The pool is finally ready for swimming! Today we learned to work the pump and v

The pool is finally ready for swimming! Today we learned to work the pump and vacuum and even what the giant hook attachment is for. (pulling people out of the pool) And after all that hard work, we're going on vacation tomorrow. We have an awesome friend who is taking care of the pool for us while we're gone in exchange for free swimming rights. Hopefully it warms up enough for them to enjoy it.

Quick poll: does all of this fit in the trunk of a Honda Civic? We will find out

Quick poll: does all of this fit in the trunk of a Honda Civic? We will find out soon. If not, we may have to wear the same 2 outfits the whole time we are in Utah. I already threatened to wear my swimming suit to the wedding. Oh, that reminds me: gotta add my suit to the pile.

Filling up the pool. Ignore all these leaves that are still in there and be gl

Filling up the pool. Ignore all these leaves that are still in there, and be glad that you can't see all the dead worms on the bottom. The next issue to work on is the fact that the highs for the next couple of days are supposed to be in the 60s. Maybe by July the water will warm up!

Death to blogs

Remember when blogs were a thing?  Do you feel old now?

The other day Julia showed me a picture she drew.  In the last year she's gone from scribbling to actually drawing with a purpose and an attempt at conveying an actual scene.  It's been nice to see that she isn't doomed to cubism, and the particular picture I'm thinking of is a nice one of me and I don't remember what else.  Pretty much the only thing I do remember is that my hair and my beard were all grey.  I tried to ask her why she would choose that particular color, but she didn't want to answer.

For the record, there are some pesky grey hairs on my head (which I have been known to yank out if they catch me in a bad mood), but there's no way anyone would notice without seriously invading my personal space.

Anyway, for those who haven't been aware, Google is killing Google Reader in about a month.  I've used Google Reader for years, and it's always worked well enough, though it never really impressed me.  It kills me that Google own blogger/blogspot, and in order to view private blogs, I have to log in with my Google credentials, AND YET, they can't make Google Reader do that seamlessly.  I think they missed the boat there, big time.

Blogs have certainly been in decline for a few years now.  This blog is a nice example.  I suppose we blame facebook, twitter and all those hip new products, as well as our continually shortening attention span.  When Google Reader goes down, will anyone still notice when blogs are updated?  Particularly with many personal blogs being updated much less lately, do people still check them manually?

In our preparation for the Reader-pocolypse, we're trying out Feedly (feedly.com) to keep track of our various blogs.  The transfer of all your favorite blogs from Google to Feedly is extremely quick and easy.  Beyond that, I don't think I have any more comments.  If you have comments, however, you should leave them. (Though probably not on this post, as it's been quite boring.  Pick other posts.  Pick better posts.)  And while you're at it, go and put something on your blog, too.  Maybe I'll comment.  And comments make everyone feel good.

Dow 10k (and 1 mile) Run

I ran the Dow Run 10k this Saturday.  I ran the race last year (which was my first ever 10k), and finished in 44:35 (7:11 pace) which I was pretty happy with.  Last year, I wanted to finish under 45:00, which I beat by 25 seconds, but I was a bit disappointed when I found out that I'd taken 4th in my age group (AG) by only 5 seconds.  Surely, somewhere in the 6.2 miles I could have cut a corner a little tighter, or uttered one sentence fewer to a friend in the first mile, or done something to shave off those 5 seconds.

This year, I've run 60% more miles, but I didn't seem to be any faster than last year (foreshadowing).  So I came into the race not expecting much.  My goal was to finish in 44:30, to at least show some improvement and, in a sense, win 3rd place from the year before.  Obviously, AG placement is very dependent on who else chooses to race that day.

The course is super flat, and fairly boring, in my opinion.  It mostly wanders through neighborhoods in town, and thankfully has enough turns that you can focus on the next corner rather than the runners pulling away from you out front.  My strategy was to run as close to even 7:15 splits as possible for the first 4 miles or so, and then see what was left in the tank to make up a bit of time over the last few miles. I don't have a fancy GPS watch, so I have to rely on my mental math during the race, and my ability to remember where I was afterward to figure out what happened.  Both years, I've learned that my brain quits working after 4 miles.

Mile 1: 7:25
I really didn't want to go out too fast, in which I succeeded.  I stayed near other runners with the fancy watches to over hear them talking a bit about the pace just to make sure.

Mile 2: 14:33 / 7:08 mile / 7:18 pace
I tried really hard throughout the race to think about my form and run easy and light.  I kept within site of a friend who ran it in 42:43 last year and has nice running form.  Whenever I'd look up at him, I'd remember to relax and run correctly.

Mile 3: 21:40 / 7:07 mile / 7:13 pace
I seemed rather alone on the course during mile 3, but started making up ground on half a dozen runners who were about 100 yards ahead.

Mile 4: 28:40 / 7:00 mile / 7:10 pace
A friend of mine running the race said that this is about where he lost sight of me, but that throughout the race I looked like I was running effortlessly.  I really appreciated this comment.  I managed to work past 10 or so runners through miles 4 and 5, before once again ending up by myself.  No one in front for a hundred yards, and no one behind that I was aware of. (Maybe they were there but running very quietly.)

Mile 5: ??:??
Brain shutting down.  About all I could concentrate on at this point was my form and not letting myself take off early and running out of gas.

Mile 6: ??:??
I kept telling myself that at 40:00 I could kick it up a gear in effort and that's about what I did. I had to slow down slightly maybe about a third of a mile from the finish line, because I didn't think I could hold the increased pace, but I was still going pretty darn fast. I passed one more person with in the final hundred yards, and pulled even with another guy, but he wasn't going to let me past, and I didn't have anything left to push with.  He beat me by 1 second.  (But don't worry, turns out he was 17, and thus not in my AG.)

Finish: 43:08 / 6:57 pace
As I crossed the finish line, I didn't really grasp what I'd just done.  I knew it was a significant improvement over the year before, but I couldn't remember the exact time.  I also couldn't even begin to divide 43:08 by 6.2 to calculate the pace. (I have a degree in physics and love to do math problems like this in my head.  The easy way is to know that it was somewhere around a 7:00 pace, so start with 7:00 * 6.2 = (7*6)+(7*0.2) = 42 + (7*1/5) = 42 + 7/5 = 43 + 2/5 = 43:24.  From there I was 16 seconds faster and 16 seconds over 6.2 miles is about 2 or 3 seconds, so I was at about a 6:57 pace.  But, in my stupor, I couldn't do the math, nor could I even think of a way to do the math.)  I got some food and water, and it wasn't until I was talking to a friend who told me I'd gone under 7 minute miles.  I was very surprised.  The math on the final 2.2 miles is that I did them in about 14:28, which is a 6:35 pace.  I'm still puzzled by that number, because it doesn't seem reasonable, but apparently I did it.  Hooray!

The official results are:
43:08 10k -- PR by 1:27
9th out of 265 overall
9th out of 129 men (where were all the fast women this year?)
2nd out of 26 AG (30-34)

After my race, I gave myself 45 minutes to tighten up, and then did a 1-mile run with Julia.  She ran the entire time and finished in 10:23, which was about 3 minutes faster than I anticipated.  About three quarters of the way through she looked up at me and said "this is kinda fun!".  Afterward she asked if she could run the 5k next year.  I told her she'd have to wait for a few years . . .

Spring is finally showing up here in Michigan. It turns out this pile of sticks

Spring is finally showing up here in Michigan. It turns out this pile of sticks I was staring at all winter is really a rhododendron! The other bush in the picture has a cardinal nest in it. As a further bonus, our grass also comes with dozens of little yellow flowers. Yay spring!

Born to Run

I've been reading a lot lately, which means I've been scraping the bottom of the barrel for things to read.  I devoted nearly a year of my life to the Wheel of Time, and I finished that a few months ago.  So, it came down to me instructing Shannon to just find me something interesting at the library on a recent trip there with the girls.  Shannon generally does a pretty good job of this, and she brought home a stack of books, including one that I'd been avoiding for a few years.

"Born to Run - A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen" was written by Christopher McDougall in 2009, and you've probably heard of it.  It's probably the single most significant driving force behind the barefoot/minimalist running movement that has grown over the last decade.  The graph below shows the number of google searches over the last half dozen years for "barefoot running" "tarahumara" and "minimalist running".  The terms all show a nice surge through 2009, with the highest blue spike in August.  "Born to Run" spent the first of it's 15 non-consecutive weeks on the New York Times best sellers list on June 7th.  You can mouse-over for specific dates info.

[I think it's interesting to see that "barefoot running" shows seasonal variation, with high searches in the spring and summer.  "Tarahumara" shows a peak with the release of the book, and a general decline afterwards; though it is still above pre-book levels.  "Minimalist running" however, has a much more constant increase over time, and doesn't seem to have been influenced much by the book.  Another note: Utah is 1st, 2nd and 1st, respectively, in searching for these terms.]

Anyway, it's clear that somewhere in the 2009/2010 time frame, barefoot or minimalist running became a bit of a fad.  Minimalist running shoe sales went from $450,000 in 2006 to $59,000,000 in 2012 (wikipedia).  I like to run, but I don't like fads.  (Or at least, I like to imagine that I don't like fads, which is probably what just about everyone tells themselves.)  Whatever it was about this book that was driving the whole world to kick off their shoes, eat chia, decry traditional training practices, villainize Nike and vow to become an ultramarathoner, it sounded suspicious to me.

As I've documented, in 2012 I played around with running barefoot a little bit, got some minimalist shoes and then haven't run in a standard shoe since.  I'm about 300 miles in to my KSOs, which are showing some wear, and I've generally enjoyed them.  I've run exactly one race in them, a 10k, which I had never run before, so I honestly can't say much for the specific results.  I've not sustained a significant running injury in them, but, I never had a significant running injury in traditional shoes, despite many more miles and a marathon in them.  [Well, I probably had a mild to moderate case of shin splints back in 2000 or 2001.]

But this was supposed to be a book review.  So here goes.  I finally read the book, because I figured I had enough of my own opinion that I could read it without being swayed unduly by all the witch-doctory-ness that had captivated the rest of the country.  The book is very entertaining.  McDougall writes for various magazines (Men's Health, Runner's World, Outside Men's Journal, Esquire, etc.) and was a oft-injured recreational runner.  He got started down a story about the Tarahumara, which grabbed his interest and lead to the book.

The Tarahumara are native americans(?) (native mexicans?) who live in the mountains of northern Mexico (southwest of the city of Chihuahua).  They're poor farmers, who live about how you'd expect poor native farmers to live, without running water, electricity or much else.  Oh, and they're basically the best distance runners in the world.  They're pretty content to keep to themselves, but when people have managed to get them out to run in races like a 100 mile race through the mountains of Colorado, they'd win.

The first half of the book focuses almost entirely on the history and stories of the Tarahumara as well as some significant American ultramarathons and ultramarathoners.  I kept waiting for it to get to the part that ignited a running revolution.  It eventually got there, but not as forcefully as I'd expected.  (Though, perhaps my expectations made it seem less forceful.)  The author gets into theories on evolution and to what extent humans are designed for distance running.

The book is very entertaining, and tells a terrific story of some amazing races.  It's not going to drastically change anything I do, but maybe that's just because I'm stubborn.  ;)  Oh, and it did get me out the door for 8.75 miles yesterday, my longest run in over 2 years.

No one was available to play the fishing game with Ella so she decided to play

No one was available to play the fishing game with Ella, so she decided to play with Winston (our fish) and Soggy Baby (the doll). I'm not sure if Winston really likes this game much.

Cross country skiing is a bit trickier with 30 pounds on your back.

Cross country skiing is a bit trickier with 30 pounds on your back.

Just finished shoveling. Doesn't it look nice? More snow this month than the las

Just finished shoveling. Doesn't it look nice? More snow this month than the last 18 put together I think. My cross country skis are calling to me today.