he calls 'conventional training wisdom' and show the world that there is better path to success than hard work and dedication. Now we're not quite sure what 'conventional training wisdom' is since no two people train the same but let's not interfere with a good battle.
Somewhere in my exchanges with him on CR, he decided he didn't like my attitude (one of his favorite methods of evasion is to cry 'Attack! Attack!', declare you the latest member of his sh¡t list, and you'll never get to call his bluff again). So, to allow me to continue my hobby, I 'cleverly' signed onto his own discussion board as 'okrunner' (hee hee....I sure pulled the wool over HIS eyes) so I can get my share of shitsandgiggles when debugging ASP script becomes tedious.
His global contribution to the running world, in terms of advice, is to run 3 days a week...one interval workout, on tempo run (which he likes to call a 'power run') and a long run...and no more, and a top runner you shall surely soon be. This is remarkably like the FIRST marathon training plan published by the Furman Institute, which Sir R seemed to take quite strongly to as of late, and I have a feeling FIRST rather influenced this groundbreaking work of his. Anyway, it's easy enough to disect what comes off his fingertips into typed words and show him how his logic processing unit seems to have a short or two somewhere, but you do have to step around the dozen or so unrelated responses he usually provides to try and muddle whatever the original point was being made. But stick with it, I've learned to keep it focused for him and have even managed to get him to admit he makes things up (see his disc. brd. thread on 'FIRST Training Research Update'), but I have be oh so careful in my responses lest my alias gets bunkied up with my CR ID on his list.
I'm not sure what quite to make of him. I don't know if he's making the whole thing up and laughing hysterically at our own amusement of his brilliant work, or if he actually believes what he's peddling. Either way, like a dog that you can get to chase his tail, it's always fun to poke a stick at him now and again. Beck may have it right.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
The Science Fair
Having at one time been young and infinitely naive and now being old and finitely capacitive I have a tendency to try to pass on the legacy of my experience to my oldest son. Unfortunately I have almost no ability to consolidate the events that allowed me to learn from what I now perceive as being paths to disaster. I've always had great confidence in myself to stand about 6 inches over the horizon and see what's coming, what it might do to me (or for me) and how best to handle it. For some reason I just can't seem to transfer that same level of confidence to my son. Maybe if I could see the world in his eyes I might realize he has the same talent, or maybe all I'll see is video game images a la first person viewpoint.
His big task in school the last several weeks has been to research, prototype and document an item ultimately to be included in his HS's science fair. His original plan involved levels of water in various size hoses and tubes to see what they would do. After he and I going through the plan we decided it didn't make a lot of sense (fill the various size tubes with water and measure pressure at the bottom) and instead decided to persue demonstrating how force can be applied to water in tubes, essentially hydraulics.
Now, understand my son isn't a big believer in providing feedback nor is he stellar in the arena of initiative. But once he puts his mind on something he can certainly persue it to the end even if that end is completely in the wrong direction or 100 yards beyond the edge of a cliff. He'll still be twiddling while approaching terminal velocity, oblivious to the upward motion of all around him and the inevitable meeting with the ground below. This takes a certain amount of reigning, as I explained to him one time to always make sure that what you're trying to accomplish is attainable (even if you're the only one who believes it is).
We built a prototype of a piston driven hydraulic setup. The plans became modified a dozen times over, going from a ballast supplied system (which, after review, we realized simply wouldn't do anything at all) to a closed system. The prototype had two upward tubes (simple ABS plumbing parts) of different diameters and a 'sealed' piston to compress the hydraulic fluid (water in this case) and record the effects on the other piston. Unfortunately we couldn't get the pistons to 'seal' no matter how hard we tried. We reviewed and revised the designs, added thick lubricants to help reinforce the seal...nada. Weeks went by and we were getting to crunch time. Classmates had theirs nearly done, documented, tidied up, and there's my son with little to show except a pair of leaky tubes.
So, on advice from his teacher, we changed the whole setup to use prefabed pistons (syringes) and we devised a sealed system (aquarium air-line tubing and connectors) and managed to form a sealed hydraulic lift system using one very narrow syringe as the activator and a large diameter one for the lifter. Then over a period of three nights built a display setup and stands to aid in measuring (it's very difficult to balance weights on the tiny end of an insulin syringe), and also managed to throw together a practical application display where we put 3 syringes together to mock up a disk braking system. He's a bit depressed that the original work had to be abandoned, he so wanted his nifty looking tubes and pipes and steel-rod pistons to work, but we can't persue what simply will likely end in failure. I'm hoping he's accepting of the new design and it seems he and his classmates had great fun pressing the various pistons and watching what happens. Today he's got a ton of work trying to get measurements and numbers and I have to just hope it all works out without being there to offer guidance.
And I reflect back on my own venture into the Science Fair arena. Me and a friend were trying to build a very basic digital logic system (this was before the days of PC's and it was nothing more than two switches and some lights) and a comparable analog system (although this failed miserably as we had no means of being able to build an output display). We had literally no help from our parents and teachers, persued blindly and abandoned to somehow have something to show, and stood with a rather ratty looking display that mimiced someone having emptied a box of garage junk onto the floor and this is how it fell together. Yet, we won a prize (only because there were less entrants at the fair then there were prizes to be handed out) and came away feeling that we somehow managed to accomplish something worthwhile.
I don't know which outcome my son would rather have, whether the tried and failed original, or the functional 'plan 2'. But I've got at least one more late evening on this one as he has to put together an information display and we cross our fingers hoping it has at least something to do with whatever his original intent was.
His big task in school the last several weeks has been to research, prototype and document an item ultimately to be included in his HS's science fair. His original plan involved levels of water in various size hoses and tubes to see what they would do. After he and I going through the plan we decided it didn't make a lot of sense (fill the various size tubes with water and measure pressure at the bottom) and instead decided to persue demonstrating how force can be applied to water in tubes, essentially hydraulics.
Now, understand my son isn't a big believer in providing feedback nor is he stellar in the arena of initiative. But once he puts his mind on something he can certainly persue it to the end even if that end is completely in the wrong direction or 100 yards beyond the edge of a cliff. He'll still be twiddling while approaching terminal velocity, oblivious to the upward motion of all around him and the inevitable meeting with the ground below. This takes a certain amount of reigning, as I explained to him one time to always make sure that what you're trying to accomplish is attainable (even if you're the only one who believes it is).
We built a prototype of a piston driven hydraulic setup. The plans became modified a dozen times over, going from a ballast supplied system (which, after review, we realized simply wouldn't do anything at all) to a closed system. The prototype had two upward tubes (simple ABS plumbing parts) of different diameters and a 'sealed' piston to compress the hydraulic fluid (water in this case) and record the effects on the other piston. Unfortunately we couldn't get the pistons to 'seal' no matter how hard we tried. We reviewed and revised the designs, added thick lubricants to help reinforce the seal...nada. Weeks went by and we were getting to crunch time. Classmates had theirs nearly done, documented, tidied up, and there's my son with little to show except a pair of leaky tubes.
So, on advice from his teacher, we changed the whole setup to use prefabed pistons (syringes) and we devised a sealed system (aquarium air-line tubing and connectors) and managed to form a sealed hydraulic lift system using one very narrow syringe as the activator and a large diameter one for the lifter. Then over a period of three nights built a display setup and stands to aid in measuring (it's very difficult to balance weights on the tiny end of an insulin syringe), and also managed to throw together a practical application display where we put 3 syringes together to mock up a disk braking system. He's a bit depressed that the original work had to be abandoned, he so wanted his nifty looking tubes and pipes and steel-rod pistons to work, but we can't persue what simply will likely end in failure. I'm hoping he's accepting of the new design and it seems he and his classmates had great fun pressing the various pistons and watching what happens. Today he's got a ton of work trying to get measurements and numbers and I have to just hope it all works out without being there to offer guidance.
And I reflect back on my own venture into the Science Fair arena. Me and a friend were trying to build a very basic digital logic system (this was before the days of PC's and it was nothing more than two switches and some lights) and a comparable analog system (although this failed miserably as we had no means of being able to build an output display). We had literally no help from our parents and teachers, persued blindly and abandoned to somehow have something to show, and stood with a rather ratty looking display that mimiced someone having emptied a box of garage junk onto the floor and this is how it fell together. Yet, we won a prize (only because there were less entrants at the fair then there were prizes to be handed out) and came away feeling that we somehow managed to accomplish something worthwhile.
I don't know which outcome my son would rather have, whether the tried and failed original, or the functional 'plan 2'. But I've got at least one more late evening on this one as he has to put together an information display and we cross our fingers hoping it has at least something to do with whatever his original intent was.
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