short little run

a short little run tonight, 5 miles up to the Giant supermarket and back, averaging 11 1/2 minutes. very tight and sore tibialis muscles.

A fly-over of ther JFK

http://therunscout.com/2009/10/jfk-50-mile/

kinda neat to see

Finish line clock; 12:38:06

In case anyone wondered, I walked up to and across the finish line.

Peter

Police directed traffic; turn left to the finish line

there was a lot bigger police presence than in years past. that was nice. no local drivers terrorizing the runners.

Peter

Rolling country roads for the next five miles

it is a very pretty typical country experience. nice little farms, some raising cows and some not, and some going to seed for lack of maintenance; plowed-under fields resting up for the next spring; road kill rotting in the November coolness; the occasional abandoned car, truck, or farm implement; and empty beer cans and McDonald's soda cups down in the roadway drainage ditches.
Just a little piece of americana there.

Peter

"The Hill" after the dam at mile 42

dang, but that hill is steep. I'm sure *someone* runs up it, but in five JFKs I've never seen anyone do it.
It's an appropriate place to put a big hill though. In case anyone is getting off the trail a little full of themselves for completing 42 miles and still smiling about it, this hill just smacks 'em down.

Peter

The dam across the potomac at mile 42

This is mile 42 on the JFK run. On the C&O canal, this is about mile 85, and about halfway between Locks 40 and 41.
A nice picturesque little place on the river.
http://www.nps.gov/PWR/customcf/apps/maps/showmap.cfm?alphacode=choh&parkname=Chesapeake%20%26%20Ohio%20Canal%20National%20Historical%20Park



Peter

This was a photo op with Santa and a cute elf at the Mile 34/Snyder's Landing Aid Station.
I didn't expect this. It was great!

Nice trestle bridge

i wasn't a quarter mile past this bridge when a train came rumbling through over it. this is the second year in a row I've got to hear a big ol' train roaring across this bridge - a powerful sight. wish i had the data capacity to be able to grab a second picture, but not.

Peter

Aid station at mile 23

pretzel sticks, plain m&ms, potato chips, generic chocolatey/vanilla-y creme cookies,

Peter

The endless trail

for 22 miles, the trail looks pretty much just like this. packed rock chips, dead leaves, the occasional puddle or rock sticking up, and more runners fading off into the distance ahead of me.

Peter

Rapids on the potomac

this is some of the most gorgeous scenery around. the rapids on the Potomac river aren't something that everyone gets to see, I make a yearly pilgrimage to run beside them.

Peter

C&oO canal park has 22 miles of the run

Peter

Beautiful view of the potomac

Peter

Weverton aid station

every year the front runners (winners) pass me before the weverton cliffs aid station. usually they begin passing me on top of the ridge, but this year I got within sight of the weverton aid station (picture) about 1/2 mile out before the first person passed me. I was soooo close. and i had to stop and fiddle with the camera to take this picture, which cost me 2 minutes. the throngs of people are all there to welcome one or more of us runners. it's great. RR usually has hot soup for us here, but not this year.

Peter

Rocky AT trail

Almost all of the AT trail is rocky just like this, only it is covered with leaves so it just isn't visible. Once you step down, though, you know pretty quickly.

Peter

Leaf covered AT trail

This is Susan G running through the forest. See the tons of leaves? I do get sick of dead leaves after about 30 miles.

Peter

Crampton's gap

the Gap is the first sign of life since leaving the starting line. You can hear it before you can see it. Cheers, air horns, shouts for runners who are ahead of you. It is a welcome place to be. As you go down the hill, you see the spread of meadow and the colorful people lined up to welcome runners (as opposed to the drab dead leaves and dormant trees)

Peter

View from the top of south mouintain

This photo was taken not long before dawn and if it hadn't been so overcast you would have seen the valley laid out below you. even still, you can blow this up and see quite a bit of detail if you have the lights off.

Peter

Radio tower on south mountain - highest point on run

Obviously it was before dawn
the Radio Tower is the highest point on the mountain. The first year I ran the JFK, there was construction up here which required us to make some fancy loop-de-loop to avoid it. Now it's just going to the left around the chain link fence and it's all downhill from there. Relatively.

Peter

First (number 1) aid station

This is always the first food station. they never have anything hot!! Gatorade, water, coke, etc.
I thought the Christmas lights were a nice touch this year.

Peter

Trail head for AT trail

The old south mountain inn is on the National Pike (US Alternative 40) where runners get off the road and onto the AT

Peter

JFK 50 starting line

This is a random hotel or business with a big Welcome sign just at the starting line. Tammy is up there with me, Tristan is taking the picture (thank you Tristan).

Peter

At the starting line

Peter

JFK 50 mile run

Tomorrow I plan to picture-blog my way through the JFK 50 mile run
we'll see how that turns out.

saturday forecast

saturday forecast is for dry, partly cloudy
starting at 40F, high at 57F, finish at 54F.
Absolutely perfect weather.
now for some sleep

Jfk organizational meeting

Dennis is explaining the new drop bag system

Peter

HIlls

I ran a couple miles today, most of it was windsprints up a local hill. This is a different hill, i think just a little steeper than the hill i had been using previously. four times running hard up that hill sure made me tired.

Phones

Running doesn't have much to do with cell phones, except that I sometimes use them during a run. That makes them fair game.

I had an older Blackberry. Loved it. It had survived some hard knocks and the glass was cracked in the corner and the battery was dieing, but it was an email machine and a reasonably good phone. Unfortunately it also comes with a backend server license fee.

My company decided that, to save major $, they would eliminate Blackberrys for everyone not high enough in the organization. Windows Mobile phones have a free synchronization license. My company cut a deal with a couple of wireless carriers; mine, Verizon, included the HTC TouchPro and the Samsung Saga as the two options for people at my level. Both are "personal digital assistants". Both come with unlimited voice, unlimited data, unlimited text messages. For all those free things I am grateful.

Both the Saga and the TouchPro are dated devices which are hard to find in Verizon Wireless stores any longer. I read some excellent reviews, particularly the CNET.com reviews. I did finally find both phones in the stores and they confirmed the CNET reviews to the letter. So I got the Saga and between the two I'm fine with my choice. I bought the extended battery and I am glad that I did.

The Samsung Saga runs MS Windows Mobile 6.1. This is where my user experience begins to fall apart.
1. In Blackberrys, there is a thing called "auto text". It allows someone to enter a series of characters that the device will replace when written. So for example, I entered "abt" and "about". Whenever I typed "abt" and pressed the space key to go to the next word, the device replaced it with "about". Oh, and auto text will also do intelligent first-letter capitalization. I had "fx" for "functional", "tx" for "technical", "descr" for "description", every first name you can think of with proper capitalization, "sh" for "should have", "ch" for "could have" - I had over 1,100 of these. I could bang out an email pretty quickly that way.

Windows Mobile 6.1 does not support anything like this. It does have an "auto correct" feature that will put the hyphen in some acronyms and capitalize words under some circumstances, but per Microsoft Support there is no way to extend it. This is a major pain in the neck.

2. In Blackberrys, any sequence of 7 numerals is assumed to be a phone number. It was smart enough to figure out all sorts of ways people separate the area code, prefix, and number parts - using a dash, using an underscore, using a period, using a space - the Blackberry would figure them all out. This was great. Any time someone scheduled a meeting and put the phone number in the meeting invitation, just click on the phone number and the Blackberry would dial it up.

Windows Mobile 6.1 does not support anything like this. Any phone number that is in the subject line of an email or meeting invite is ignored completely. Any phone number in the body of an email or meeting invite is usually ignored unless it is formatted with dashes, and even then sometimes it won't recognize it as a phone number. I haven't been able to figure out the magic and there is no MS-published help available.

This issue is an example of the overarching problem with MS Windows Mobile: it creates a mini mobile PC which happens to have a phone. The integration of the two is not done well.

3. Did I mention battery life? When my Blackberry was new, the battery would last for two and a half days, easily, before recharging. The Saga lasts for a day if I haven't been very busy, otherwise I better have power available. And this is *with* the extended battery. There are ways to extend the battery life which essentially amount to crippling the ability to send and receive emails (ex: I currently have the machine set to sync emails whenever they come in. Just like the Blackberry. I could set it to sync emails every 10 minutes, which will save some battery juice, but then every 10 minutes I get a flood of emails versus seeing them as they arrive. Why would that even be an option?)

4. It is nice to be able to use Internet Explorer on my phone. The Blackberry browser is pretty awful. But IE pulls down full pages unless I explicitly tell it to go after the mobile site, which takes forever and the font is so teeny tiny I can't read the page. The Saga does come with an alternative browser called "Opera" but I haven't been able to figure out how to get it to work very well.

Every day is a new adventure. I am considering upgrading to Windows Mobile 6.5, but I worry that it will not solve my problems and give me new ones I like even less. Many of my peers have gone to iPhones. I am soooo strongly tempted, but I have heard nothing good about the AT&T network and I know the Verizon network is good. And then there are the Google android phones. They look nice, some great marketing around them, but I have no idea what they are like.

Oh well, too late now. I'm going to be a Saga/Windows Mobile guy for a couple years...

Capital Crescent trail

Ran about 6.5 miles from work out onto the Capital Crescent trail and back. it runs along the east side of the Potomac just above and to the west of Georgetown. It has an identical look and feel to the C&O Canal tow path, which is its sisters.

Only a handful of pedestrians on the trail that I saw. The C&O tow path is right above it, all unpaved, and I think that the pedestrians use that because...there are lots of bikers on the CC trail in the morning, most heading into work, some zipping right along like Speed Racer but without the manners. Almost got run over twice. Whenever a cyclist is courteous enough to signal they are going to pass me (a bell, a "passing on your left", or whatever, versus just the sound of their tires in my ear), I try to always say "thank you" as they go by. Just a karmic reward that I hope will help them to continue being courteous.

I felt tired pretty much the whole way - it was a struggle to keep up a 10 minute pace. I need more sleep. speaking of which, I think it's time to go to sleep.

Pre-JFK

I put in 14 easy miles on the W&OD today in preparation for the JFK. Kept up a 10 min/mile pace for the whole time. Saw Marce' on the trail, she was running strong. Tons of other people out enjoying the clear cold day.

I really should have a *long* run tomorrow - 20 miles - but I don't know if I can manage it schedule-wise. My youngest is getting over the flu so I will be home with her for the morning while the rest of the family is off to church, and then I still have lots of leaves to move (with a 3/4 acre lot and 50-year old trees, lots of leaves is an understatement). If I do those things before I start a run, it will probably be mid- to late-afternoon before I can get out the door to run. And at that rate I'm going to be out after dark before I finish (which actually is also good preparation for the JFK since I plan to start and finish in the dark).

Hills redux

Today I ran another iteration of hills. I could only force out two repetitions because I am so doggone tired. A cold wind was biting my ears the whole time I was out.

When I got back, I took my dog for a jog around the block. She seems to really like these jaunts.

Hills

I'm beginning to taper down towards JFK on November 21.
Today I ran four sets of hills - start at the bottom of the hill, run up as fast as I can to the top (about 45 seconds, I estimate a 100M distance), note the split, then jog or walk down and do it again. I try for negative splits on every one but I usually can only get the first three like that.

I'll do this twice a week and not much else between now and JFK. No long speed runs for sure.