Running is therapy

I have added a new category titled ‘Cooking’. My neighbors have been teaching me to cook for about the last month. They eat pretty healthy and some of their interest in that has rubbed off on me. I hope that I will post recipes and cooking tips that I pick up here.

First just some general observations.

calorie-count.com is a great place to look up calories for the food you may or may not want to cook with.

Splenda is freakin’ good (and must use a netscape app server, note the favicon).

Google can be a huge help in calorie counting and figuring out recipes.

Cooks.com and Allrecipes.com are also very helpful.

A few days ago I posted about a geocache that Bob and I placed at Kings Gap state park. I tried to submit it to geocaching.com.

Geocaching.com can’t accept the cache because you need a permit to place a cache in a state park. I am going to remove the cache as I have little or no desire to jump through the hoops of state government so I can leave a joke in the woods.

If anyone is heading out to Kings Gap anytime soon and wants to try to find it and dispose of the cache, that would be sweet, just zip me an email. Otherwise I will go get it either this weekend or next.

I really like it when I go running, but then later in the day, I do something active as well. That’s always a good feeling.

Bob, Sun and I went down to Kings Gap yesterday to hike around in the woods. We had good weather and talked the whole time we were out. Fun.

Bob recently purchased a GPS and wanted to do some Geocaching with it. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find online any caches in the park. We decided to make our own.

Yes, that is random crap we put in it. There is a “Red Bull Dog Tag”, a light switch, a lighter and mouse trap. All cool things one would want to find in the woods.

I am not sure how accurate my Forerunner is for this sort of thing, but the coordinates are:

N 40° 05.720 / W 077° 16.137

If you go look for it, and find it, shoot me an email so I know it’s fairly accurate. I would like to put it on geocaching.com but I don’t want to frustrate people if the coordinates aren’t right.

Of course I wore my Garmin the whole time, so I have stats.

Motionbased link

Some Stats:
Distance: 5.18 Miles
Time: 2:19:52 (pace: 26:59)
Average Heart Rate: 90 bpm
Calories Burned: 511

It took all the will power I could gather to not go running today. Yesterday was a rest day, and I did no exercise at all. I did wear a pedometer from about 6:30 am to 6:30 pm and logged 5700 steps in that time. But those steps were just a normal work day.

I kept reminding myself this morning that I have an 11 miler tomorrow and going out today, even for a short run might be a mistake.

I decided instead to go over to Kings Gap State Park to see if I could get a decent hike in, and scout out some trails to run. It worked out pretty well. I got a hike in for cross training, and a date with a trail when it cools off a little more. Plus, I wore my Garmin, so I got some data from the deal too.

Looking forward to that run tomorrow. Should be very challenging.

Motionbased Link

Some Stats:
Distance: 4.87 mi
Time: 1:17:08 (pace: 15:48 m/m)
Average Heart Rate: 107 bpm
Calories Burned: 493

Eric, Patrick and I went to 1000 Steps today. It was a good time. We had gone up there last fall, and knew it was a heck of a climb, but well worth the effort.

I was sweating like…something that sweats…a lot. But we had a good time. I also twisted my ankle pretty good and took a little spill in the process, but the pain wore off pretty fast and I feel fine now.

Nice hike, try it!