The bright side of a Moon
Oh, yeah, running schedule for this week. Um… OK, here:
After my seven miles yesterday, I woke up this morning with a sore left ankle and my normally-sore right heel. Probably not good. Tried my stretches, walked up to the Skybox to get breakfast, both were still sore. Probably should have iced them both but didn’t.
The plan called for hills today, as part of my speedwork. Finished breakfast around 10 AM, figured I’d go home and clean up the house a bit, then head out for a run around noon, come back and find a large delicious lunch close by.
I got caught up in the cleaning, though; took my bottles back to the store for the deposit, bundled up my newspaper for recycling, vacuumed, did the dishes that were stacked up in the sink, laundry, rolled up my loose change. The whole shebang. Even gave Smacky his flea treatment.
So there it was, nearly 3 PM, and I hadn’t had any lunch and still hadn’t run. I was getting hungry. Breakfast was big but not that big, to tide me over for 5 hours plus a grueling hill workout.
…but I decided it would have to do. I stuck with my plan. I may come to regret it later but for now it’s behind me. I did make one small concession; I still did eight times up the hill and jogged back down, but I did not aim for 5-10 seconds better each time. I only pushed myself to go a little bit faster each time. As long as the numbers went down, I was OK. And they did almost each time, although I was pretty wiped out by the last time and forgot to time myself.
The best part was coming home and finding this month’s Runner’s World in my mailbox. Perfect timing.
Total miles today: 6.8
Total miles for the week: 26.55
…um, wow. Didn’t realize I’d ran that much this week. Next week I’ll taper off the end of the week and then run the 10K on fresh legs. Yay.
Running helps me deal with the sadness and frustration of the twin American disasters. The first, Hurricane Katrina, was natural in cause. The second, ongoing tragedy, however, is the government preparation and response to the first one.
Take note, kids: Republicans. Can’t. Govern. Bush has demonstrated what he’s done to learn from the lessons of 9/11. Abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
See? I can’t talk about anything without talking about my outrage. I’ll post more later. Remind me to tell you about the National Guard troops stuck in Iraq with families in the affected area. Short version: if their families are confirmed dead or wounded, they can come home. If they’re just missing, or refugees, the troops are shit out of luck. They stay in the sandbox.
Deep breath. Getting a grip.
But for now, I wanted to post my running times. Ran 7 miles tonight, my longest single run ever. It’s part of my preparation and training for the Pints-to-Pasta 10K, which I’ve chosen as my season-ending race. Last year I performed incredibly well, running the race in 59:54.5, for a 9:40 pace. I hope to do at least that well this year. And my plan has been to increase my long run until it was more than 10K and run it several times before the race, to build up my endurance, and to work on my bursts of speed with hill- and speed-work. Yadda yadda, I’ve explained this before.
At any rate, tonight was the stress test of my training. And I think I’ve done quite well. I finished 7.01 miles in 1:13:58.2, for an average pace of 10:33, which I think is very good considering my poor results in the Nike RHW last month, not to mention my horrible time last week. Hell, last week that was practically my time for 6.5 miles.
My time at the 6-mile mark was around 1:02:00 or so, which put me at a 10:25 pace. Keep in mind that I was running on the street, in warm (but not hot) weather, and I did stop several times for water. The P2P course is almost entirely downhill, and I will be pushing myself harder, so I’m really pleased at where my training has brought me. I’ll continue to work on speed for the next couple of days, then taper for at least 2 days and maybe 3 if I can stand it, so I’ll be running on fresh legs for the race.
I’ll also be running in the Race for the Cure co-ed 5K, but because there are so many entrants in that one, and because I might be running with my 13-year-old nephew, I’m not planning on having a great time in that race. I’m going to stick with my partner, and make sure he enjoys the race, and not focus on speed.
I might look for another 5K to run in myself, though. With my great 4-mile times (sustained sub-9:30 pace) lately in training, I might be able to (finally!) post an equally-great “official” race time for the 5K this year.
I caught the slinker in a rare playful mood, even rarer for the fact that he was moving slow enough for me to catch on camera…
…and here’s some more!
Lately, all I’ve been posting about, it seems, is my cat and my running.
Now I want to post about something geeky.
At home, I have a desktop (a Mac mini) and a laptop (3+ year old G3 iBook). Most of the time I use my iBook, occasionally I’ll use the Mac mini if it’s something that requires a (tiny little) bit more horsepower; the difference in processor power and memory is slight but sometimes noticeable. (I know, I know, I should upgrade. Someday…) But mainly I use the Mac mini as a file server for my iBook. My music collection is on the mini, for example.
Lately, though, I’ve realized that I don’t have a backup strategy. I mean, my music collection is on both my mini and my iPod, so the chances that both drives would fail is small. But I don’t have anything else backed up. My Quicken data, going back years and years, exists in only one place. All of my personal writing – again, pretty much only in one place. Archived email, again, going back years… only in one place (not counting the stuff stored on my IMAP server, but that’s on a burly RAID system so I’m not too worried about it).
So I thought that a good partial solution would be to mirror the home directories of my mini and my iBook. I figured I could write a simple shell script that ran nightly and copied files back and forth depending on which files were new. That way, both machines would have copies of all my important files.
But… I’m a newbie when it comes to shell scripts. I goofed around writing pseudo-code but never got around to figuring out the actual scripting.
Then, poking around for examples, I found a program called unison. It’s essentially a mirroring tool – it does all the hard work of comparing files by date and differences and deciding which to keep. It will report if conflicts exist – for example, a file on both machines was modified in different ways. It’s like rsync in that it will only propagate the updates instead of the whole file and will use compression. It can be run either as a direct connection or tunneled over ssh.
So now, instead of writing a script, I can just invoke a simple command to mirror the specific directories I want. It’s perfect for my needs – simple mirroring over my local network. Although there are some other files I do want to make copies of (like my iTunes preference files and some other important preferences) so I’ll probably end up scripting the whole shebang anyway. But now the mirroring part is essentially done.
With the -path and -ignore switches, I can direct unison to only the directories I want, and leave alone the ones I don’t, like my ~/Music/iTunes/ directory. I’ve got over 20 GB of music and only have a 30 GB hard drive on my laptop. Like I said above, my iPod is my backup for my music.
And the best part is, unison was available as a package in Fink, the package manager I use. It’s in the “Unstable” group but that doesn’t worry me. So it was easy to install (almost a requirement for a Mac OS X program, even a command-line utility!).
Smacky got out last night. I was cleaning out his litter box, and when I came out from the bathroom, he wasn’t in the house. I looked all over for him. No sign of him. The front door was open but the screen was still latched. While I was poking around for him I heard the dog next door barking and then a cat-like screech and yowl, and then the neighbors were outside talking amongst themselves.
I headed outside and around the corner of the building and asked them if that had been a black cat tangling with their dog. One of the girls said yes, and the older lady asked me if it had been my cat.
Glumly, I said, “Yes, probably. He’s not in the house. But I don’t know how he got outside.”
To which the mom pointed at my living room window. “Looks like there’s a tear in your screen,” she said. And, sure enough, a round cat-sized hole was in my living room window screen.
I went inside and got a flashlight and his bag of food, and walked around the building a couple of times, shaking the bag and calling his name. He didn’t show up. I went to bed worried.
This morning, around 5 AM, there was a soft mrow-ing and then a scratching at my bedroom window. I got up and looked outside; I found myself face-to-face, through the screen, with Smacky, hanging by his claws on the ledge.
Looks like Smacky’s decided he’s an outside cat. I let him him, he headed straight to his food dish, gulped it down, and then went out to the living room and plopped himself down, eyes half-lidded, and posed like he was the king of the house.
“Tire yourself out, Smacky, running around all night?” I asked him. I got no reply.
Since I was up early, I went out for a run (4 miles! I didn’t time myself but I ran strong the entire way, no walking, kept a good pace, and finished strong with a sprint to my finish line!). When I came back, Smacky was curled up on my bed, fast asleep.
Not sure I like the implications of this new development. Is he going to claw his way through the screens anytime he wants out? Am I going to have to put in a cat door? For his safety and my peace of mind I’d really prefer he be an indoor cat.
But it looks like Smacky has a different opinion about that.
I know I’m late with this, but I can’t let the event pass without some small comment.
New Orleans was my favorite city in the whole world, at least of the few places I’ve actually been. And now, it seems, it will have to live on in my memory. Partying, drinking, eating the most amazing food, the local color and history and architecture. Of all the cities I would have liked to retire in, to sit in the shade, drinking and writing and people-watching…
Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Andy Jackson and Jean Lafitte, Delphine LaLaurie, Marie Laveau… The Garden District, the French Quarter, Storyville… Preservation Hall and CafĂ© du Monde…
Katrina has all but wiped it from the face of the Earth.
The sewage, the toxic chemicals from the refineries and industrial ports, the dead bodies being exhumed from the Big Easy’s unique above-ground gravesites and floating down streets-turned-canals… It’s going to be uninhabitable for a long time to come.
My thoughts go out to all the victims of Katrina.
And… the economic devastation is going to be rather harsh, too. The Port of Southern Louisiana is one of the five largest ports in the world, and the largest port (by volume) in the United States, larger than New York, larger than Los Angeles. Not only does New Orleans handle oil imports, but it handles food and timber exports to the rest of the world.
We haven’t even begun to feel the effects of this natural disaster.
I know I haven’t posted a running schedule for this week. I’m basically following the same schedule I posted last week, except my long run is going to be 7 miles.
Which means, tonight I was scheduled to do speedwork on the elliptical trainer at the gym. And, I did.
I ran my warmup at a very brisk pace; I set the machine for a 9:32 pace, then around .4 miles, I increased it to 9:22, then pushed it to 9:15… yeah, I just kept pushing the pace faster and faster every .1 mile or so. Had a lot of frustration to wear down. Didn’t work, but, hey. Oh, and I ended up doing 1.25 miles, instead of just 1 mile. Go figure.
Then, on the elliptical trainer, in spite of the left footpad being loose and making a “clunk” noise every so often, I did my normal 30 minutes, with 8 x 0:30 “sprints” and 1:30 of “normal” pace in-between. And I increased the distance I went in my 30 minutes, up from 2.72 miles last week, to 2.8 miles this week, an increase in overall average pace from 10:59 last week, to 10:43 this week. I guess if my pace on the elliptical trainer ever reaches my 5K race pace (best pace 9:27) I’ll know I need a new speed workout.
Finished with 1 mile of fast-but-not-as-fast-as-my-warmup running on the treadmill, and a quarter-mile of walking to cooldown from my cooldown. Yay.
Side note: warming up, I was directly behind this very cute girl with an amazing dragonfly tattoo on her back, between her shoulder blades. Kept telling myself I should at least compliment her on it. But the timing of my workout and hers never gave me the opportunity to catch her when we both weren’t in the middle of a workout. Oh, well.
Ran tonight. Non-speed day, so I didn’t take my watch. 3.5 miles (only I did it the opposite direction shown on the map).
Kept a very good pace and only stopped twice for traffic, once to cross Tacoma and once to cross Milwaukie Blvd at Bybee. Even threw in several (three, I think) near-sprints. Felt good. Nice and cool, not warm and muggy like it has been. And I made it back just before the rain hit.
From Thursday evening to Saturday afternoon, I ran a total of 15.5 miles.
Which is almost as much as the average Hood to Coast runner did between Friday morning and Saturday evening (196 total miles, divided by 12 runners on a team, equals an average of 16.3 miles per runner).
So, in a small way, my weekend was almost as grueling as running in the Hood to Coast.
OK, not really. I didn’t have to sleep in a van with 5 other sweaty runners and eat nothing but energy bars and Diet Rock Star and not shower or shave for two days, along with all the rest.
But it gave me a small idea of what it might be like. I think I might be ready for HTC next year.
UPDATE: Since I’m able to get up or down stairs easily, unlike several HTC entrants I know right now, I’m going to say I definitely haven’t pushed myself as hard as I would in the HTC.
