In Non-Running News . . .

Apparently this has pretty much turned into my running blog.  As it is how I'm spending ever increasing amounts of time at it, I guess it's fitting.  In our quest for 1 kilomile, we're now less than 40 miles behind pace, having cut the deficit about 25 miles so far this month (which is barely half over).  I'm signed up for my first 10k ever this Saturday.  As we don't exactly live in a big city, there aren't tons of near by racing opportunities.  I'm hoping for 45 minutes.  I did just over 6 miles (which is just under 10k) tonight at a 45:30 pace.

But, as my title promised, I bring non-running news!  What else do I do with my time?

Every other Thursday is Starcraft night, so that's always something to look forward to.  I've got a co-worker who is a big gamer and spends his disposable income on computers.  He's got his main computer for gaming, and then his backup computer, which is also for gaming and for watching TV.  Well, his backup computer was having trouble playing his game and running TV at the same time so he needed some upgrades.  He had a pair of nice video cards laying around, so he went to put those in.  Not enough power outlets on the power supply.  So he ordered a new power supply.  While he was at it, he got a new mother board, too.  But then the power supply didn't fit in the case he had.  Solution: buy new case.  And the CD drive doesn't have the right connection for the new mother board, so he picked up one of those, too.  So, pretty much, he built a whole new computer, and was sending his old backup to the surplus pile (the corner of his computer room).  "I've got a spare hard drive," I said.  So he was nice enough to put it in, load a copy of Windows and give me the whole thing for free.  Awesome.  So now, instead of playing SC with all settings on low, I can play with them all on ultra.  So we've got 2 computers.  But only 1 desk, 1 monitor and 1 keyboard.  So basically I've got a box that is just for playing SC once or twice a week.  I think this qualifies as a first world problem.

The other big (big, big, BIG) black whole for my time has been the Wheel of Time.  I'm 8 books in to the 14 book series.  (Book 14 isn't out yet, but it will be by the time I get there.)  The story is massive, the characters are plentiful and the author loves to describe what everyone is wearing in detail.  His motto seems to be "why use 1 character when 7 will do?".  Alternate mottos that didn't make the cut are "How many hundreds of pages can I go without mentioning certain main characters?" and "Because it's important to know the material and neckline of every outfit that every female character has ever worn." and "Editors?  What are editors?"  But, I'm not giving up.  I'm over 6,000 pages in, so I'm seeing this thing through.

Other than that, it's work, church, sleep and tickle fights with little blonde girls.  What more could a guy want?

April Self Locomotion Update

We're 4 days into May, and I haven't published the updated results of our self locomotion quest.  I'm sorry for the great impact this has had on all of your lives.  Spring is slowly working its way to Michigan.  A very warm March was followed by a cooler April with lots of wind.  45° temperatures with steady 25mph winds do not make people want to go outside and self locomote.  The month splits pretty easily into 10 days of awesome, followed by ten days of not, and finishing up with ten days of "pretty good".  The graph shows this pretty clearly.  I've been slowly lengthening my runs, but still haven't done anything over 4.4 miles, which means we're still attacking the goal with many small chunks.  April was easily the best month so far, but we expected to do better as the weather improves, and I was a bit disappointed that we didn't do better.  Through the first 3 months of the year we were on a 700 mile pace, so we need average a 1300 mpy pace through the next 3 months to hit 500 miles by July 1st.  Then, we'll just have to mirror that through the second half of the year.  I'm amazed that 4 months in, 1000 miles still looks like a very challenging yet achievable goal.  Not bad for just picking a very round number out of the air.

The numbers:
April total: 88.50 mi
Total through 4/30/12: 261.93 mi
March pace: 10800 mi/yr
Pace YTD: 792 mi/yr
Current Deficit: 68.67 mi


The chart:
This chart nicely breaks things into months.  You can see how much ground we lost in January and February, how we nearly held even through March and the modest gains in April.