Running is therapy

I drove down to John’s this morning to do the HH10K W2D7 workout with him. It was a 3.5 mile run. I suppose I should stop mentioning it, since it is the middle of July, but man that Sun was killing me out there.

We got started a little after 9, we covered 4.78 miles (incl walking) in 1:04:26. During the running portion we kept the pace easy, we covered 3.5 miles in 41:42. Despite the baking sun and tired legs, I had a good time. It was cool to see John’s default where he logs his miles.

After the last two days of training and racing, I was blown out. I dropped into bed at 1pm and slept for 2 hours. Feeling pretty good now, but I need a shower.

Tomorrow is an easy day of stretching and strength.

Today was the Spirit of Gettysburg 5K. John and I met up in Gettysburg to tackle, what turned out to be, one of most fun races I have ever participated in.

There were 1400 participants (including the fun run, kid sprints etc), 800ish of which ran the 5K. What a great time. There was music blaring, they started the race with a musket shot, and most of the race took place on the road through the battlefield. It was pretty incredible. There were a lot of hills, but that just added to the excitement.

The race conditions were about as close to perfect as you can get. It was very cool, there were long stretches of road that were in the shade and people were courteous. They had pace markers at the start, so you could line up in accordance with your rough pace. Of course the pace markers only went up to 8 minute miles, so John and I filed in a little bit behind that.

My goals today were: Bottom goal, complete the race in 32 minutes. Top goal, (if all was going well) break 30 minutes. I did both. My official time was 28:48 taking, 5 minutes 10 seconds off my previous 5K. Now, the weather played a big part in that, as did my training…however I gotta think not smoking for the last 12 days has to have helped that a lot. This was the first race (this time around in my racing “career”) that I didn’t get up and smoke a bunch of cigarettes before a race.

So I am sore, and tired…but I have 40 minutes cross training to do today, so I better get off my duff.



Happy running to you!

Running 2 miles? Eh, that’s for chumps. Just kidding, but seriously, I ran two miles tonight and by the time I was nice and warmed up and in a groove, it was over. Time to go home. I didn’t do anything extra tonight, as I didn’t get home from a meeting until after 8 pm. Tomorrow is a rest day, and then Saturday is the Spirit of Gettysburg 5K.

Stats:
Distance: 2.00 mi
Pace: 11:29 mi
Time: 23:04
Avg Heart Rate: 146 bpm
Calories Burned: 182 // Lame

If you want to install the Ruby Gem rmagick you have to have the libmagick development files installed for the gem to compile. If not, you’ll get this error:

configure: error: Can't install RMagick. Can't find Magick-config or GraphicsMagick-config program.
RMagick configuration failed with status 1.


To fix:

sudo apt-get install libmagick9-dev


Happy hacking.

I have 75 feeds in my bloglines reader. That is just nuts. Information overload. Ok, I am getting rid of some. and here they are in no particular order:

• Cool Tools Interesting, not valuable.
• CNN I use the BBC news feed, I don’t need this one, it’s not as good.
• Wired Wired is self important garbage.
• Yahoo News Too many of the same stories make it into the feed, it’s noise.
• Joel on Software Joel jumped the shark a while ago. Wind-bag.
• TechCrunch Too busy in my reader, I usually skip it all anyway.
• RubyOnRails Talk Group Google group, gets spammed a lot, not much good content.
• WebGraphics Not getting anything out of this.
• Games Radar Who am I kidding, I am not a gamer
• Joystiq See above
• Twitter feed Much as I suspected, twitter was fun for two weeks.

Ok, so those, and couple others to pages that had expired (and I didn’t even notice) that brings me down to 63 feeds. Still too many I think, but I will clean out more as the mood strikes me. Happy rss’ing.

I should write a web 2 point OMG app that brings together people who are either actively quitting smoking, thinking about quitting smoking or are maintaining a quit.

According to this article, in 2001, approximately 22.8% of U.S. adults were current smokers…that’s 68.4 Million people (if we use 300 Million as the population, which it was not that high in 2001).

Now if I can figure out a way to have each of them send me a dollar…

**Edit: I just realized that math makes no sense. At any rate, it’s a pant load of people. So listen up smokers…make the checks out to Nathan Powell. **

Day 3, that can only mean one thing. Cross-training. And that can only mean one thing. Sore ass.

It’s actually getting better, I think my butt has resigned itself to the idea that I am too cheap to get a gym membership and it will have to suffer on my costco bike.

Tonite I rode my bike over to the trail to…well…ride my bike. I didn’t turn the Garmin on until I reached the trail. I did three laps on the 2 mile trail over 31 minutes. On the way over I was thinking, biking really lends itself to interval training. You have little choice but to peddle hard in some places and rest in others. So that is what I decided I would do. I peddled as hard as I could up hills and and then coasted down. I was able to keep a nice average heart rate of 140 bpm. It was a great workout.

I think I may actually look into getting a new bike in the future. The one I have is all rusty and lame. I will likely get something used as I have no intention or desire to ride a bike on the roads and be a cyclist. I am too big of a puss when cars are whizzing past.

Some stats:
Distance: 5.90 mi
Time: 31:55
Avg Heart Rate: 140 bpm
Calories Burned: 366

HH10K W2D2. My workout tonight consisted of a .5 mile walk, a 2.5 mile run and a 3 mile walk. It was so hot, I think I saw the devil out there. Only the 2.5 mile run was required by the training plan, but since I have to have no life at all, I figured what the hell.

Couple of cute girls out tonight at the barracks trail too…so that is always nice. Of course when you are a sweaty meat head like me, I am not sure it does you any good to try to flirt :)

Anyway…here is the workout on motionbased.

Stats (total):
Distance: 5.98 mi
Time: 1:23:43
Avg Heart Rate: 135 bpm
Calories Burned: 769

Stats (running):
Distance: 2.5 mi
Time: 29:11
Avg Heart Rate: 152 bpm
Calories Burned: 398

Fascinating.

For some reason today was a little harder than things had been going. It wasn’t crazy hard, but I was caught a little off guard by some urges to smoke throughout the day.

I must confess, I did have a few beers last night. I went to a friends house to do a little grilling, and he offered me a beer. Now I could have said no, but honestly, I wanted to test the waters a little. I did want to smoke while I was drinking the beers, but I did some deep breathing and reassured myself that I was not going to smoke (in a non-obvious way…don’t get the impression that was in a trance on his deck talking to myself). I didn’t smoke by the way, but I am no hurry to have another beer either ;)

I dunno, maybe it was drinking last night that made today worse than the few days prior. I’m not sure. I also need to remind myself I am only on day 7. A 20 year addiction doesn’t disappear in a weeks time, chantix or no chantix. One day at a time. And I will not be smoking today.