Running is therapy

The schedule today called for a 10 mile run.

Joining in on the fun today was my neighbor Heather. In addition, her boyfriend Brad came out to walk along the trail and was kind enough to meet us for a water stop.

We set out at 7:30 this morning and drove down to Newville to the rail trail. It was chilly, but not super cold when we started down the trail. At about the 3 mile marker, Brad met us at Fish Hatchery road. Neither of us were thirsty at the time, so Brad agreed to meet us there on the way back as well.

As an aside I really like to say the words Fish Hatchery as all one word (fishatchery)…say it…it’s fun.

By the 5 mile turn around I was ready to…well, turn around. I wasn’t tired and I was still enjoying the run, but my hands were cold and I needed that emotional boost you get from the turn around on an out and back run.

Back we trundled, meeting up with Brad and some drinks. On the way back, the wind kicked up pretty good and chilled my thinly gloved hands to the bone.

It was a great time, very proud of Heather and myself, and also thankful to Brad for the assistance. That was great, I never had anyone meet me out on a trail before.

The only other thing that bears mentioning is my knee. I have been having some weird knee problems for a little while now. So this week I kind of experimented. First, I posited that perhaps my orthotics were bothering my knee. So being the rocket scientist that I am, decided to go for a 4.5 mile run without them. That was fun. My legs were moving in a way they hadn’t in months and months and so it was like running out the door after months off and doing 4.5 miles. So then I decided that for my next trick, I would use a knee brace and put the orthotics back. That worked out pretty well, except that my calves were killing me the entire time because they were so tired from running without the orthotics.

Knee braces kind of suck. If they are big enough to hold everything in the right spot, they tend to bunch up with movement and make your leg uncomfortable. But it HAS helped. My knee feels better when I wear it on the run.

By the time todays run was over, my knee was singing pretty good. I am icing it as I type this and hoping this is a temporary thing.

1 Mile Splits: 9:50, 9:38, 9:30, 9:42, 9:35, 9:33, 9:35, 9:35, 9:41, 9:07

I am happy with those times and splits. It bodes well for my goal time of 8:46 Miles for a 1:55 finish.

Motionbased link

Some stats:
Distance: 10.02
Time: 1:35:49 (pace: 9:33)
Average Heart Rate: 142 bpm
Calories Burned: 1419

Mine: “Not good, at any of this.”

As tagged by Marcus

Tagging Eric A, Mah, Patrick, John, Maggie (I know she loves a good meme) and Don… in no particular order.

I ran into a guy I know at the recent Run4Luck…and he happened to snap a most unflattering shot…

mmm, sun chips!

As I alluded earlier I did indeed go running today. I think my overall lack of a life makes me a little restless at times, and so I will look at my day and think, “This day will be incomplete without a run in it” and so off I go.

I think today I may have been satisfied with a hike, but I didn’t think I’d have time. As it turned out, I actually would have. Oh well, hiking is for slow runners. (totally kidding :)

I was hanging out with a bunch of hikers last night, and a couple of them were sectional through-hikers on the AT. To understand what that is, it helps to know that a through-hiker is one that has hiked the entire AT. A sectional through-hiker is someone that has hiked every inch of the trail, but in chunks, rather than all at once. I have long wanted to start doing that, and I actually think I might start making plans to do it, but at any rate the concept is interesting.

Since I was thinking about sectional through-hiking last night, I decided that I wanted to do the same thing with Rails-To-Trails around here, but not hike them, run them. To that end, I looked over the map and decided since I had already run past Fish Hatchery Road a number of times, I would start there and do an out and back run to claim another section of trail done.

View Larger Map

I ran out 3.5 miles to Duncan Road, then turned and ran 1.5 miles back and walked the last 2 for a little extra calorie burn. Next week I plan to park and Duncan and run the roughly 4 miles to Shippensburg, back and a little more to get my 9 miler in, and complete the trail. After I finish this one, I plan to attempt to do Conewago and York as time allows.

It was a nice SLOW run, just as I intended. I also managed a 2 mile Walk

1 mile splits: 10:12, 10:10, 10:15, 10:33, 10:13 (Pretty even, I can live with that)

Motionbased link

Some stats:
Distance: 5.01 Miles
Time: 51:24 (pace: 10:16)
Average Heart Rate: 140 bpm
Calories Burned: 737 calories

There is no way I am not running today. It’s not perfect out, not by a long shot, but that long cold winter is loosening it’s grasp on my hemisphere and I desperately want to get out there. Toodle pip!

5 SLOW is the plan. Going to drive to Newville, I believe, to do it.

This morning was the Lancaster Area’s Run4Luck near F&M College.

The temperature at my house (about an hour away) this morning when I woke up was a toasty 44 degrees according to the backyard thermometer. When I got the race it was a bit brisker and windy.

Luckily I had met up with Eric and his wife and daughter beforehand, and his wife was kind enough to take articles of clothing from us at the start. We were able to keep sweats on right until start time. She was also kind enough to meet us out on the course and take any clothing we decided to shed on the course.

I also ran into Marcus and another friend Dave from that area. And Eric introduced me to Jen and Bridget.

The race started on about 100 yards of grass and made it’s way out into the street and into a figure 8 through the nearby neighborhood. In years past the course has taken a couple of knocks as being short, but I think the beginning and end on the grassy runway added the needed distance.

Eric and I ran together for most of the first mile, each of us jocking for position during that mile. During the second mile I decided that I needed to pull ahead or I wasn’t going to be able to run my own race. During the second mile we would sometimes find ourselves running shoulder to shoulder.

At the end of the second and the entire third I ran ahead of Eric, not because I thought I was faster and should be in front, mostly because I knew that if I had any chance of beating him out there, it HAD to come in the third mile. If he was still with me for the last mile I knew he’d win as he would out sprint me.

Sure enough with about half a mile to go he pulled back up. He told me that it was going to be a sprint to the finish. I told him that he would win that one and told me that I would need to put him away there then. I knew for a fact the race against him was over. That’s cool I can live with that. I honestly didn’t feel nervous or upset. I have been chasing him since we started running, there was no shame for me to come in a paltry 8 seconds after him at 30:54 (official time).

Great race. I recommend it to anyone. Well organized, lots of volunteers decent bag of stuff to take along with you. The shirts are cool. I love the logo and that they are long sleeve. The cream color this year a little less than desirable in my opinion, but I wear some garish running shirts, so this one fits in right nice.

Viva La Run!

1 Mile splits: 7:42, 8:08, 7:50, 7:11 (So sayeth the Garmin)

Motionbased Link

Some stats (Garmin):
Distance: 3.95 Miles
Time: 30:52 (pace: 7:49)(I am using total time not moving time because this was a race, and I did stop to tie my shoe)
Average Heart Rate: 174
Calories Burned: 578

What a crazy week. I ended up running Monday night because a friend wanted to. Then on Tuesday it was my regularly scheduled day to run, so I ran. Now I have had the last two days off, and I am taking today off because I have a race tomorrow.

Race tomorrow! Yeah! The last real race (as in non virtual) was the HARRC Winter Series…(where I took 2nd in my age group out of like 2 runners) so I am excited. I am shooting for sub 32:00. I think that is doable.

Mmm, it felt so good to be back to 7 miles for a long slow distance day. This was the longest I have run in months. It has been a long slow trek back from my hip problems of last fall. However, it is, as always, ultimately worth it.

I am still having some leg pain. My hip this morning was sore as I was hobbling about the house. I went to the gym yesterday and did 40 minutes on the bike. I also stretched for a LONG time afterward and that felt great.

My neighbor joined me down at the Newville Rails To Trails. We trundled the first 3.5 miles into pretty bad head winds, but the return was much less nasty. By the time we finished I was warm.

I also ended up doing a 3 mile walk later in the day to celebrate day light savings time and the fact that it was light out until after 7. Yay!

1 mile splits: 9:46, 9:42, 9:41, 9:38, 9:38, 9:39, 9:19

I am happy with that pace and those splits. I held back on purpose. I ran slower than I needed to because I don’t want every run to turn into me grinding myself to dust.

Motionbased Link

Some stats:
Distance: 7.01
Time: 1:07:27 (pace: 9:37)
Average Heart Rate: 144 bpm
Calories Burned: 1024

I use emacs for the majority of my editing, however I use vim to edit config files. Most distributions will have a global vimrc that sets up vim to remember the last place it was in a file, and put you back there when you reopen that file. I find this to be a preferred behavior since I tend to make incremental changes to a config file and want to open it to the same section over and over again. Ubuntu for some reason has this section commented out in /etc/vim/vimrc:

if has("autocmd")
au BufReadPost * if line("'\"") > 0 && line("'\"") < = line("$")
\| exe "normal g'\"" | endif
endif

So I just snip that out of there and put it in my ~/vimrc. Happy configuring!

For a long time now I have been addicted to using C-r (control-r) to do a reverse search in the terminal. If you haven’t done this, do it, it’s a huge time saver. Just hit C-r and start typing something unique from the command you are trying to recall.

I have a big history file (that’s what she said) on purpose, and being able to search back through it is nice. However one thing always bugged me, and I never got around to solving it, until today.

I would hit C-r and start typing, and then I would hit C-r a few more times to get back to the command I was actually looking for, except I ALWAYS got overzealous and went right past it. So I would hit C-c and start over. Then I thought, I bet you can go forward. Like any good Gnu/Linux user I typed man bash in my terminal and then /reverse.

Sure enough,

reverse-search-history (C-r)
Search backward starting at the current line and moving ‘up’ through the history as necessary. This is an incremental search.

forward-search-history (C-s)
Search forward starting at the current line and moving ‘down’ through the history as necessary. This is an incremental search.


That should work then. I pop out of my man reader, and hit C-r ssh


(reverse-i-search)`ssh': ssh nathanpowell.org


Whoops! I meant to only go back to the one BEFORE that entry :). So I hit C-s…nothing. So I went to the modern forward slash of information, google.

I found this bug. It appears that, for whatever reason, C-s gets trampled on by C-s (stop). If you apply the workaround suggested there, it does indeed start to work. So I pushd the following onto my .bashrc (bad bash joke, and ultimately untrue since I added it to the bottom of the file, not the top of the “stack” *sigh* *groan*)


stty stop undef


I don’t use stop in the shell so this will suffice for now, but it’s an interesting bug. I installed xterm, multi-gnome-terminal, and konsole, and only konsole was unaffected by the bug. So it’s an environment thing somewhere that konsole is not reading.

Does everyone else see this?