Running is therapy

I don’t have a lot to say on the topic of Fair Use. I am for being able to use the media you purchase in an unencumbered way.

I also think sites like The Pirate Bay are doing things to enable people to procure copyrighted material they didn’t pay for.

But what I will stand firm on is that I am a puss. If authorities came to me and said I could end up doing 2 years in the pen for putting up text files that will track digital media and allow the end user to download it…I would stop, forthwith. There isn’t a chance in the world I would fight that battle.

I would go to prison to protect human rights violations. I would go to prison to stop torture. I would not go to prison so people can have unfettered access to reruns of The Cosby Show.

Those dudes at The Pirate Bay, right or wrong, have guts.

I like to disable that. In your xorg.conf file, add:


      Option         "MaxTapTime" "0"


To the InputDevice section for your touchpad.

Just to help the cause, I will post that reddit now has a dedicated sub-reddit for Ruby.

Just wanted to point out that there is a virtual race coming up on February 22nd.

I signed up for it, I have seen the shirt design and it’s pretty nice. Well worth the price of admission.

Last night I had a rather lackluster lifting and stretching night at the gym. I wasn’t feeling good, a little run down. I whipped through the chest and bi routine with all the enthusiasm of a man folding laundry.

Today over lunch Eric and I hit the streets for a 3 miler. A load of fun as always. A great way to celebrate our 1 year of running.

Motionbased Link

Some Stats:
Distance: 3.05 Miles
Time: 28:27 (pace: 9:19)
Average Heart Rate: 145 bpm
Calories Burned: 441

On January 29th 2007 I survived the first day of the C25K program.

Since that time, except for injury, I have run consistently week in and week out. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started I just knew that I needed to fix the sorry state of my cardio-vascular health. My goal then is the same as now, that is, consistently run for the rest of my life. My most important PR is that I am still running, still adding days to my career as a runner.

Much like Eric’s post yesterday, I also want to give a big thank you to John who introduced me to the C25K plan in the first place, and to Eric who ran with me in the cold winter snow and kept me motivated during those early months where runners are forged.

And to the people who used to read this blog to talk about Linux, programming and general computer stuff…sorry? :)

As always, keep your feet moving!

And so begins my long runs.

Sunday morning was the first “long” run of my half marathon schedule. Since I am coming back from an injury, I haven’t set the bar real high for the first four weeks or so. The run was only 4 miles.

I don’t plan to change my long run schedule at all. It’s conservative, but I am still adding mileage every week during the first 4 weeks, and I am lifting and cross training. I just don’t think it would be smart at this time to push harder than I am.

Bill, Eric and I, met at the southern terminus of the Conewago Trail at 8 am.

The run went very well. Despite the three of us being at pretty different levels of fitness and ability we managed to lop off 4 miles and carry on a conversation the whole time.

Afterward we hit a local diner for some breakfast grubbing.

Motionbased Link

Some Stats:
Distance: 4.06
Time: 37:11 (pace: 9:09)
Average Heart Rate: 154 bpm
Calories Burned: 586

Got up early yesterday and went to the barracks for a 3 mile run. I was pleasantly surprised to see that I wasn’t the only runner out there; I saw three others.

I am still working on getting vmware-server with an instance of XP running so I can use Motionbased from inside my Linux host. It all *seems* to work, but the data never uploads. I can’t imagine why that would be.

The run felt good, albeit cold.

Motionbased Link

Some stats:
Distance: 3.00
Time: 28:31 (pace: 9:30)
Average Heart Rate: 149 bpm
Calories Burned: 438

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.

I am off work today to have some minor mouth surgery (no they aren’t wiring my trap shut), so I needed to get out there and hit up a 3 miler before hand. It went really really well. Most fun I have had running in a while.

Over the last few weeks of coming back, I have been going faster than I needed to. I think I was eager to see how much or how little I had lost. Today, I forced myself to keep the pace slow. It made me remember why I fell in love with running in the first place.

I constantly evangelize running, and the one thing I tell people when they tell me “But I hate running” is that they are going to fast. If you go to fast, running does indeed suck. It’s not fun at all…now, I just need to take my own advice.

Training overall is going well. I am sore and tired nearing the end of this week, but that is too be expected. I am still on the mend. Another two weeks of doing this, eating right and going to bed early and I will be in running shape.

Motionbased Link

Some Stats:
Distance: 3.00 miles
Time: 29:27 (pace: 9:48)
Average Heart Rate: 148 bpm
Calories Burned: 439

Happy trails!